Hacking the PSP to play backup games

With news that a utility to dump the ISO image of a UMD disk to a Memory Stick, it seems that those hackers will soon be able to play "friendly" games on their PSP. However, according to an article on Tom's Hardware, it may not be that easy to play copy games on the PSP. So unless someone smart comes up with a way, there'll be no "friendly" PSP games at least for now. Who's smarter, Sony or the hackers? We'll soon find out.

Chris Gilbert -- well-known among the homebrew PS2 development community as "Neovangelist" -- told Tom's Hardware Guide that, even after someone dumped the contents of a PSP game's UMD disc onto a memory stick, getting it to actually run from that location may be a monumental task yet to be accomplished. "On the PSP, the binaries themselves are all encrypted, using some really strong RSA encryption," said Gilbert. A PSP decrypts binaries as it runs, and expects that stream to emerge from the UMD disc drive, not the memory stick. "It's not like you can just disassemble the binaries, change some stuff, and recompile it," he said.

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