Legality Issues (Psp hacking)

[Mendelevium]

Alright, it seems I have been making a lot of post lately. XD.
But well being the retro gamer that I am I have made a vast collection of old games. PSX included.
And I read somewhere that hacking your psp is legal, and putting pops loader (psx emulator for psp) is also legal. It is only illegal if you use pirated games.

And here I have my original copy of FF7, luckily my little siblings didn't wreck it like they did my original suikoden II *weeps*.
Anyways, I have noticed that there are several little mods for the psx version such as difficulty, and spell names that directly affect the iso image of the FF7 psx version. Would it be possible to directly mod the iso then use the psp program to make it into an eboot file. Or is that considered illegal? Is any of this illegal?

I just want to be able to play my old favorites on the go, just want to know if it's possible to have them modded as well. >.>.

Thanks,
mendel

[Immortal Damyn]

Sounds like that should be possible, I mean, if you can play it on a psx emulator, the psp should play it. You should note however, most popsloaders for psx have a lot of bugs running FFVII, I had my game freeze up every time i used clear tranquil being one such bug. the popsloader isn't perfect, but i played thru most of FFVII without difficulty, then i got bored, and deleted it.

[Mendelevium]

Yup. I have the original running fine as well. >.>;;.
I changed some stuff around so that the save files would work when changing discs. XD.
And it runs fine, all the way through midgar at least. I will try modding it now, and see what i come up with.
I just don't want to do something that has already been done, and find out it won't work, and have wasted my time. you know?

[Kudistos Megistos]

Halkun has a problem with PSP modding, so any threads you post about it are likely to get locked.

I'm not exactly sure about the legality of PSP modding, but it's a grey area at best; it might be considered as breaking copy protection. Personally, I don't see any problem as long as you're not downloading any games without paying for them. Hell, you're adding a massive amount of functionality to the PSP by doing it. However, I'm not sure what Sony would make of it.

[obesebear]

Halkun has a problem with PSP modding, so any threads you post about it are likely to get locked.

I'm not exactly sure about the legality of PSP modding, but it's a grey area at best; it might be considered as breaking copy protection. Personally, I don't see any problem as long as you're not downloading any games without paying for them. Hell, you're adding a massive amount of functionality to the PSP by doing it. However, I'm not sure what Sony would make of it.

I'm sure Sony is well aware that Popsloader and emulators are one of the things still selling PSPs.  On paper they may not condone it, but they know it sells systems.  It's all about making money.

[Immortal Damyn]

Technically, as far as I know, there isn't anything legally wrong with MODDING a psp. It's just that it gets a bad rep from people pirating games through it. As is emulators and such on a psp are rather looked at as pirated because most people don't have the games they have ROMs for on their PSP. Not to mention I doubt they have the means to get the ROM off the cart and onto the psp. So generally modded psp's are looked at as bad, but there's a lot of things for the modded PSP that aren't illegal, such as pretty homebrew apps, completely made from scratch. Only thing is, there aren't many of those worth mention.

[Bosola]

I'm sure Sony is well aware that Popsloader and emulators are one of the things still selling PSPs.  On paper they may not condone it, but they know it sells systems.  It's all about making money.

But don't Sony make their profit on the software, as opposed to the console itself?

[obesebear]

I'm sure Sony is well aware that Popsloader and emulators are one of the things still selling PSPs.  On paper they may not condone it, but they know it sells systems.  It's all about making money.

But don't Sony make their profit on the software, as opposed to the console itself?

I'm sure they do, but you aren't going to sell any software if no one is buying the hardware

[Kudistos Megistos]

Halkun has a problem with PSP modding, so any threads you post about it are likely to get locked.

I'm not exactly sure about the legality of PSP modding, but it's a grey area at best; it might be considered as breaking copy protection. Personally, I don't see any problem as long as you're not downloading any games without paying for them. Hell, you're adding a massive amount of functionality to the PSP by doing it. However, I'm not sure what Sony would make of it.

I'm sure Sony is well aware that Popsloader and emulators are one of the things still selling PSPs.  On paper they may not condone it, but they know it sells systems.  It's all about making money.

Thing is, they're increasing hardware sales but decreasing software sales since nearly all PSP mods allow people to play downloaded games very easily. For each PSP sold, only 2.6 games get sold, compared to 4.2 for the DS, 6.7 for the PS3 and Wii and 8.7 for the 360. Third-party developers almost certainly take this into account when they're thinking about whether they should develop for the PSP. Then again, it's hard to say whether there aren't many decent PSP games nowadays because the sales are so low that they put developers off, or whether the sales are so low because there aren't many games worth buying and people just want a portable console emulator that can play Dissidia and Crisis Core. There's probably a bit of both.

[Cupcake]

Alright, I'm just going to put this out in the open

First off, I am very knowledgeable about PSP hacking, every time I get into a modding scene, I go right to the top, for the PSP, I used to talk to Dark_Alex and Mathieulh, and now in the Wii scene I talk to Team Twiizers (on rare occasions, they're not around too much)

Now, PSP modding, is legal, if you OWN a PSX game, and convert it to a .PBP file, to be used with POPS, it's perfectly legal.  It's what I have to do, actually, since I don't have a memory stick large enough to fit the 1.73 GB Playstation Network version

A Custom Firmware, has never been declared by Sony, to be illegal, just in violation of your Warranty.  Which, really doesn't matter, since you can remove all traces of the custom firmware.  Another great thing about custom firmware, is that it's like Bootmii, something goes wrong, you can fix it.... Shit, looks like today is going to be a day of PSP modding for me

Now if only I could open it up and replace that damn Analog Nub, I'd be able to finally finish Crisis Core =(

[Bosola]

You've likely been asked this a thousand-and-one times, but: what's your understanding of Dark_Alex's early 'retirement' from the PSP modding scene?

[Cupcake]

You've likely been asked this a thousand-and-one times, but: what's your understanding of Dark_Alex's early 'retirement' from the PSP modding scene?

There were a large amount of factors.  It had a lot to do with the leak of the Prometheus project before release, and there were a lot of knockoff firmwares.  Then he decided his job wasn't done, and came back as M33.  Then there were even more knockoffs, so he just said fuck it, and well, that's where it is now.  That's the understanding I got from idling in IRC a lot.

When people stole most of his code, made minor changes, and gave him minimal credit, it pisses him off.  I can't blame him either, I looked at the source of his, and the source of another, and it was virtually the same

[idl12]

Just wondering if anyone ever heard of this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5z4JLJ0od9k  Seems pretty legitimate, there was a demo version and everything, but it's no up anymore.

[Mendelevium]

*edit due to stupidity*

[Prince Lex]

I've never had a problem playing any of my PSX games on PSP because I use POPSloader and this list to choose the best version of Popstation for each game.