Finding reasons not to buy this gadget have been hard to come by. Thankfully the price alone has been able to keep me from yet another major impulse buy. Another has been some possible hardware issues that I've read about (but have been unable to determine if they are legitimate reports) and the proprietary UMD format.

Today brings news that the latter problem has been removed. Now the UMD format has been cracked and games in ISO format can be burned to onto CD/DVD. This means that movies and games can be decoded. So far the games are unplayable in ISO format, although I'm willing to bet that someone will write an emulator to take care of that.

The big question is how will Sony respond to this. To date they seem to be catering to the modding crowd as they welcome third party applications for the PSP. This most likely has been a selling point as it shows that Sony likes to see what people can do to make the PSP more functional. Cracking any system is generally viewed as a negative by a company. The obvious example is Microsoft and its reactions to people modding the XBox.

Cracking is not necessarily an evil. For instance there is an XBox chip that allows you to choose the bootloader for the console. It keeps the main one in tact while providing another loader for a media center. The media center, not officially endorsed by Microsoft, allows one to transfer media files between a networked PC and the XBox. In general Microsoft has tried to prevent those from modding the XBox by disabling Live play off of modded consoles.

Is cracking the UMD format an evil thing? It could be and I have no idea how Sony will respond. Once the copied games become playable an emulator will be written for them or the copying process will be altered to make it so a console, maybe a PS2, could play the copied game. That is the reason I think the copying could be an evil thing (at least as viewed by Sony). Once games can be copied and played not on the PSP then it is very reasonable to think that a major pirating scheme will come to fruition so that Sony loses money because the hardware isn't needed and the games can simply be downloaded off of P2P.

I ask that this piracy not happen because I happen to like using torrents for downloading game updates, software updates, and general file transfers. It is a marvelous technology that I don't want to see destroyed. However, that is a story for another time.

Still, good work on figuring out the formatting!