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After almost a year of getting no love from us, we picked up our aging white PSP and decided to upgrade its firmware so it was useable with the latest games. An upcoming trip convinced us that this might be a good idea, else we might die of boredom on Southwest’s display-free seating environment. Unfortunately, the procedure to upgrade our particular PSP’s firmware version wasn’t as straightforward as we’d have liked, so we had to go through a bit of trial and error to discover what was missing from the documentation that came with the latest firmware upgrades.

Understand that last we dealt with our PSP’s firmware, we decided to stop emulating newer firmware versions on our 1.50 PSP, and instead move to a custom firmware version that would both play the latest games, and yet still allow us to run homebrew software. Not wanting to forego this latter option, we decided to stay away from an official firmware upgrade, and stick with a custom firmware solution.

Fortunately for us, PSP Hacks is a great little site that has all the files we needed to move ahead, and we live-twittered the rather quick procedure after we finally figured out what to do. For those in a similar situation as we were in, the general instructions follow.

1. Download the custom 3.52 M33 firmware package. Extract the contents.
2. Download the official 3.52 firmware. Extract the contents, and rename the file 352.PBP.
3. Download the official 1.50 firmware. Extract the contents, and rename the file 150.PBP.
4. Follow the instructions included in the 3.52 M33 firmware package, and in addition to moving the 352.PBP file into the directory the instructions tell you do, also move the 150.PBP file into that directory.
5. Run the upgrade package from the PSP. Once done, you should be sitting pretty with a PSP running firmware 3.52 M33. You can now delete all the files you used to upgrade.
6. Download the 3.52 M33-4 firmware package. Extract the contents.
7. Follow the instructions included in the 3.52 M33-4 firmware package. This entails moving the extracted files to the PSP, and running the respective program from the PSP. Once done, you’ll have a PSP running firmware 3.52 M33-4. Delete the files used in the upgrade procedure.
8. Download the 3.71 M33 firmware package. Extract the contents.
9. Download the official 3.71 firmware. Extract the contents, and rename the file 371.PBP.
10. Follow the instructions included in the 3.71 M33 firmware package, and move the 371.PBP file to the proper location. Execute the respective program on the PSP to upgrade, and when done, you’ll be one version away from the latest custom firmware. Delete the files used in the upgrade procedure
11. Download the 3.95 GEN-2 firmware package. Extract the contents.
12. Download the official 3.95 software package. Extract the contents, and rename the file to 395.PBP.
13. Follow the instructions in the 3.95 GEN-2 firmware package, and place the 395.PBP file in the root PSP folder. Execute the respective program to do the upgrade, and when done, you’ll finally be running 3.95 GEN-2. Delete the files used in the upgrade process.

Admittedly, the chain of upgrades is annoying, but there’s no way to directly upgrade from 3.51 M33. Note that discussion about downgrading to 1.50 before upgrading is unnecessary. The key to the upgrade is having the 150.PBP file handy, and upgrading to 3.52 M33 before 3.52 M33-4. (Alternately, one can upgrade to 3.52 M33-3, which also allows one to move onto 3.71 M33.)

The upgrade to each new firmware revision takes about five minutes. A more time-consuming task was downloading each of the official firmware versions, which run around 20MB apiece. When done, however, the ability to throw every game you’d want to play onto an 8GB Pro Duo card is totally worth it.

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