Wow, the first weekend of the IMBC sure is a killer, huh? One out on Friday, three more on Saturday. Only 68% of the original competitors remain.

That chicken/orzo salad thing I made last night turned out pretty good. Nice and light with lots of different textures. Kinda wish I’d gone heavier on the almonds and sesame seeds, but oh well. Here’s a photo:

I dug out my long-negelected PSP today and loaded up some freshly-downloaded ISOs/CSOs. Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions ran fine (and I ended up playing it for 2h:59m, according to the save file), but Patapon hung at the loading screen. Of course, it turned out my custom firmware was tremendously out of date; I was surprised to find no one even uses “open edition” CFW anymore. So I had to scrap my 3.40 oe Revision A. What I needed was 3.90 M33-3. But it wasn’t that easy.

It’s way harder to hack a PSP than a DS. Can you even brick a DS? If you can, it’s an exceedingly rare hazard. Not so with the PSP. Malicious firmware distributions aside, there’s several parts of the update process where you can brick your console by simply disconnecting the power cord, hitting the wrong button, or failing to reboot. It’s kind of scary to do this stuff without a UPS, what with Pullman’s not-so-infrequent power dropouts.

Anyway, I had to go from 3.40oeA to 3.52 M33 to 3.52 M33-4 to 3.90 M33-3. Thank goodness for Dark Alex and eXophase! Now I’ve got Patapon running like it’s sposed to. Echochrome (which is apparently entirely English-language, despite being a Japanese release) also works. Both seem really hard, but I’ve only played ten minutes of each. Some pics:

Boy, 1 GB is not enough space for this stuff. I need to upgrade one of these days. The 8 GB Pro Duos are only about $90… a 16 GB would be nice, but they cost more than a PSP!

Okay, gotta make dinner. Salmon and penne al pesto tonight.

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