shortfin

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞
Hello! My name is Fish. This is a blog about my life, and it'll probably include a lot about video games. I collect consoles and mod them, and I'm a big fan of handhelds. One day I will acquire a PSP Go and a GBA Micro and my power will be restored.

November 26th, 2025


this week is endless,

and it is agony.
hello! so my PSP is coming hopefully friday, maybe saturday, hopefully not Monday. the waiting is agonizing. all im doing is waiting for my new game system to arrive and playing fortnite, i want homer. im so fucking bored. tomorrow is thanksgiving but theres not much going on, just another day to wait through. and theres no mail, so my psp gets backed up another day. darn. , im fucking tird.

November 22nd, 2025


i hacked my PSP a bit more,

and i legally acquired some game.
today i embarked on the stupidest quest ever - to actually buy a game or two for the psp. to do this, you need a ps3/vita, computer, and psp. in short, you can still buy games for PSP on ps3/vita, using funds you added on PC, and you can still download them directly to the PSP on itself. so i did! i got caught for two HOURS on the part where you connect for psp to wifi - and i actually gave up before remembering that installing ark4 gives the psp much-needed wpa2 support. so i was able to do it! i spent $10 on N.O.V.A and flying hamster or whatever it was called. it was kinda fun. why didn't i pirate them? i do think that buying games was a part of the experience of these older consoles (especially on Nintendo ones) so i'd like to do it at least once. i also learned you can set the psp to autoboot to ark4's custom launcher, much like booting to twilight menu++ on dsi. it's actually FASTER than twilight menu, surprisingly. (unsuprisingly, in the race that i did to see what could boot into a game the fastest, the 3ds lost.)
also, i bought a PSP Go. i cancelled it out of panic earlier but i told the seller to please actually not cancel it, so if he doesn't, then i should get myself a shiny new cute-ass psp go in the mail next week! it's like the gba micro where it's flashy and cute and small and worse in basically every way. (the gbamicro can't play gbc games, and the pspgo can't play umds. it also can't connect to any peripherals the normal psp can, and its comp cable is Expensive...)

November 9th, 2025


hacking my ps2 was really fun,

so i'm going to write about it.
i have a ps2 slim, 70012 model, so i'm mostly writing all this down for my later self because i don't know if it'll work on your specific model.
in order to load custom firmware, all you need to do is buy a FreeMCBoot memory card off of Amazon or something for like 15$. it just WORKS, it loads into homebrew immediately, and that'll let you launch some things. (ulaunchELF lets you launch .elf homebrew, select "mass" as your USB drive, format to fat32. don't run games off it, usb 1.1 is very slow.)
in order to play ps2 games (without modifying your console at all, you need to burn them. if your game is a .bin and .cue, combine them UltraISO (trial), go to properties and select these settings, then click "save as" and save as iso. if your game is an .iso, cool skip that. next get ESR Disc Patcher and patch your .iso file with it. (this is one method of loading ps2 games- ill talk about the other in a bit). burn your disc onto a DVD-R (NOT a dvd+r), one with 4.7gb of space, at the lowest speed your burner can manage. (use imgburn) (i tested 8x instead of 3x, and it seemed to work fine, but it was recommended to me to burn slower.) fmcb will auto-bott the esr-patched disk for you.
in order to play ps1 games you need to do a little hack called MechaPWN. it backs up something about your system (im not sure what), and it basically lets you turn your console into a devkit one. follow this tutorial. keep force unlock OFF. burn your disc onto a cd, it seems like you can just.. burn the bin and cue files onto a disc.
if you have force unlock ON, you can boot ps2 games, unpatched, from a disc. this is useful in very specific situations only - for example, parappa 2 doesn't work using ESR! however, installing force unlock will not let you boot PS1 backups or DVDs. (you can still boot real ps1 games.) you can uninstall force unlock by repeating the setup process and selecting "no"