Play Station Portable Slim & Lite Series - Redesigns - Homebrew

Homebrew

The PSP scene is well known for its homebrew community. The homebrew community were initially unable to hack the later PSP-2000s and the PSP-3000 because it had a new CPU (motherboards revealed to be TA-088v3 (for PSP Slim) and TA-090v2 (for PSP-3000)) which does not support the PRE IPL Exploit used in hacking the previous versions. This is due to the motherboard having its own PRE IPL where it checks the firmware thoroughly; if passed, the PRE IPL is cut off entirely to prevent unwanted modifications to the system.

In November 2008, Datel announced a "Lite Blue Tool" battery which allows the PSP-3000 to boot into service mode. This battery is not able to start homebrew as the new PRE-IPL has yet to be cracked. The Lite Blue Tool was deterred from distribution due to legal action by Sony. Some time later, Datel changed the name from Lite Blue Tool to Max Power Digital and changed the description.

MaTiAz, a known hacker in the PSP hacking community, found an exploit which is done with a US copy of GripShift and a HEN save game exploit. However, this was only temporary. After the release of this initial hack, a sizable increase in sales of the game was experienced. Many eBay sellers inflated their prices to cash in on the sudden demand. A revised version of the PSP firmware (v5.03) was released shortly after to patch the exploit. Malloxis found a TIFF crash which is proven to work on 5.02 and 5.03 firmwares for PSP-3000; further crafted and engineered by MaTiAz, the TIFF crash became a TIFF exploit capable of loading an h.bin from the root memorystick. Davee, another hacker, further engineered this exploit with a privilege escalation exploit and created a Homebrew Enabler (HEN) which would allow the execution of unsigned code by users. In firmware revision 5.50, the TIFF vulnerability was removed, preventing any further firmwares being affected by the exploit. The HEN for the TIFF exploit, which was called "ChickHEN", was released on May 5, 2009.

On June 5, 2009, custom firmware version 5.03GEN-A for HEN was released, which is compatible with both PSP-2000 v3 and PSP-3000. It allows users to play game backups (ISO/CSO), PS1 games, and includes access to PSN, VSH, and recovery mode. This marked a major step forward in ending Sony's PSP-3000 piracy protection. Two days later, on June 7, 2009, a duo of hackers (Xenogears and Becus25) released custom firmware support software based on a modified work of the released 5.03GEN-A for the formerly unhackable handheld called "Custom Firmware Enabler 3.01" in which PSP-3000 users can install custom firmware and load those firmware's files onto the PSP's RAM with the direct usage of "ChickHEN".

On March 29, 2010, a user-mode exploit was revealed in the demo of the game Patapon 2. This was quickly followed by the first stable public release of "Half-Byte Loader", a piece of software allowing to load homebrew software on all PSP models (including the PSP Go) running firmwares less than 6.30 (an open-sourced HBL was previously publicly released on November 29, 2009 for the Medal of Honor Heroes exploit). HBL's portable and configurable design made it easy to port for a number of other exploited games, such as Everybody's Golf, which allowed HBL to run on up to 6.60 PSP firmware.

On December 24, 2010, Total_Noob's HEN (6.20 TN-A) was released, allowing users to run Homebrew on any PSP Console with the 6.20 firmware.

On December 25, 2010, Liquidzigong, a well known hacker with numerous identities (such as hrimfaxi and Virtuous Flame), released a Homebrew application for 6.20 TN-A called Prometheus ISO Loader. This application allowed users to run game-backups on their console, which would have not been possible using the stand alone HEN.

On December 30, 2010, Total_Noob updated his HEN to the version B (6.20 TN-B), which featured a way to downgrade ALL the PSPs, including those with TA-088v3 motherboard, 3000+ and Go, breaking the long-established "barrier" that prevented these PSP versions from downgrading.

On January 2, 2011, Mathieulh announced the discovery of the PSP's master keys, allowing homebrew to run on the PSP without any firmware modifications.

On March 13, 2011, Virtuous Flame and Coldbird updated their HEN to the Version B3 (6.35 PRO-B3). This provided users with the ability to run ISO and CSO game-backups, run Homebrew games and applications, to run PS1 Games, and to run Plugins, while retaining access the PSN.

On May 29, 2011 the Pro CFW became open source and added compatibility with firmware version 6.39; this was upgraded on August 25, 2011 to version 6.60 compatibility.