Bean

I bought a PSP slim back in November out in Ontario while I was visiting Sirgets. So once I got home a got settled I went about the tedious effort of trying to mod it for homebrew applications.

Needless to say, with very few tools to assist me with some delicate work, and a limited understanding of the process, I bricked my PSP.

For those of you not familiar with the term, "bricked" is how you refer to a PSP that someone has foolishly attempted to mod, and screwed up somewhere leaving the system unable to fully boot, thus making it impossible to finish the mod, or even return it to normal. The PSP has become an expensive plastic brick.

So anyhow, I sat for a few weeks wondering how to go about fixing it. The process to do so would require me to purchase another battery (roughly 50 bucks) and modify THAT battery in the hopes of finishing the originally attempted mod.

I know you all see the flaw with that plan...

So I was looking online for solutions when I came across a forum with users all around the world willing to mod or unbrick your psp for you by mail. Usually for nothing more than 5 bucks and the postage. I found a guy in Fredericton NB which is about 4 hours from here, talked to him on facebook and was amazed that he didn't want payment. He said that he doesn't bother as it doesn't take long to do the work (Once you have the modded battery and the software, the flashing process takes only minutes).

So I went to the post office today and mailed my 230 dollar (plus tax) plastic Sony brand brick to an utter stranger. Not only did I do that, I paid 10 dollars to get it to him overnight, and another 10 dollars to include a return express envelope in the hopes that he will return it.

So now I sit, feeling somewhat aprehensive, and thinking how completley and utterly unlike me it is to display that level of trust not only in another person, but another person I've never met.

I do however have a tracking number, and his name and home address, after all, it's only 4 hours away...

__________________
"I haven't faced death. I've cheated death. I've tricked my way out of death and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity. I know nothing."

--James T. Kirk

Cymro

You should also be sure to purchase an aluminium baseball bat and practice your mean face just in case.

__________________
"Let me tell you something about humans, nephew: They're a wonderful, friendly people - as long as their bellies are full and their holosuites are working.

"But take away their creature comforts, deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers, put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time and those friendly, intelligent, wonderful people...will become as nasty and as violent as the most blood-thirsty klingon."

Cymro

My mate's getting one of those and he says you're basically going to have to destroy one battery to hack the thing anyway.

In other news, the same dude bought a GPS off Ebay last week and hacked it so it works as a PDA now but then decided to get rid of it cause he's getting a PSP. Now I have a GPS that I can play TV shows with in the car

__________________
"Let me tell you something about humans, nephew: They're a wonderful, friendly people - as long as their bellies are full and their holosuites are working.

"But take away their creature comforts, deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers, put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time and those friendly, intelligent, wonderful people...will become as nasty and as violent as the most blood-thirsty klingon."

Bean

Yeah, in the PSP slim Sony put in a new method of "Hack proofing" that basically involved a chip IN the battery. In order to circumvent it, you need to remove a pin from inside the battery. It is possible to do it and then fix the battery but I don't have a soldering iron, nor the skills to do it.

This is where I fucked up on my mod. I did the physical hack and forgot to run the "pandora" mod program which enables it all before I installed the new firmware. So, my PSP is locked up tight.

Oh well, in all honesty the guy seemed pretty on the level, so with any luck, I'll have my PSP back and in working order within a week.

__________________
"I haven't faced death. I've cheated death. I've tricked my way out of death and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity. I know nothing."

--James T. Kirk

Cymro

Yeah, I don't know if he got a slim or not, but he told me there's a chip on the Battery that basically means the battery's ruined if you try and mod it, which is why you need another Battery. Apparently it's worth the expense anyway because you can use the PSP for so much more when it's been hacked. He wants to do it so he can play old PSX games on it from the PSP's Flash Drive.

I have 2 soldering Irons.

__________________
"Let me tell you something about humans, nephew: They're a wonderful, friendly people - as long as their bellies are full and their holosuites are working.

"But take away their creature comforts, deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers, put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time and those friendly, intelligent, wonderful people...will become as nasty and as violent as the most blood-thirsty klingon."

Bean

Well no, that's not really accurate. The chip on the battery stops you from accessing the firmware on the PSP. In order to play ripped games, or older ones, or basically any of the features you alluded to, you need to replace the Sony firmware with custom firmware.

To do this, you need to pull a pin off the chip on the battery, and then run a program that enables you to "bypass" the chip. Once you do that, you can change your firmware and mod your psp to heaven and back.

The chip doesn't stop you from modding the battery, it stops yo from modding the firmware. And in order to mod the firmware, you HAVE to mod the chip on the battery.

In the end, if you're any good with a soldering iron, and you have a really fine tip for it, you can mod the battery, change your firmware, then solder the pin on the battery and carry on as normal.

I unfortunately neither own a soldering iron, nor am I capable of using one to begin with. But barring those unfortunate realities, you don't have to destroy your battery at all.

And yeah, I'm looking forward to trying out alot of homebrew stuff once I get it back.

__________________
"I haven't faced death. I've cheated death. I've tricked my way out of death and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity. I know nothing."

--James T. Kirk

Stag

I have a soldering iron and because I live in George W. Bush's America, I have a soldering gun too.

Bean can you IM me or post a link here with info on the PSP mods - why do it, etc...I am curious about this.

__________________
"I want to do a motorboat on Shatner's manboobs" - Sam Cogley

Cymro

Don't you need a spare battery to run the Pandora's thingy? I'm sure there was something not good about cutting one of the legs off and leaving it.

__________________
"Let me tell you something about humans, nephew: They're a wonderful, friendly people - as long as their bellies are full and their holosuites are working.

"But take away their creature comforts, deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers, put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time and those friendly, intelligent, wonderful people...will become as nasty and as violent as the most blood-thirsty klingon."

Bean

It would be ideal to have a spare battery, but all that does is save you from having to undo what you did.

You disconnect the leg on the chip to bypass the installed firmware. This causes the PSP to boot from the memory stick (which if you've done this right contains the software to replace the firmware on the PSP).

Once you've DONE that, and have replaced the firmware with your custom version, you need the PSP to go back to booting from the internal flash memory instead of your memory card. So all you do to achieve this is reconnect that pin on the battery, and if you do it right, everything goes back to normal, except now you have installed the new firmware.

The reason you'd want to have a second battery, is if you fuck up soldering the pin back on. And even then, you can still use the PSP, you just have to use the AC adaptor (which kinda sucks).

If you can solder, and you do it the proper way, the only things you need to do the mod are a 1GB Sony memory card, the PSP, the original battery that came with the PSP and a soldering iron with a fine tip. I purchased the PSP slim that came with Daxter and a 1GB memory card, so technically I had everything I needed with the exception of the soldering iron. It doesn't help that I fucked up the software end of it anyways. I had planned to do the mod, then use the AC adaptor until I could by a new battery as I can't solder. That didn't work for me only cause I fucked up.

__________________
"I haven't faced death. I've cheated death. I've tricked my way out of death and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity. I know nothing."

--James T. Kirk

Bean

Ok, so here's a link that explains how to make a Pandoras battery out of your PSP Slims included battery:

BATTERY LINK

And if you scroll down the page there's another post describing the process of making the needed memory stick and using it all together.

Of course you could make it all a whole lot easier by finding an older stock PSP with older firmware installed, but that's probably next to impossible. Firmware version 3.4 and under I think, can be replaced without a physical mod although I may be wrong about that.

The PSP slims all come with at least 3.6 installed and can't be changed without a physical mod.

The other option, if you think your soldering skills aren't up to it (the pin is about 1.5 mm wide, and 4 mm long...) you can also go on Ebay and buy a pre modded battery from someone. That way you don't have to do any physical modding, and if you do fuck up and brick it, you can always fix it again. You can use the battery from a "fat" psp to mod a slim. It fits in the battery slot, but you can't put the battery cover on as it's a thicker battery. But if you're only using it for the mod it shouldn't be too much effort to hold the battery in place for the 2 minutes it takes to do it.

EDIT: Oh yes, one important thing to remember. It may sound obvious though... If you're interested in runnning homebrew on your PSP and you do mod it, or are thinking about modding it, don't EVER EVER EVER EVER run the Sony update on your psp. It will overwrite the firmware with the latest version from Sony, thus making it necessarry to run a mod on it again to get back to custom firmware.

__________________
"I haven't faced death. I've cheated death. I've tricked my way out of death and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity. I know nothing."

--James T. Kirk