Hello, I'm new here and hoping to get some help as I've been scouring the internet and not found any real answers yet.
I recently started a passion project where I made an excel spreadsheet of all the PSP games I may want to play one day that were still available on the official store. I went through the lengthy process of setting up a guest SSID to allow WPA connections, disabling 2FA and generating a token password to sign into the official store on the PSP natively and begin downloading said games. That's all well and good, but apparently here's were things change from everyone else online. I also have movies and shows that are still tied to my account that I want to download and preserve as well. I lost a good chunk of them as they have already disappeared from my account totally, but over 50GB+ in just videos still remain.
The idea is that I like preserving things, and the more companies shift to Software-as-a-Service where the fine print says you actually own nothing and can lose access on a whim, the more strongly I feel about it. I also like keeping hardware and consoles OEM, so I have a regular PSP & PSP Go that run official hardware and will stay that way. I'm aware of the benefits of CFW though, especially now that PlayStation has taken the official stance that they will provide no support whatsoever beyond PS4s in customer service. So I purchased another PSP Go that is intended to be modded and also a Japanese Monster Hunter PSP 3000 that I already put Ark-4 cIPL on.
This is where what I found in my wants/needs differs from any other blog post I've combed through. While I don't need to supplement the licenses for the backed-up games to play them after using the nodrm_free_mod_v7.3 plugin, it seems it was never designed with PSN videos in mind. Obviously even with licenses in MLN_ROOT\LICENSE, that gives me the message "To use this content, you must activate the system." So I read a little about the firmware, although there wasn't any single source that really seems to explain things in detail in layman's terms. Given Ark-4 lets you connect to the PC in flash0, 1, 2, 3, I did that to take a look at what folders and info would be in there, as well as dump them. While the MH PSP isn't activated, my OG is, so I put a temporary Ark-4 on there to both look at / dump the flash files to my PC. There was a clear difference especially in flash2, where while the MH had nothing but a .bin, OG had act.dat with a number of other .DAT files.
I proceeded to overwrite all MH's files with OG's (I will admit I forgot to back up MH's flash0), and it works fine, but still gave the message "The activation information is invalid. To use this content, you must activate the system."
So I looked further if there was a plugin or app I could use to dump the firmware. I believe I used Universal Flash Dumper and was surprised to find it actually dumped folders/files that were not present when looked at while connected to the PC. The problem with that though was it only dumped flash0 & 1. I don't know if there are other "hidden" files in flash2 or 3 (everytime I've looked at 3 it's always been completely empty regardless of PSP or activation). I also haven't really seen anything that is like a "Flash Uploader". If the file didn't show when looking through Ark-4, will it still work as intended if just placed as a normal folder?
In conclusion:
I see two solutions for this, but only really one I'm trying to do. The first is wait for some update to have a plugin like no_drm include video, as there currently is nothing like that (I scoured for a couple of days through thousands of plugins, unless I completely missed the one and only). The other is what I'm trying to go for, which is transferring activation from one PSP to another. This is my reasoning, they functionally work the same but the key difference is in OEM usage. I haven't modded my PSP Go yet, but my working hypothesis has been activating first then applying Ark-4. And the idea is that I suspect you won't be able to activate a PSP much longer, it's already a janky workaround to get there that customer support doesn't even know about / isn't trained on. The original convential methods are gone. The servers to authenticate through PS3 and MediaGo have long been shut down. If my OEMs are lost, stolen, etc when even the PSP itself can no longer do it, that's it.
Thus, I'd like to have that activation data backed-up and retained so in such an event, I could source a replacement, throw CFW on long enough to move that firmware data over and let it reset back to official firmware. I already have one that's CFW, but like I said previously, I like keeping things preserved OEM.
The biggest hurdle is I don't really understand the inner workings of what each flash folder is, holds and/or what's missing to truly get it working properly. Any input and knowledge will be a great help.
tldr; how do?
I recently started a passion project where I made an excel spreadsheet of all the PSP games I may want to play one day that were still available on the official store. I went through the lengthy process of setting up a guest SSID to allow WPA connections, disabling 2FA and generating a token password to sign into the official store on the PSP natively and begin downloading said games. That's all well and good, but apparently here's were things change from everyone else online. I also have movies and shows that are still tied to my account that I want to download and preserve as well. I lost a good chunk of them as they have already disappeared from my account totally, but over 50GB+ in just videos still remain.
The idea is that I like preserving things, and the more companies shift to Software-as-a-Service where the fine print says you actually own nothing and can lose access on a whim, the more strongly I feel about it. I also like keeping hardware and consoles OEM, so I have a regular PSP & PSP Go that run official hardware and will stay that way. I'm aware of the benefits of CFW though, especially now that PlayStation has taken the official stance that they will provide no support whatsoever beyond PS4s in customer service. So I purchased another PSP Go that is intended to be modded and also a Japanese Monster Hunter PSP 3000 that I already put Ark-4 cIPL on.
This is where what I found in my wants/needs differs from any other blog post I've combed through. While I don't need to supplement the licenses for the backed-up games to play them after using the nodrm_free_mod_v7.3 plugin, it seems it was never designed with PSN videos in mind. Obviously even with licenses in MLN_ROOT\LICENSE, that gives me the message "To use this content, you must activate the system." So I read a little about the firmware, although there wasn't any single source that really seems to explain things in detail in layman's terms. Given Ark-4 lets you connect to the PC in flash0, 1, 2, 3, I did that to take a look at what folders and info would be in there, as well as dump them. While the MH PSP isn't activated, my OG is, so I put a temporary Ark-4 on there to both look at / dump the flash files to my PC. There was a clear difference especially in flash2, where while the MH had nothing but a .bin, OG had act.dat with a number of other .DAT files.
I proceeded to overwrite all MH's files with OG's (I will admit I forgot to back up MH's flash0), and it works fine, but still gave the message "The activation information is invalid. To use this content, you must activate the system."
So I looked further if there was a plugin or app I could use to dump the firmware. I believe I used Universal Flash Dumper and was surprised to find it actually dumped folders/files that were not present when looked at while connected to the PC. The problem with that though was it only dumped flash0 & 1. I don't know if there are other "hidden" files in flash2 or 3 (everytime I've looked at 3 it's always been completely empty regardless of PSP or activation). I also haven't really seen anything that is like a "Flash Uploader". If the file didn't show when looking through Ark-4, will it still work as intended if just placed as a normal folder?
In conclusion:
I see two solutions for this, but only really one I'm trying to do. The first is wait for some update to have a plugin like no_drm include video, as there currently is nothing like that (I scoured for a couple of days through thousands of plugins, unless I completely missed the one and only). The other is what I'm trying to go for, which is transferring activation from one PSP to another. This is my reasoning, they functionally work the same but the key difference is in OEM usage. I haven't modded my PSP Go yet, but my working hypothesis has been activating first then applying Ark-4. And the idea is that I suspect you won't be able to activate a PSP much longer, it's already a janky workaround to get there that customer support doesn't even know about / isn't trained on. The original convential methods are gone. The servers to authenticate through PS3 and MediaGo have long been shut down. If my OEMs are lost, stolen, etc when even the PSP itself can no longer do it, that's it.
Thus, I'd like to have that activation data backed-up and retained so in such an event, I could source a replacement, throw CFW on long enough to move that firmware data over and let it reset back to official firmware. I already have one that's CFW, but like I said previously, I like keeping things preserved OEM.
The biggest hurdle is I don't really understand the inner workings of what each flash folder is, holds and/or what's missing to truly get it working properly. Any input and knowledge will be a great help.
tldr; how do?
