James Delahunty
6 May 2005 7:18
It is being reported that crackers have managed to compromise copy protection on Sony PSP games. A few days ago, several PSP games appeared on the Internet in the form of ISO images. However, there is no way for somebody to play these copies of the games on their PSP device just yet because you cannot burn UMD discs. The PSP has only been on the market in the U.S. for a couple of months but already several hacks and tweaks have appeared for it.
Sony is trying to get more deals with content providers to offer their content in UMD format for consumers to view on the PSP console. While some content providers may be less likely to sign a deal with Sony if they think UMD discs are unsafe, existing partners have nothing really to worry about as Sony has touted UMD's DVD-like region coding, unique per-disc ID number and AES-based content encryption system as suitable protection for UMD-stored content.
UMD discs can hold about 1.8GB of data. But even though you couldn't burn a UMD disc, one major possibility is that one day games might be loaded directly from a MemoryStick. You can get pretty high capacity MemorySticks now that you can use with the PSP and some of the PSP games floating around the net now are quite small in size for games; one of them being just 133MB. So a MemoryStick is a complicated but maybe possible method; more possible than actually making direct copies to UMD discs for now.
Source:
The Register