Pandora's PSP unbricker (no soldering required)

[bitblt]

That's right, anyone can now unbrick a PSP without needing mad soldering skillz. You will need access to a working hacked PSP, a spare Memory Stick Pro Duo, and need to sacrafice a PSP battery pack.

News Source

A project promulgated under the collective Noobz - more officially branded as N00bz! - has given birth to another monumental development in homebrew: a PSP unbricker for every Sony PlayStation Portable. A universal PSP unbricker/downgrader by the Prometheus project, also
known as Team C+D. In short summary, it would perform the following:

1. You run a program on a homebrew-enabled PSP that will convert a standard PSP battery into a jigkick battery. Note that you can't then use that battery normally - so you should use a spare one.
2. You run a program to generate the unbricker memory stick image, built from the v1.5 update EBOOT (note that this, and the custom IPL, means the release is completely free of Sony copyright materials).
3. You run some programs on a PC to install the image to your memory stick.

Download

(from the readme.txt)

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        \ \ \/_/_/\___  __\\ \ \ \ \
         \ \ \L\ \/__/\ \_/ \ \ \_\ \
          \ \____/   \ \_\   \ \____/
           \/___/     \/_/    \/___/

PANDORA'S BATTERY
=================
A universal PSP unbricker/downgrader by the Prometheus project, also
known as Team C+D.

REQUIREMENTS
- A spare PSP Battery. Any make will do. Using a spare is best, as it
will not be possible to boot the PSP in its normal state with the
modified battery.
- A spare Memory Stick Pro Duo of less than 4Gb. (256Mb should be
enough for all applications).
- A PSP with a Custom Firmware such as OE, M33 or WC, or a PSP with
the 1.5 original kernel.

INSTALLATION PROCEDURE
- Connect the PSP to the PC with the Memory Stick inside via the USB
Connection.
- Format the Memory Stick using any utility.
- Use mspformat to format the Memory Stick logically.
- Remove the Memory Stick and disable the USB connection.
- Connect the Memory Stick again via the USB connection of the PSP.
- Manually create the PSP/GAME (optionally PSP/GAME150) folders on the
Memory Stick.
- Copy the "battery" and "installer" programs to the PSP/GAME
(optionally PSP/GAME150) folder.
- Copy the 1.50 official updater as UPDATE.PBP to the root of the
Memory Stick.
- Remove the Memory Stick and disable the USB connection.
- Run "installer" through the firmware on the PSP. This application
will create the firmware files on the root of the Memory Stick, as
well as msipl.bin.
- Connect the Memory Stick again via the USB connection of the PSP.
- Execute "msipl" application on the PC with the msipl.bin to write
the IPL to memory stick.
- Remove the Memory Stick and disable the USB connection.
- Execute "battery" application on the PSP to modify the battery.
- Congratulation, you are now in posession of a "Magic Memory Stick"
and a "JigKick Battery".

USAGE
- Insert Memory Stick into the PSP
- Remove power cord and insert the JigKick Battery into the PSP.
- A menu appears when the PSP boots. Follow the onscreen information
and instructions.

NOTES AND RESTRICTIONS
- The firmware in the Memory Stick is not a full 1.50, but a minimal
subset. Therefore, not all applications (such as flashers, or
recovery apps) will load.
- Only Memory Stick Pro Duo are compatible. Memory Stick Duo
(e.g. 32MB sticks) are not supported.
- The IDStorage cannot be totally restored, as there is no known way
to regenerate it properly.
- It is strongly RECOMMENDED to make a flash dump of the PSP before
any downgrading operation.
- There might be a BSOD at the end of the downgrade. This is normal,
and happens on the standard downgraders.
- All hardware revisions known at this day are supported.
- This release contains no Sony-copyrighted material. All required
Sony data is generated from the v1.50 update files.

CREDITS
- Please do not edit or remove these credits...
- All work done by the Prometheus team aka Team C+D:

Adrahil (VoidPointer)
Booster
Cswindle (Caretaker)
Dark_AleX (Malyot)
Ditlew
Fanjita (FullerMonty)
Joek2100 (CosmicOverSoul)
Jim
Mathieulh (WiseFellow)
Nem (h1ckeyph0rce)
Psp250
Skylark
TyRaNiD (bockscar)

- With thanks to everyone who has contributed to the PSPSDK, without which
nothing would have been possible.

[Shane R. Monroe]

That's some wild sh*t right there. WTF is the deal with the battery??

[bitblt]

That's some wild sh*t right there. WTF is the deal with the battery??

Yeah, it's pretty weird stuff. Apparently the "jigkick" is a PSP recovery technique developed and used by Sony to recover bad PSP firmware updates. There has been firmware code and circuitry in all Sony PSP's to perform "jigkick" recovery since PSP was introduced. However there was no public knowledge of the technique until a video from Japan was leaked (several months ago) showing a PSP being recovered. Many people though the leaked video was a hoax. However team Prometheus took the video seriously and reversed engineered the technique, and without access to the official software or hardware. The key challenges they had to be overcome to make this work . . .

- Reverse engineering of the service (unbrick) mode
- Development of a technique to change an ordinary battery into a service mode trigger battery (and back)
- Development of custom IPL code along with a technique to sign that code as authentic

Noobz salutes the members of the Prometheus project, namely Adrahil, Booster, Cswindle, Dark_AleX , Ditlew, Fanjita, Joek2100, Jim, Mathieulh, Nem, Psp250, Skylark, and TyRaNiD - who should also be recognized in their Create and Destroy (C+D) identities as follows:

Mathieulh = WiseFellow
Tyranid = bockscar
Fanjita = FullerMonty
Joek = CosmicOverSoul
Dark_Alex = Malyot
Chris = Caretaker
Adrahil = VoidPointer
nem = h1ckeyph0rce

[bitblt]

I wanted to make sure everybody understands the "jigkick" recovery procedure is also quite useful as a general purpose PSP downgrade solution. Using jigkick ANY version PSP firmware can be downgraded now, and in the future. In fact it might even be possible to downgrade the new PSP slim using this technique? We shall see.

Here is about 20 min of YouTube video showing how to make Pandora's Battery . . .
Part 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGip2pwytG0
Part 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6p5dWkYBQWs
Part 3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWhsPvgl6wQ

In related news, Fanjita co developer of the PSP jigkick, is retiring from the PSP homebrew scene.
News Source

In a shocking development, PSP homebrew icon and pioneer Fanjita has announced his retirement over at his website Fanjita.org, citing trust issues as the main reason.

While no specifics were mentioned, the famed developer did say that "the betrayal of trust that preceded the Pandora release was extremely hurtful." This, he says, left him to unable to fully trust the people he previously enjoyed working hard with.

"I'm tired of the continual pressure and idiocy of the PSP scene - long gone are the fun days of pioneering amongst like minds, in a mutually supportive and gentlemanly environment," he says.

"The Pandora Battery therefore marks my last major PSP project," says Fanjita. "I expect that Team C+D and Noobz will continue to release stuff without me, and I still hope to finish up some of the non-exploit projects that I'd been working on (Installotron, piKey etc.).

Fanjita says that the he will now concentrate on fatherhood as well as non-PSP projects that he wants to explore.