PSP Firmware 5.0

The firmware came out with PSP3000 and a major enhancement is the support of full screen video-out for PSX games. Also PlayStation Network (PlayStation Store) is available for direct access on PSP. The download speed is very good.

Hours ago Sony released 5.01 firmware, fixing a compatibility issue of PSN download on large (8G or above) memory sticks. 5.00 users are required to update in order to be able to access PSN again.

Some screenshots of the PSN store and the new PSX video-out on my 22 inch LCD TV.

PSP Internet Browser HTTP Headers

I remember visiting a PSP-only website, which when browsed on PC, gives a different output saying something like “you should view this on PSP”. I wonder how they implemented it.

I guess PSP must send some kind of special info to the server, so I wrote a little PHP script showing request headers. (traditional sniffers / browser plugins won’t work now, unless you wanna port them to PSP yourself, lol).

As my hosting does not allow apache_request_headers, I have to extract the data from $_SERVER myself.

<?php
foreach ($_SERVER as $k => $v) {
	if (substr($k, 0, 5) == "HTTP_") {
		// Format the variable names
		$k = str_replace('_', ' ', substr($k, 5));
		$k = str_replace(' ', '-', ucwords(strtolower($k)));
 
		echo "<tr><td class=\"e\">$k</td><td class=\"v\">$v</td></tr>\r\n";
	}
}
?>

You can point your PSP to http://playground.softboysxp.org/show_request_header.php and test it yourself.

Here’s a snapshot taken on my PSP

Clearly, there are two PSP-specific variables, x-psp-browser and x-psp-productcode. Also notice that the User-Agent was set to reflect PSP’s browser.

Further Research

I googled x-psp-browser and found this document by SCE.

Guidelines for Creating Content for the “PSP” Internet Browser (Japanese)

User-Agent by far can only be “User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (PSP (PlayStation Portable); 2.00)”

x-psp-productcode represents the region of your PSP and can be one of the following

x-psp-browser is in the format of “n.nn (xxx; yyy; zzz; …)”
n.nn is the version of the firmware
xxx, yyy, zzz … being parameters, specify from where the browser was lunched, with LX for XMB, SX for applications under XMB, and LU being applications on UMD or Memory Stick. Another parameter, “system”, specifies the version.

Another variable, x-psp-application can be used to specify the name of the game/application, when the browser was launched by an application on UMD/Memory Stick.