PSP Hacking

My brother gave me a PSP 2000 with some damaged goods a while back. Namely, the bars that hold the UMD disc door in place and help it close were severely bent and had popped off. Sidebar - I guess letting a 4-year-old "play" the PSP isn't such a good idea :). Anyway, I was able to get it back together with some mad needle-nose plier skills, but it still was somewhat finnicky to get the disc door closed. So, I decided to devote my time to hacking the PSP so I wouldn't need to use the discs anymore.

In a nutshell, what I needed to do was hack my PSP, overriding the "stock" Sony firmware with custom firmware. What that firmware would do is unlock the full potential of the PSP unit, things like allowing me to play my UMD Iso's straight from the memory stick, the ability to install cool apps (more on that later), and so on. There are a lot of really easy to follow tutorials out there, so I won't bore you with lists of them. The important thing to note is that you can't hack your PSP 3000 just yet, only Fats (the 1000 series) and Slims (2000's). There are also a number of ways to tell which on you have.

I purchased a Pandora's battery (a tool necessary for the hack) and went to work. All in all, the process was fairly simple. Once I was done, I was then able to install the following:
- Emulators: NES, SNES, GBA, GBC, N64 emulators to play all the games I owned as a kid
- ISO compressor: to compress the backups I made of my PSP games, so more would fit on my 4GB memory stick
- Custom themes: to make your PSP look "cool"

All in all, it was worth it just to play my games from memory stick instead of UMD, but the emulator is just cherries on top. Since installing it, I've beat Metroid, Zelda, Startropics (ok, I got to the end guy, but haven't beat him yet), and am currently working on Mike Tyson's Punch Out. Ahh, the memories.