Dark~AleX’s 4.01 M33

This is old, old, old news for those who are active in the PSP custom firmware/homebrew scene. Dark~AleX released his 4.01 M33 custom firmware back in June. It also appears to herald the arrival of a plugin that DAX had been working on for some time which is the savestate plugin. It’s not exactly the same as the save states that you have in your handheld emulators that have in your desktop computers.

What DAX did was intercept the data that the PSP generates when it goes into sleep mode. Notice that if you turn off (not completely shut down) your PSP in the middle of a game, when you go back, it technically is still in that same state when you wake it up again. Basically, what DAX’s plugin does is get all that data, dump it somewhere in your memory card and then when you want to go back to that state, it fools your PSP into thinking it’s coming out of sleep mode and pushes that save state data as the current active data for your PSP. Everything else that’s technical about that, I don’t know anymore but it does sound awesome and it opens up doors for other homebrew developers to make things faster or more efficient for this plugin.

So will I convert to 4.01 M33 anytime soon? Not really. At the moment, I’m enjoying the Llewelyndows theme that my 3.90 M33-4 firmware PSP has and I don’t think there has been a conversion released out in Consolespot.net. And right now, 4.01 M33 doesn’t really bring anything new in the table form me so the urgency to switch isn’t there. That is probably until my curiosity gets the better of me and I convert to 4.01. But for the moment, nah.

But for those interested, you can find the latest version of the 4.01 M33 firmware here. It’s at 4.01 M33-2, methinks. Or better yet, get it straight from the man himself, Dark~AleX~! Here’s his site.