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I finally hit my breaking point with The Show. Those load times of over a minute a game got too much. So I got myself a tool battery and followed a guide to putting custom firmware on my PSP. The instructions were nice and clear and after one delay caused by having to check that the EasyInstaller software wasn’t really a virus and another caused by having to wait for my tool battery to charge I was up and running.

I spent a lunchtime ripping UMDs to my PC’s hard drive while reading Edge’s excellent article on Grand Theft Auto, then copying the ISO files from the UMDs back to my PSP. All a bit of an effort, but it’s been worth it. Very, very worth it.

The Show’s game load times have gone down from over a minute to ten seconds. That’s much, much better.

Setting the CPU to run at its maximum speed – rather than at Sony’s battery-saving standard limit – gets rid of all the framerate issues in OutRun 2006. Not so long I said I’d buy the game again if they’d done nothing else but fix the framerate – now I don’t have to.

It’s marvellous. I have six games sitting on my memory stick now. There’s Disgaea, for strategy-based fun. There’s Football Manager Handheld 2008 for when I want to finally get back to my Ebbsfleet game. There’s The Show, for excellent baseball action. And three racing games – OutRun 2006, Sega Rally and Flatout: Head On. Only Flatout was new to me, conveniently being released yesterday. It feels an awful lot like the PSP’s Sega Rally – same dev team, perhaps? – but it’s basically Flatout Ultimate Carnage squeezed into the PSP. Obviously it doesn’t look as nice as the 360 version and on the small screen there’s less of a “whoa!” factor when scenery flies everywhere, but they’ve done a very, very good job with it.

I’d like to have had ripped my discs of Wipeout Pulse, Street Fighter Alpha 3, etc. to save carrying them around and to cut the loading times, but PSP games use up an awful lot of space. The Show is 1.5GB, give or take, and I’ve “only” got a four gigabyte memory stick.