Noise on the net

Installing a custom firmware on a Japanese PSP.

I was half-way around the world, but I had the internet at my fingertips. It seemed a daunting task, trying to separate the crap from the useful information. Any time you search for something that may be a little outside of what’s “allowed”, you get a lot of noise. A search for something like “encoding DVDs” on google will get you countless “tools” designed to help with the task - for a price. It’s really quite ridiculous. The problem’s magnified when you search for a Windows OS-based issue. Something like “free anti-virus program” will result in almost all of the hits either being a paid anti-virus program ¹ or a CNet review of an anti-virus program.

That said, I powered through the noise to stumble upon a decent thread on maxconsole.net. It had a fairly detailed explanation of the process to make Pandora’s battery with a phat PSP battery. I had a slim PSP battery. Several pages into that long thread, I found an explanation of how to make a slim PSP battery into one.

(Click for bigger)

It’s a pretty awful picture (seriously, how hard is it to use the macro function on your camera?!?), but it gets the job done. You’ve got to use an exacto knife or a razor to cut carefully around the sides of the battery. Just keep scratching at it until you can pry it open all the way. It takes some perseverance and patience, so don’t rush it. It took me about 15 minutes to get it open. Once you get it open, just scratch out that one little wire. Put the battery back together and you’re done.

The next step involved tracking down a program called 14749_TOTALNewbieasyInstallerPandorasmenu.rar. (Remember my previous mini-rant up above about noise? Well, I could have burst an ear-drum with all the noise that this search produced. I mean, if google searches were audible and the opportunistic websites screamed at me. Or something.)

Downloaded, un-RARed, copied to my brother-in-law’s Windows computer - preferably after a virus scan with the free software I tried to find earlier - and run.²

Done.

Put the battery in the PSP, put the memory stick in the PSP and pressed “X”. After 3 minutes, I had a CFW on my PSP.

Things you’ll need for this process:

• A PSP
• An extra PSP battery - slim or phat. If you use a slim battery, you can make it work as a normal battery again by using a pencil to fill in the line you cut, but I haven’t done that myself.
• A razor or exacto knife
• A memory stick you can format
• A card reader (not required but nice to have)
• Total Easy Newbie Installer - google it. I decided to upload it myself since it is relatively hard to find. Please don’t hotlink this file! This file is virus-free.
• A Windows-based computer. I hear Vista won’t work.

That’s it. Hit those links and make me some referral money! Just kidding. Happy CFW’ing!

Footnotes

1. I find it so ironic that my google adwords ads have “free anti-virus” programs listed there now. I would click on the ad to see if it’s actually free, but I don’t want to get accused of click-fraud. ↩
   
   
   
2. The instructions on the web say you need to format your memory stick in the PSP first, but the program formats it for you so I think that’s unnecessary. The only tricky thing is that you need to make sure you select “4″ from the menu choices. It’s really pretty self-explanatory. ↩