Hacking the PSP Blog

(Off Topic) Video on XBox 360 Homebrew Development

Ok, so the XNA Game Studio Express is out for the XBox 360 - develop your games on a PC and they run on both the PC and XBox 360. $49 for a Developers Club membership, which you need in order to get the launcher for the 360. Probably so they know who hacks the console :) Either way, it's way cool to be able to develop for such a powerful platform, especially for so cheap...

Here's a video about it:

http://www.xbox.com/NR/rdonlyres/6D12AECB-A17B-4012-8F29-35AF5C521D4C/0/vidXNA_Community_PartyHi.asx

Enjoy!

-Auri

Silver PSP Released

The silver PSP was released today in Japan and Play-Asia has them available now. You can check them out here...



Via: Play-Asia

SCEA comes clean over PSP website

Sony Computer Entertainment America has admitted that a blog purporting to be the work of real life PSP fans was in fact part of a marketing campaign designed to promote the handheld in the run-up to Christmas.

The site, alliwantforxmasisapsp.com, appeared to be have been designed by two friends and featured downloadable PSP greetings cards and t-shirt transfers. It also hosted a video showing "Cousin Pete" rapping about the handheld, which has since been removed from both the site and from YouTube.

"Consider us your own personal psp hype machine, here to help you wage a holiday assault on ur parents, girl, granny, boss - whoever - so they know what you really want," a message on the site read.

However, visitors to the site became suspicious and discovered that it had been registered by marketing company Zipatoni which, according to its own website, offers "integrated multimedia marketing initiatives".

Zipatoni's site lists SCE as a client, and featured a picture (also now removed) of an employee who bears a striking resemblance to a man posing in a home-made PSP t-shirt on alliwantforxmasisapsp.com.

As a result the blog was flooded with complaints from critics exposing its true origins. They have since been removed, along with the video, and the welcome message has been replaced with the following message, credited to Sony Computer Entertainment America: "Busted. Nailed. Snagged. As many of you have figured out (maybe our speech was a little too funky fresh???), Peter isn't a real hip-hop maven and this site was actually developed by Sony.

"Guess we were trying to be just a little too clever. From this point forward, we will just stick to making cool products, and use this site to give you nothing but the facts on the PSP."

It seems likely that Sony will need to take more care with its guerrilla marketing campaigns in the future - and not just to avoid a backlash from consumers.

According to the Washington Post, the Federal Trade Commission has warned companies "engaging in word-of-mouth marketing" that they must disclose details of who is endorsing the product. A failure to do so, the FTC said, could be seen as deceptive.

Ellie Gibson
December 14, 2006

Source: GamesIndustry.biz

Advanced Remote Play functionality coming in March

Remote Play is one of the more exciting things about the PS3-PSP connectivity. It's a nifty feature that allows you to access your PS3's media via PSP. While cool in theory, in practice, there's too many restrictions. Firstly, the PS3 can't do anything else when in Remote Play mode. Secondly, you have to be in range of the PS3's wi-fi. Finally, you can only access media stored on hard drive (no games, or disc media!).

It appears that a future firmware upgrade in March will address some of these issues. The future PLAYSTATION 3 upgrade promises multi-tasking, which should help address the first concern. Secondly, you'll be able to access your PS3's media from any internet connection, a la LocationFree Player. Certainly, this is a strong step forward. With the PS3 gaining Tivo-like functionality later next year, the PSP may be the perfect media device for people on the go. Imagine: you could record Battlestar Galactica when you're away, only to watch it from your PSP whenever you're near a wi-fi spot. The future of PS3-PSP connectivity is certainly exciting.

(Note from Auri: I've had no luck in getting the PS3+PSP connectivity to work... however, I hope to be in contact with Sony tonight to resolve the issue...)

Andrew Yoon
December 13, 2006

Source: PSP Fanboy

NetConfigBackup Tool Released

This just in from Noobz! The excellent team that recently brought us the 3.0 / 3.01 Firmware decrypter have just released a new tool to backup your network config. This program has been specifically made to backup your network configurations from the PSP so that if you corrupt the registry on your PSP you can restore settings without needing to type in the network details such as the WEP key etc. It's simply an application made for you to save time, and even allows you to add network points for Dark_Alex's 2.71 SE-C custom firmware.

So what does the program do exactly? When you run the NetConfigBackup tool you'll be presented with a basic interface which will give you the option to dump or restore your config. It will dump the network configurations to the ms0:/netconfig.bak directory, and then when your registry is corrupted you can then restore your network configuration, or even transfer it to another PSP using the restore facility.

We advise you backup and then restore a firmware on the same PSP, because (according to the readme) if a dump is made on 2.00+ and it is restored on 1.5 then it may not work, depending on if the access point uses WPA or not. The source code has been included in the download.

Download NetConfigBackup Tool

Source: PSPUpdates

I'm going to CES, are you?

CES, the only remaining large-scale consumer electronics trade show left in the United States, is this January 7 through 11. Are you going to be there? If so, want to get together and talk PSP stuff? Maybe we can get a group of PSP hackers together and go over everything, from Sony's announcements to what's coming up! Send me an email from my contact form and let's figure something out!

Best,

Auri, Author, Hacking the PSP