My little PS4 dilemma

[lwiz]

Long story short, I managed to acquire PS4 at OFW 4.05 and considering my options how to proceed with the sucker. I have a slim with dongle at 9.00, which is working well, but I'm considering making this phat my main console. Basically there's three options for me going forward, which are as follows:

1. Keep the console at 4.05 and pray for a miracle in form of CFW. (I'm not in a great hurry to get the PS4 "into production" - still have plenty of other toys to play with meanwhile.)
2. Update to 5.05, pray for even greater miracle in the form of CFW and transfer my stuff over and hunt for backports for my FPKG's.
3. Update to 9.00, transfer my stuff over and be done with it.

6.72 isn't an option anyway

I know that saves can be transferred over easily enough with Apollo, but is there some way forr transferring the already installed fpkg's over? I have a faint recollection seeing a mention of fpkg transfer in somewhere, but no idea where... Also, can the transfers (if even possible) be done using external HDD - I have a nice SSD in my slim and will switch the HDD's as well when doing the changeover.

Any pointers, links to tools etc. are more than welcome!

 

[lwiz]

Just notes for posterity what I did so far - the switchover is done and the phat is purring happily on 5.05.

Starting point was to transfer all the games from system A to system B, switch the HDD's and hopefully transfer the saves over as well. No need to keep anything on system A as it will be repurposed and system B will become the new main one.

I started with updating the 4.05 phat into 5.05. Using KiiWii's guide after installing the fw update. Finding old Sony OFW's was pretty painless with practically no search-fu. Used Nomadic2000's DNS as it seems Al-Azif ones do not support the pkg-zone domain at all. (Scene drama or whatevs.)

Formatted the external transfer hdd's on the 5.05 system just to be sure. GoldHEN should be agnostic for the external drive formatting OFW, but I'd rather be safe than sorry. "Drives" as I didn't have one external of suitable size available for emptying. Then connected those one at a time to the system A and filled the drives with my "extended demos".

Also used Apollo tool to create fake PSN id on system A and too a note on the hex code for that ID on the creation screen (phone camera works wonders).

At this point I transferred a throwaway "extended demo" from the external HDD to the system B and checked that it transferred and worked ok. Do note that this one fpkg will be lost in the next steps as the game is always moved, not copied.

At this point I transferred all the saves from system a to USB memstick using Apollos copy everything function.

So - time to switch HDD's over. One should have full recovery OFW's at this point - the update only versions do not work. Switched the HDD's over and reinstalled 5.05 on system B with hard drive originating from A and 9.00 on system A.

Then, after starting GoldHEN on system B installed the homebrew I wanted from pkg-zone, installing the pkg-zone app autoinstall from the browser - starting from mission critical Apollo. With Apollo installed I created a new fake PSN-id on system B with the same hex code that I used on system A. Then just resign saves -> transfer all.

Afterwards transferred the "extended demos" over from external drives. (Surprisingly many worked out of the box, but for some I neeed to do some backport searching.) Anyways, transfer was done, drive swap was done and I'd say with minimal fuss and time consumption.

"Extended demos" you may ask. Trying games on PS4 - as a full game - not a short version has made the game studios several sales for me - usually at full price. Also I have avoided several "bombs" - games even lauded but missing any replayability or real content (looking at you, Stray).

 

[KiiWii]

Good choice, stay on 5.05 for now

 

[lwiz]

Only slight drawback is netcatting the payload manually each time I boot the console, but haven't yet found automated solution for that. Unless there's better solution, optimal would be sending a message on listener port to server in LAN when waiting for payload, which then sends the payload. Have time to check if that solution could be fesible earliest at summer though.

And of course, I could have (again) missed something obvious

 

[KiiWii]

Use rest mode

 

[lwiz]

Use rest mode

That works for a bit, but due certain circumstances like beyond idiotic design of how leccy is distributed in our living room, it's usually easier to do full shutdowns and coldboots unless actively playing on PS4. Probably I might be able to cook something together given enough free time - before that, I'm mostly happy with current setup

 

[KiiWii]

There is an unreleased method to host payloads from USB at startup on 5.05. Maybe one day it will be released.