I’ve not really spent much time customising my PSP since I upgraded to the 3.71M33 firmware version, mainly due to a lack of quality themes being available, and the small matter of having o time to create my own. Added to which, the latest themes now include the ability to completely redesign the interface, and I’ve not kept up to date with the latest developments, so its unlikely I’m going to ever get back into creating custom XMB themes for the PSP.

Having said all that, I came across this SchMedia SchEnter custom theme for PSP owners using firmware 3.71M33-2 and greater and was instantly interested in getting it installed on my PSP.

Installation is very straight foward, simply boot up the PSP into the recovery menu and connect the via USB to flash0. Copy across the vsh and font directories and away you go.

There are a few things to note however – you may need to use the compressed files if you are short of space on flash0 (simply copy the files from the relevant folder of the download into the vsh/module directory before copying to flash0). You may also need to free up further space on flash0 – you can do this by replacing some of the fonts in the font directory with dummy files – search for flash agent 4 (or go here) if you need help with this.

Note: This theme is only for PSP’s with custom firmware
3.71M33-2 and greater. If you have a standard PSP firmware, or have no idea what the recovery menu is, I advise you steer clear of this custom theme.

As always, your PSP is at risk if you delete or corrupt any of the files on the flash memory without understanding what you are doing. While the process is straight forward, you cannot hold me, the theme author, or whichever God you believe in, accountable for any mishaps, bricks and general cock-ups you may suffer from using this software.

Heres the authors release notes:

After 4 long weeks of redrawing and helpful hex editing, SchmEdia SchEnter is ready for your enjoyment….if you have 3.71-m33-2 or higher….slim or phat, I’ll just leave it at that.

The main icons have not been reduced in color or quality from their original creation, but in order to do that I had to remove many foreign language images inside of .rco in order to keep my icons from disapearing due to stricter rules in the psp when applying rco to the xmb. Im sorry. If you try this theme and have problems or something, set your region to USA and your language to English and hope for the best.

-My old friend Zelu the chameleon wallpaper was made by me from photos and the nice Land Rover pic was my old ride parked on a tree…the 01-12.bmp was stolen from McCabe when he sent me the first WMC test files that he made. The rest of the wallpapers included are from various wallpaper packs that have been released online in the forums..thanks to you who created and collected
-All icons drawn by myself through inspiration of McCabe for starting the Windows Media Center idea and Skyfox for reviving his old project as well. It will be fun seeing all 3 personalities next to each other! The colored square images inside are from WMC screen grabs I took and I have added 3 of my favorite albums as well…Also take notice to the graphical shout outs to my favorite web pages in the Online menu
-Background wave was created with Z33′s wavemodel3 and psp on speed along with my own texture and repositioning. (Seems the chinese realy liked my old PS3PO wave which was created the same way because they include that in all of their theme releases on pspmod.cn, so I figured I would build off that base again but differently)
-Opening_plugin.rco has been tampered with by Skyfox and I stole his light ray that goes around Thanks buddy.
-USB Connection animation has been modified to utilize 2 images. One on the left and one on the right with a nice bar of light going back and forth. SkyFox sent me a neat trick he had with negativing the image scale to flip an image and I took it a step further and changed the rco resources to use the shadow file of the usb image and then relinked the locations needing the old shadow to a different dummied image in the rco…hard to type..but look at the data in rcoedit to see I can’t screen shot that because my psp crashes everytime i screenshot while transfering.
-All sounds were created again with my logitech team-speak mic and my mouth They fit in pretty well.
-Submenu icons are all stock with modified flash speed and minimum alpha changes to stop the flashing because I didnt like how it looked and didnt want to uncompress another rco just t remove shadows and glows.

Ive only modified as much of the XMB as i pay attention to. You may try to mix and match other images or rco wtih the theme, but be warned..Almost ever time I would change something new, icons in the network and settings menu dissapear. This theme doesnt seem that large in size, but it is very resource hungry.

None of this could have been possible without the long hard work of all the boys (and maybe girls, and I know there were a few monkeys one day) over at Endless Paradigm ripping apart those prx and rco files for us regular guys to tweak and of course Dark-Alex for fixing the flash0 access back with 3.71m-33-2. (sure was crazy trying to figure out why transfers were failing, I am glad you could do it) All of your dedication and enjoyment of ripping apart these files is amazing and very appreciated!

Download from DCEmu : SchMedia 3.71 M33-2 Custom PSP Theme