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Want to do more with your Playstation PSP Portable than just play prepackaged, commercial titles? Thanks to the community of PSP tinkerers out there, there are emulators, cool homebrew applications, and thousands of games that you can run on your PSP for free. Liberating your PSP is easy; here's a quick how-to.

The key is that you need to use a PSP that runs version 1.50 of the firmware. These were sold new during the first half of 2005, so if you have or can find one of these that has not been upgraded, you're set. Otherwise, you can pick one up on eBay and elsewhere; just include "1.5" in your search. (As of this writing, new PSPs are up to version 2.5 firmware.)

Newer games won't run with the old PSP firmware, so I personally won't buy any game in Sony's UMD format until I know that there's a patch for newer versions of the PSP firmware that will let me run homebrew games. Of course, it would be a different story if Sony actually helped people to develop applications for the PSP independently...

For the multimedia folks, here's a video (QuickTime MOV) on how to do all of this.

And of course, here's an MP4 version that you can watch on a PSP.

Hardware

• PSP with USA firmware 1.50 (Settings > System Settings > System Information)
• Two memory sticks, 128Mb or greater
• Memory stick reader/writer. I use a cheapo no-name one that was at CompUSA.

1. Download and install MSwapTool.

Download the wonderful tool MSwapTool, from here. There's a readme/PDF included, but what you need to do is explained below. The application is Spanish, but it doesn't matter-- it's really simple. [Editorial note: Since the time that this How-To was first written, people have started sharing PSP games by zipping up the sets of files ready-to-copy directly onto memory sticks, without having to run MSwapTool first. The procedure described here applies to the most common style of PSP game sharing as of mid-2005.]

2. Download a homebrew PSP game.

Download and unzip a homebrew game for your PSP from PSPHacker.com. I downloaded PSP chess--it's a neat app, and now my wife and I can play chess anytime. In addition, there are emulators that let the PSP play games written for tons of other platforms, including Gameboy, MAM, MSX, Neo Geo, NES, PC Engine, Sega, SNES, and Wonderswan. Running emulators, you can play thousands of games on your PSP, available as freeware and homebrew ROMs. Popular homebrew games include Doom, PSP chess, Pong, Pocothin, Higher or Lower, HTML Game, PSP GO, Maze, Arkanoid, and Puyo. Note that emulators can potentially max out the PSP processor if running it at its full 333Mhz for extended periods of time (which licensed PSP games don't do). So be careful, and stop playing if it seems like you're overtaxing the system, or else you might damage your PSP.

3. Run MSwapTool.

With MSwapTool installed and your game downloaded and unzipped, run MSwapTool (Start > Program Files > MSwapTool). You'll see a simple interface with two input boxes, which are basically From and To. "Fichero PBP" is where to find the game files to convert, and "Directorio" is where to write the output file.

Click the first dotted box ("Fichero PBP"), navigate to the directory where you unzipped the game you downloaded, select the EBOOT.PBP file, and click Open. MSwapTool will convert this file into the files you need for a launcher and game stick.

Click the "Directorio" dotted box to choose the output directory for MSwapTool. Then click "Generar ficheros" (Generate files). Once the conversion is complete, you'll get a message in Spanish.

The outputted files will be in two folders, MS1 and MS2.

Now you need to write these files onto your two memory sticks, and make sure you keep track of which one is #1 and #2. Insert each stick into your reader, and create three new, nested folders on both sticks: PSP, PSP\GAME, and PSP\GAME\PSP-DEV.

Copy the contents of folder MS1 into the PSP\GAME\PSP-DEV folder of stick #1. This will be your launcher stick. Then swap the contents of folder MS2 into the same directory on stick #2. This will be your game stick.

Pop stick #1 into your PSP and select Games > Memory Stick. You should now see a lovely new icon for PSP Launcher (and the name of the game/app you made).

Get stick #2 ready, then select PSP Launcher, quickly swap out memory stick #1 with memory stick #2, and viola! You're now running a free application someone made. Most of the applications and games come with source code, so expect some amazing new things to do with your PSP. Just don't update your PSP's firmware, ever, ever again.

If you want to make your own games and apps, here's what Clayton from PSPHacker.com told me (this was before PSP Launcher was released, but is likely still applicable): "There are programs, like Yamasan's ELF-to-PBP converter, which convert ELF files to PSP-readable PBP files. You then copy the file to PSP/GAME on your memory stick. Currently for 1.0 PSPs, this is one of the ways homebrew programs can be created." (ELF, or Executable and Linking Format, is a standard machine-independent format for binary data.)

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