PSP Loaders: Enter the Remix - What's going on ?

 Wherefore art thou Humma.Kavula the masses asked as he parted from the PSP loader scene. Ever since the release of the MPH gameloader the PSP scene has started to show more signs of life. There have been new loaders and new edits since then but so many have come out so fast that they may get overlooked. The edits have been appearing left and right by people who wanted to add there own touch to the loader and hopefully some added features. Now remember in order to use any of these you will need the required firmware files.


This is one of the latest releases by Dragonuk, an all in one loader package which also boasts MP3 playback whilst you're playing a game.

The first edit was made by Mika. It allows games to be played without a disc in there drive. This edit is a combination of umdemulator, devhook and mphgameloader that gives life back to PSP with dead umd drives and gives extra playtime by saving battery life. Using this loader is simple, after you go back to system menu from umdemulator, choose the devhook edit, select the iso again and launch. This is the only edit I have found from Mika but with such few problems with the first edit theres no real reason for a second.

Next are edits by wakAwooki. There have been a few edits under this name. First is the fastloader edit, this edit made what was impossible before possible now. Because the way fastloader launches iso it wasn't possible to go back and launch the mph loader but this edit launches mph once the iso is launched. Theres nothing special to do when using this edit, simply choose your iso and launch. After this edit a umedmulator edit came out but because umdemulator uses boot.bin and eboot.bin there were two edits to give people a choice. The boot.bin edit launched mph when boot.bin was on. The eboot.bin version was for when boot.bin was off. It would have been a one edit version but because some games had 2.0 eboot it was necessary to use the games boot.bin and because some games had dummy boot.bin the eboot was necessary. Both of these needed to be on either direct load or system menu to work. The last edit was a dual firmware boot version. With the discovery of Dragonball Z needing a different firmware dump, this version was made assuming the new firmware wouldn't work on the other games. This one is used exactly like the other release except you select "original 2 0" on or off. On would launch firmware from folders flash0/flash1 and off would launch firmware from flash2/flash3.

Around the time the last edit came out Dark_Alex released an application that ran compressed iso which gave more space to people who wanted to cram more games on there memory stick. The first release was pretty much a beta version showing people that running compressed images on the PSP can be done. The compatibility of the first version wasn't all that great but within days a second version came out that added more games to the list. Dark_Alex is now on version 4 and this version not only has a much higher compatibility list but it also added more functions to help improve compatibility such as allocate tables in ram which will decrease memory use.

Chossy has made probably the most edits of all, his edits range from simple umdemulator edits to a launcher to launch any other edit without having to go through the system menu clutter. His first edit was a umdemulator edit which launched iso directly without having to go back to the system menu. There was no tricks just choose mphloader, boot.bin off and launch. His next edit was an eboot changer and it was for firmware selections to let you choose between two different ones. To use it you simply put it on your psp and choose eboot changer from your system menu and hit O twice. To go back to the original firmare repeat. His next release was Devhook GL plus which was more of a selector edit. This little baby let you choose which edited loader (umdemulator, devhook or fastloader) you wanted to use without having to constantly go up and down in your system menu selection. Using this is pretty much self explanatory just choose which loader you want, pick your iso and boot select method, then launch. Since new things for the PSP kept coming out so fast Chossy made another edit and released it days later. The new one was called Devhook evolved no umd solution. This new edit let you choose which loader to use just like the recent one except it added no umd feature to each loader so you did not need a umd for any of the loaders. The feature list of this version is daxziso v4 no umd, mphloader no umd, fastloader no umd, devhook no umd, umdemu no umd and an empty slot for future releases.

Last on the list is not an edit but a umd launching application which has not been successful with edits per say. Runumd is an application created by a very well known PSP developer nem from the Saturn Expedition Committee. What this tool does is allow you to play original umd that not even the MPH loader has been able to play. Only umd will work with this tool, not iso. Runumd dumps the needed files from the games update folder and uses them to run games for systems up to 2.6. Although this tool launches some new games, its been reported the games will more then likely crash after a while of playing but I'm sure this will all be sorted in future releases.

So there you have it, in the span of less then a month more edits then some people would want to handle. Hopefully this helped some people realize what each one does.

Related URL's

* Universal GLoader v0.3 - Allows MP3's whilst playing game.
* DAXZISO Loader v0.4
* Dax ZISO Loader v0.4 Compatibility List
* Tutorial: How to use Dax ZISO Loader
* DevHook Evolved No UMD solution
* Devhook & Run UMD edit