Be Excellent To Each Other

My second hand PSP came with custom firmware 3.03oe-a installed on it. I am semi-tempted to try and install a newer firmware (the one I have appears to be from early 2007) to get the latest versions of emulators and whatnot on it.

Some googling seems to somewhat reassuringly state that you can't really brick a PSP anymore with firmware updates as they can all be restored with "pandora battery" tricks (me neither), but nevertheless I still don't really know how to go about doing it and, specifically, if I can just install a new firmware over the one I have or whether I have to be very careful about what "brand" of firmware I currently have and what options that gives me.

The process of creating one of those Pandora batteries was fairly poorly documented back when I tried it many moons ago, but it's not truly difficult. Having fiddled with firmwares enough over the past while it's probably not needed apart from getting the first custom firmware onto the machine in the first place, the procedure now seems mature and reliable enough that I trust it, as long as you have a 'real' trustworthy, known good memory stick to work off.

You will be able to use any custom firmware you like without looking for any special versions. If it's the old chunky PSP's you may want to download the add-on that will let it work with really old homebrew stuff, but it's not absolutely vital.

At least with Dark Alex's firmwares, you only have to mess around with moving stuff manually onto memory sticks once, after that you can just use the now-redirected 'system update' to install the latest custom firmware. Can't remember when that started, but I'm fairly sure it was well after 3.03

It is indeed an old school chunky number. I will attempt to just stick a new firmware directly over the existing one then.

Fingers crossed

That was a fairly heart-stopping process but it all worked!