Yesterday’s news that a downgrader for the 2.71 PSP had been released was greeted with enthusiasm by a lot of people who had been keeping their PSPs updated since updating your PSP to play PSP games seems like a contradiction in terms at the moment. I know I bought three new ones in Japan but I wouldn’t call any of them essential.

So I jumped on this new bandwagon and, risking a brick, downgraded my PSP to 1.5 again. It worked fine – although the fact that it only initiates without crashing a tenth of the time is disconcerting – and set about using a handful of hacks to turn my PSP into a dual-boot machine. I can now choose whether to boot into 1.5 (for homebrew) or 2.71 (for new games) depending on where I have my wi-fi switch when turning it on.

I seriously recommend using the combination of Devhook and Harleyg’s Custom Firmware to do this with a PSP. You get the ability to play all the latest games on 2.71 and use great stuff like ScummVM on 1.5, all within the same PSP. It might actually get me using the thing regularly, even if the battery is still rubbish. How many other systems can give the double frustration of Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts and Ultimate Ghosts ‘n Goblins? It’s violence guaranteed!