Karol Krizka

The PSP recovery menu has many interesting settings, however many go unnoticed by the average user. I’ve recently discovered several that made my PSP much more fun to use. The following post covers the settings that I found, in hope that others will find them useful.

The first step is to make sure that you are running the latest custom firmware from team M33. If you are not, you can read an earlier tutorial that I wrote with instructions about how to upgrade to it. The next step is to start the recovery menu, which I have also documented earlier. When you are in the menu, you can navigate with the up/down arrows, and you can use the X button to change the selected setting. After you have changed all the needed settings, just click the “Exit”option in the main menu, and the PSP will reboot into the XMB.

Configuration -> Skip Sony logo

This setting can will skip the Sony logo that you see when you start your PSP from a shutdown, which should speed up the boot time of the PSP a bit. However I think that the setting is useless in most cases, because I usually put my PSP into Sleep mode that does not display the Sony logo. But I have enabled this option anyways, because from time to time I do need to shut off the PSP completely.

Configuration -> Hide corrupt icons

To install a homebrew game that has been compiled for FW1.5, you have to copy two directories to your PSP memory stick. One is the actual application, and the other (the one that ends with a %) is used to help to launch it. However the second folder will be counted as another game by Sony’s XMB menu, and will be displayed as “Corrupted Data”, because it is not an actual PSP application. If you install a lot of homebrews, your XMB might become very cluttered. But this can be fixed with the Hide corrupt icons setting option on the M33 firmwares. Just enable it, and all the garbage entries in your XMB Application section will be gone. This is the most useful setting in the custom firmwares, and I suggest everyone enables it.

CPU Speed -> Speed in XMB

The processor in your PSP can run at several speeds, with the default being 222Hz. There is no way to change that in the official firmwares, but in the custom ones it is a piece of cake. I suggest that you set the speed to 75Hz, because that is the slowest possible speed. Your XMB does not need much processing power to run comfortably, so running it at 222Hz is a waste. Running at a lower clock speed does not require as much energy, and will increase the battery life of your PSP. Just press the X button after you have selected this option until you see it currently set to 75.

I run my PSP at this speed without any problems while I use it as an MP3 player. However I have not tried to watch a video, so you might experience some problems there because decoding of video requires much more power. I will cover how to change the clock speed of your PSP from the XMB in a later post.

CPU Speed -> Speed in UMD/ISO
This setting sets the speed of your CPU while you play a game from an UMD or from a dumped ISO. I set mine to 333Hz, which is the fastest possible speed, to reduce the load times in many games. This is not overclocking your PSP, so it is completely safe. It has been designed to run at 333Hz, Sony just decided to underclock it to 222Hz in order to increase the battery life. If you run your games from an ISO, the 333Hz setting is recommended because you are already saving energy by loading from your memory stick, therefore your battery life will not be affected as much.