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I bought Vice City Stories for my PSP shortly after it came out. This was one month ago, just as the new 2.82 firmware revisions were showing up on PSPs around the world. Just one more firmware revision designed to lock people out of playing homebrew, under the auspice of new-game-allure. In other words, I could upgrade my PSP to play my new game, but lose the ability to play homebrew. Or, I could keep my old version, and stare at the Vice City Stories box as entertainment. Sadly, I opted for the latter.

Rumours shortly hit the web that people were getting ripped copies of Vice City Stories playable by disabling the version check mechanism in the PSP via DevHook, but apparently this only worked on the modified 2.7x firmware. Other stories popped up that people were able to get Vice City Stories working by swapping UMD discs, but this only worked for certain UMDs, and might have been linked to certain firmware version. In any case, I even went out and bought a copy of Wipeout since I heard it could do the trick, but this was wrong. I was steadfast in my decision to keep legacy 1.5 firmware, and assumed that in the near future, a new version of DevHook would be released that could properly emulate 2.82.

Four days ago, the new DevHook installer was released, which shortly followed the release of DevHook .50, now capable of emulating 2.82 PSPs. And so it is that on oldschool firmware, I can play the latest PSP games, despite Sony’s ridiculous efforts at shutting down homebrew, which is one of the major selling points of consoles, especially consoles with a limited gaming selection in the first place.

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