Euro PSP to Ship With Anti-MAME Upgrade Pre-installed

Yes, I agree, that is much what I am also meaning, out dance them.


I think that they need to deal with the pirates, but are swinging the IP pendulum to far into other territories.


The following is sort of what I wanted to post last night, about various serious allegations made that should be addressed, call me weak:



Sorry, depends on the version of English your used to, and the version of English my spell checker uses.

On free market economies, I too believe in them (objectively, until we get something better). Wherever it is a big company restricting you, or the soviet union, it's more of the same. All I'm talking about is a better way of doing free market. I however dispute the distorted world view prevailing today. Various arguments I have been putting forth, have been going on in political and economic circles. But you usually can't trust either side completely, too much BS. So it pays to get contrasting opinions on economics/IP/business matters to get around it. Letting companies say and do what they want, is a recipe for more of the same. The only answer is to do something about it, to change the world for the better.

I have Atari Anthology and a number of other store bought retro's and publisher public domain released console games for use by emulators. Even though I never have time to play them, I defend the legitimate use of emulators for people to do so. I am not in the habit of downloading non public domain ROMs. I also quoted the situation I believe I remember, about laws somewhere, put forward to make old games available, but I do not know where ever this got passed, or wherever it was through commercial re-release or public domain. You have seen that I do advocate laws on mandatory release that still give profit back to the copyright owners, as they deserve it. But this was the problem with the article taring us all with the pirate brush.



As with the grammar, and other allegations, would you care to point any examples out? I have been relatively careful, so don't believe there is anything serious there.

I thought you were maybe trying to wind me up before. I find in arguments, when people start actively accusing other people of things they didn't do and misreading things etc, it is because they are losing and starting to write what they feel instead.

Please, you are not my target, nor should I be yours.

Nothing wrong with that, but lets face it, your first post on this thread was not the most reasoned one you've ever put up.








All because Sony plugged a hole in their firmware to try and make pirating games harder?

You're going to ignore that Nintendo have historically been the most aggressive format holder when it comes to cracking down on grey imports. You're going to ignore the fact that Microsoft have hurt homebrew apps with their mod detection routines in Live.

Now you are entitled to your opinion, don't get me wrong, but there are ways of expressing this that don't come across as hypocritical and blinkered.

It's OK being fair and even-handed overall, but posting a blinkered rant like you did isn't the way to get there. You may feel aggrieved by the side effects of this firmware upgrade, but you have to admit it has also had a benefit for the developers of PSP games.


I do too. It's always great when we get a good discussion going here, but like you with the games companies, I like to poke sticks at bombastic posts. Given your generally balanced and considered posts, I couldn't pass up the opportunity you presented.

That's not entirely true. Nintendo’s litigious insanity was really kicked off during the Pokemon boom and even then, it aimed its resources, especially in the west, at IP infringement rather that hardware/software piracy.

And when you say historically, the Famicom saw massive levels of piracy and still does. Nintendo has only recently started to aggressively tackle the illegal misuse of a 20 year-old platform… Think about that for a moment.

Even today, hooky Nintendo handheld software is the easiest to buy, say on eBay and the firm does little to clamp down on it. Also, Nintendo has never AFAIK, aimed a middleware shot at the mod community. Okay, it has had issues with Flash cards and writers, but hasn’t calculated its hardware releases (and retrospectively issued middleware – something that will be possible with the DS) to specifically undo legitimate homebrew coders. Sony has done this, and that’s the difference.

I think the argument that the Ver 2.0 release is aimed at stopping illegal PSP software use is somewhat bogus. To date there are no UMD writing tools (although there are rips available) and don’t see any emerging in the medium term. All the key sites monitoring this claim it unlikely, though of course, China is a very clever nation. And there’s no way of dumping, then booting software onto and from a Memory Stick.

The bottom line is that Sony wants you to buy UMD games, obviously. And of course, full MAME, full NES, SNES, SMS, MD, Neo Geo, PC Engine and all the rest make for a pretty compelling (and low power usage – don’t forget the lack of moving parts with SMS-booted emu apps) portable gaming experience.

So what you are saying is that Sony has invested huge amounts of money just to squash someone's hobby? I know we all think corporations are evil, but they don't waste money just to be evil, they are evil in order to make money.


But, that's exactly what the homebrew people are doing with their own software.

Also, this Game Daily article hosted by Business Week on the V2.0 firmware update from early August states (last section);


So either Game Daily has independently found evidence of that being possible, or has believed Sony when they say it's possible. In the latter case, Sony obviously also believes its possible and has invested who knows how many Yen into plugging the holes.

Of course, it could all just be software engineering at work, with programmers actually squashing bugs in the system to make it more reliable. That costs too, but should keep down the customer support calls, so it's an investment.

Well, the piece says:



That doesn't refer to booting UMD rips from SMSD and I'm fairly sure that such a practice is not possible. Though I can't imagine what else it means. Perhaps to draw a line under this, Sony doesn't want you do anything at all with your PSP that isn't paying Sony, though I personally doubt claims that UMD piracy is the top of the list of concerns when releasing Ver 2.0

Guys, guys, guys. Running UMD Disc images (ISO's) IS possible, via an app called 'Freeloader 0.5D'; but ONLY on PSP's with firmware v1.0 or v1.5 (the only ones able to run unsigned code). So newer games, that require firmware > 1.5, won't work.

The homebrew (and with it, pirate) scene will die unless someone can figure out how to run unsigned code on the latest firmware. There are some very tempting games coming out this Autumn/Winter which'll require v2.0, updating to which'll prevent emu's etc from running.

But even if someone does figure it out, Sony will block it again by releasing v2.1.

Is that 100%?
You got a link - would be very interested to see. I hear it should work in principal but doesn't run to date. Does it run UMD software from SMS - like, is it actually working?

Sign up to the TeamXecuter forum (PSPUpdates don't like you talking of such things), and search for Freeloader. You should also be able to find out about which games work (about 90% work).

If you can't find the file, I could mail you the link this evening (can't remember it off the top of my head).

And yes it works; I tried Puzzle Bobble in the name of "research".

Holy crap!
When did you manage this research?

It's been available for v1.5 for a few weeks, and v1.0 for a few days. I tried it last week, and it's very easy (almost too easy; my morals are facing testing times)

Anyway, the harlot-like Freeloader will no longer haunt me after I receive Burnout: Legends in 4 weeks - coupled with compulsory firmware update :(

OK, I didn't mention this, but I remember (I think for PSP but might be for DS) about some sort of hardware crack that connected a hard disk to the memory card port and run a drive off of it. This would have been upto a month ago. Also as saturated before, I remember something about a V2 crack, but because I am not a pirate and I did not pay much attention.

The truth is that Sony will have a hard time stopping pirates, and they will still be out there without home-brew, working in the background. The truth is it is virtually impossible. Their best bet is to make it impractical for anything but the biggest commercial pirates to be able to afford to do it, and so expensive it has to be done in volume. This reduces the number of pirates and makes them big enough for authorities to easily find and close them down. But one of the big things is to reduce prices so there is not so much profit margin for the pirates, and incentive for people.

To give you an example of how hard it is to stop them, a mod can be made to bypass virtually any normal security system and record programs and data internally. It is even possible to observe the internal working of a chip through monitoring the bare circuit through IR and other EM (basically a recent technology developed late 90's or early 2000's) . I recently stumbled on a picture of a pic chip recently that had the casing removed to bare chip to do this. I remember some university researchers demonstrated something like this to crack the password on some sort of secure card format a few years back.

And as to attacking bombastic posts ;) people should not waste their time arrogantly attacking them, but worry more about maturely concentrating on the moral issue instead. After all it is like saying that, if people that pirate sent the whole industry broke they would be in the right, just because somebody posted a bombastic post against them..... Takes all sorts to make things work (or to get it wrong). Emotion and logic, what has been known for years, is that peoples emotions (what they feel) affect their logic (they tend to base their logic on their emotions about the thing in question). What I tend to find is that humble people see where I am coming from, and often have some good insight, unhumble people ;) tend to think that I must be at least as unhumble as them, because that is the direction they come from. So if you have some emotion about a bombastic post, question yourself first and where you are coming from...

This is why Sony are worried.

I suppose the really hardcore gamers will just buy another PSP in order to keep their homebrew PSP at v1.0 and 1.5. Either way Sony kind of win which really ironic.

Having played a PSP running roms I'd have to keep it that way, and yes even if it meant having to buy another PSP or go without altogther. Most PSP games aren't that diffeent from PS2 anyways so it would not be much of a loss to me.

Would also give my DS more playtime too.

It's quite frightening how misinformed you are.

How can you SERIOUSLY believe anything else.

Sure, Sony is a corporation, ergo evil, but do you REALLY believe that they think the ability to run Manic Miner on the PSP is a major threat to their sales.

No. I think it's to ensure that whatever you use you PSP for, Sony gets a cut. Like I said.

And the biggest threat to that cut is?

Piracy!

The only game piracy that can currently exist on the PSP is piracy of UMD games.

What was your point again?