Upgraded my PSP to Open Edition 3.40 30th April 2007

I bought a PSP a couple of weeks ago for a trip down to London. 4 hours in both directions ..ig.. It came with firmware 2.71 installed when I purchased it. If you turn it so the back is facing you and open the UMD drive it has 1009CT printed on the circuit board on the left hand side. The “CT” is horizontally flipped. Mine is not what is known as a TA-082 model.

I’d decided to switch to the Open Edition firmware by Dark_AleX before I’d even bought it. At the time and for the first week of ownership I was under the impression that I would need Grand Theft Auto: Liberty Cities to downgrade the firmware. I found out that this is no longer the case.

The first step is to downgrade the firmware to v1.50 which is what GTA:LC was originally needed for. I found these two guides which describe how to do the downgrade without the game:

eXophase Forums 2.71 Downgrade Guide
Vulpixs 2.71 Generic Downgrader Tutorial

I found them both helpful as the first was more concise but the second had more screenshots and was a bit more verbose at points that it happened to be useful at. I found it was quite easy to just read the relevant section on each site as I reached that stage.

The first problem I ran into was that I had hooked up my USB cable to the PSP but my PC wasn’t detecting it. Turns out you have to enable it via the Settings menu. Move over to that and then scroll up till you reach the “USB Connection” option. Tap X to select it. Now your PC should detect the PSP. Press O to deactivate the connection.

Everything went smoothly until I tried activating the homebrew enabler. The screen went blue then it went red. I tried again, this time it just froze on the menu. The third time I tried it went blue and then green and then shut down. That meant it had worked and I could carry on with the process. Proper crapped myself when all that happened.

After the downgrade process was complete it was time to upgrade to v3.40 OE. To do that I followed the guide here:

eXophase Forums 3.40 OE-A Install Guide

One thing that I saw alot of people having problems with is the new directory structure on the memory card that is required to use alot of homebrew applications. An easy solution to their problems is to format the memory card after they have upgraded. The newer OE firmwares automatically create the extra directories as part of the format procedure.

Everything went fine and I now have v3.40 OE installed. There’s a ton of custom apps already available as well as a few programming SDKs. I’m more interested in the later for now. Here are some handy links you may be interested in:

Dark_AleXs site
eXophase Forums 3.40 Plugins List
PSP Homebrew Database
PSP Vault
PSP LUA – LUA scripting engine for homebrew enabled PSPs
PSPSDK – C SDK for PSP