PSP World

Has Sony Created the Unhackable PSP?

We have to hand it to Sony. After struggling against software pirates for the first several years of the handheld console's life, the company appears to have finally shut out the hackers for good. As of January 9, 2009, the newly released PSP 3000 remains unhacked, meaning that it has survived an impressive 83 days against the onslaught of hackers and the homebrew community, who are intent on unlocking its secrets and enabling it to run hacked custom firmware. Certain models of the PSP 2000 slim also remain unhackable because they have the same, newer motherboard (TA-088 v3) as the recently released “Brite” model.

There were some early signs that the device wouldn’t last this long. Back in November, accessory manufacturer Datel announced that it had created a Pandora battery for the PSP 3000 device called the Lite Blue Tool. After much delay, it emerged that the battery did not work as advertised. Datel was forced to rename the device (to the Max Power Digital) and rescind its claims about hacking the PSP 3000.

Buying them remains the only way to enjoy games on the PSP 3000.

Less organized hackers have also taken a stab at unlocking the new hardware. A hacker from the Philippines named Royginald created a Frankenstein PSP 3000/2000 hybrid, but this did not lead to anything concrete. More recently software hackers have managed to access the usermode kernel by exploiting a save game bug in GripShift. There is even a “Hello World” application to prove the buffer overflow exploit works, but so far nobody has been able to downgrade the PSP 300 firmware successfully.

Sony is undoubtedly happy with this turn of events. Losses from piracy have been huge, causing some Western developers to abandon the system altogether. Sony needs to show game publishers that the system is secure enough to ensure sales in order to win them back to the struggling platform. An unhackable PSP is a good thing for gamers, because it means a greater chance of this turnaround happening.