Hold+ v2.0 - Battery Saver Plugin

Hold+ v2.0 - Battery Saver Plugin

July 1st, 2008, 02:29 Posted By: wraggster

News/release from Torch

This is a simple plugin I made a long time ago for my personal use. I just found the source code while going through some old stuff on my computer, so I thought I'd clean up the code a bit and release the plugin.

I realize that there are other plugins that feature similar functionality but I wrote my own because I wanted to be sure its coded optimally, as there are a few careless ways in which these functions can be improperly used (the point of this after all is to conserve battery life).

It does the following when the Hold switch is enabled:
* Switches off the LCD backlight.
* Switches off the actual LCD screen.
(This is important because the backlight and actual screen are two different things. You can have an image being displayed on the screen while the backlight is switched off, such that you can see the image if you use a flashlight. You can also have the screen switched off while the backlight still illuminates the powered off screen.)
* Underclocks the CPU to 61MHz
(Sony has changed the clock speed functions such that only certain combinations of speeds work correctly. Simply trying to underclock to arbitrary values will result in the CPU simply running at the stock speed. I have verified that Hold+ successfully underclocks to 61MHz.)
* The original screen brightness and clock speed are restored when the Hold switch is released.
* Prevents the PSP from going into suspend mode if you accidently push the power switch too far when turning off Hold mode.

Installation:
You can install it in the seplugins folder, and make an entry in VSH.txt. Thus it will be active in the XMB. Its also possible to use it in games by adding it to GAME.txt, but some games may crash etc., if the CPU is underclocked to such a low value.

Optionally, its also possible to install it in your PSP's flash0 so that it will work without a memory card. For this you can use FreePlay's "NewBTCFNedit" and enable it for VSH mode in the all the PSPBT?NF.bin files. Add it after vshmain.prx.

Credits:
Thanks to adrahil for helping with preventing the suspend mode.

Spoiler for Changelog:
Changelog v2.0
----------------------------------
Added feature to prevent PSP from going into suspend mode if the power button is pushed too far when turning off Hold mode.

Note:
I never made any previous hold plugins, those are not by me.

If you want to change the clock speed to your own values, you can use a hex editor to change them. The offsets in the file for v2.0 are
0x278, 0x284 - CPU,GPU (Both should be same)
0x27C - Bus (Should be half the CPU speed or less)

The values should be entered in hexadecimal. The default value for CPU/GPU is 3C (60 MHz in decimal) and the default value for bus is 1E (30 MHz in decimal).

Note that simply using any arbitrary value will not work. You will have to test and see which values for CPU/GPU and Bus speed work.

Download and give feedback via comments

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