uOFW, the alternate Firmware project for the PSP

November 19th, 2012, 14:33 Posted By: wraggster

via http://wololo.net/2012/11/14/uofw-th...t-for-the-psp/

Some of you might have heard of uOFW, a project that aims at fully reverse-engineering OFW 6.60 on the PSP with the goal of writing an open source Firmware for our beloved device. Others might remember the Utopia project with a similar goal. Finally, most of you might wonder what the point of such a project would be, since we all have CFW on our PSPs… Today, in the hope of answering some of these questions, I’m interviewing Felix and Artart, the leads of one of the most ambitious projects on the PSP.





Wololo: Hi guys, could you describe the uOFW project in noob-friendly words? If I am a regular PSP user, what does this project do for me? What is its ultimate goal?

Felix & Artart: It’s quite a tough question, but although the project is very technical and not noob-friendly, its goals are very simple to understand.

uOFW is a project of reverse engineering the PSP firmware: in short, it means we are discovering how the PSP operating system works. In other words, it means we are looking into all the software which is used to make your PSP work as it does. From the binaries of this operating system (like a computer executable), we take its source code: it means we discover the way it works in a both human-readable and machine-readable way, in a conventional programming language (here, the C language).



As an end user, the project does nothing for now… we are “just” making a new PSP firmware, identical to the original one, but free of rights (it can be modified freely), and in a way which lets us modify it how we want. This means alternative firmwares may appear, opening your PSP to more opportunities and functionality… of course that part depends on what people will do with uOFW, not on uOFW itself. Still, with the documented source codes of the modules (and the working modules) we make adding new features to the firmware easier than ever before!

In addition, uOFW can also lead to progresses in emulators. As an example, the audio.prx module reverse engineering is heavily used in PCSP (practically untouched from what I heard), and it’s working perfectly.

A major part of the uOFW project is the documentation about the PSP modules and the PSP hardware itself. We intend to create the first compact archive of PSP hardware/kernel information. For now, a lot of information about it can already be found on the Internet, however, unfortunately, they cannot be found at a single place. Examples are the websites wololo.net and ps2dev, both being places where major information about the PSP can be found, but in many cases only in the form of bits and pieces, leaving much valuable information unfound (or can only be found after some search time). We want to change that with uOFW, adding module specific information right into the module’s source code. And it doesn’t end with that; we have setup a PSP wiki for the uOFW project as well, adding all information we find during reverse engineering which don’t get included into the source code.

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