As part of the unoffical XMB themes week here on pspculture.co.uk, here is what you need to know about getting a full high-res background on your PSP and still retain the XMB wave effect.

One of the real downsides to the PSP’sXMB is that if you want to retain the nice wave effect, you can only use the standard PSP themes, or variations that use a very small BMP file. The BMP file then gets blown up to fill the screen meaning you lose all the definition. It was discovered that you could use a BMP file as large as 270pixels wide as a background, but even that lost its definition when expanded to fill the full 480pixel wide screen.

Well, thanks to Innercy over at QJ.net, there is now a method to have full resolution (480pixel by 272pixel) backgrounds and still have the wave effect:

This is achieved by taking a single 480pixel by 272pixel image and saving it as a PNG format file. you then need to take this file and rename it to 01-12.bmp, and then copy it onto the flash0 of your PSP. The file does need to be smaller than 150k.

Note: This is a mod for custom firmware users who have access to the recovery menu.

You do need to activate themes on your PSP (or disable use of the background wallpaper), and this will only show up in the first slot in the theme selector. I have been told this od only works if you are using custom XMB icons, but I haven’t tested this myself as I am already using custom icons on my PSP.

These pictures of my PSP’s XMB show my own custom high res background with a custom wave on top, and using the Metrox icon set. Its also got a custom battery graphic.

I’m putting together a new icon pack, and will release this whole theme when its complete.