PSP-3000 Now Open to Piracy

Posted on May 13th, 2009. Written by Rico.

From what I’ve seen, Sony sells the PSP-3000 locally at a lower price than the older PSP-2000. That’s because the company designed the PSP-3000 from the ground up to be more resistant to “homebrewing”, a process that ultimately (among other things) allowed the PSP-2000 to run pirated games. Sony was trying to get more people to buy the PSP-3000 because it only played legit copies of PSP games.

Sony may have to rethink their plan, as a team of hackers have managed to hack the PSP-3000, opening it up to homebrewing, and of course, piracy. The Gadget Blog has the details:

This is a demo of the 5.03 firmware running the tiff exploit and booting into a HEN environment on a PSP 2003 (3000 Support also) on 5.03 Official Firmware. This proves that the code survives a reboot and the system software and MAC address can be changed. This is something that only can be done with a kernel exploit. A video launching homebrew will be posted later.

Credits: Homebrew Enabler – (Davee) Team Typhoon
5.03 Tiff Exploit – MaTiAz
Video – Granite
The Community – All your support.

The hack was made possible through a TIFF exploit. Viewing a carefully crafted image on the PSP’s image viewer makes it reboot and load a special environment that makes homebrewing possible. I guess all the pirates have to figure out now is how to pirate PS3 games cost-effectively.