January, 2007

Well it seems as if Sony always cracks under pressure or at least its developers do because nothing has stopped the PSP homebrew community and their desire to do whatever they wish with he PSP they spent their hard earned bucks on!

Introducing the PSP Firmware 3.03 Downgrader and HEN enabler which will allow you to downgrade your PSP up to firmware 3.03 or run homebrew safely from your PSP with firmware 3.03 already on it! Either way this is a HUGE leap for the fine fellows who work on these projects! So rejoice all of you who've left comments on Evil PSP asking if there's a way to downgrade a PSP running firmware 3.03 because today is your day to start breathing again!

Dark_Alex out of the blue drops another bomb on us that shows everyone how skilled & devoted he is to his projects.

He has been a huge contributor to the PSP homebrew community and keeps our PSP's happy all month long with this homebrew goodness! If you haven't updated to 3.03 OE-C here's all that of its updated abilities.

• - AVC videos bitrate limit patched. The firmware limited the bitrate of avc videos to only 768 Kbps.
  OE now forces the limit to be 16384 Kbps. (Note: this doesn't mean than the psp can handle such a high bitrate;
  this means than they won't show error. I don't know which is the real maximum bitrate than the psp can handle at
  full speed).

• Speed of OE boot is now ~3 seconds faster than previous versions. (without plugins).

• Cpu speed of XMB can now be changed.

• Wifi can now work at 333 Mhz.

• Added access to flashes 0 and 1 via usb in the recovery menu, based on the great idea of USBSSS by Booster.
  Note that writing is enabled, so this is intended only for advanced users that know what they are doing in each moment.
  (It is not a great idea to change anything from the kd folder).
  Because of this addition, the rest of flashing options were removed.

• PSP isos can now be deleted as any normal memstick games. (also the size of the iso now shows fine when you press triangle->information).

• When formatting memory stick, GAME150, GAME303 and ISO directories will be automatically created.

• Changes in internal HEN core:

• * If a EBOOT.PBP with a plain DATA.PSP had a data.psar, modulemgr took as size of the executable the size
  of data.psp+data.psar. Fixed. (this fix enables psx games to have plain data.psp without causing a memory error).

• * Added a couple of patches found by Tyranid. One allows syscalls instructions to be used in kernel mode
  without causing a crash. The other allows sceKernelQueryModuleInfo to work with sceInit and previous modules.
  

Well you certinly can't stop Dark_Alex's firmware attack as he raises the bar through the roof! PSP Firmware 3.03 OE-B is Dark_Alex's newest achievement and the rumors are true!

Heres the readme included in the archive:

This is the update to 3.03 OE-B

Execute this only from 3.03 OE-A or 3.03 OE-A'

changes in OE:

- Patched the firmware to allow decrypted mp4-AVC videos to play at 480x272 resolution.
- pic0.png was not shown in psp isos. Fixed.
- The speed functions were not dummied after setting the speed. This could cause the few games
that set the cpu speed not to run at the selected speed in the recovery menu.