HOW-TO: Install Custom Firmware on a PSP Slim as of 2008/4/8

To begin
This is going to be brief and assume you know your way around computers. There’s a lot of bad/outdated/confusing PSP hacking information out there; I personally just bought a PSP slim and successfully hacked it after going down a few blind alleys and thought I’d share what worked for me. I take no responsibility if you fuck up and brick your PSP, k?

Thug Life

1. Follow these instructions to the letter to make a magic memory stick. Apparently memory sticks larger than 4gb won’t work.
2. Order a slim tool battery (caveat emptor: I haven’t ordered from CodeJunkies, can’t vouch) or make one yourself, which is what I did. After trying the wire method and failing, I used an X-Acto knife to cut the trace and that worked perfectly. You should consider buying the tool battery – I almost stabbed myself working on getting the battery case open, and accidentally puncturing the LiOn battery would be a disaster. Either way, you’ll know your battery is working when you put it in the PSP and it powers up but you get only a black screen.
3. Follow these instructions – third section, red text – up to and including 10C. DON’T SKIP BACKING UP THE MOTHERFUCKING NAND.
4. To follow instructions 11C and 12C in the above guide, first follow the instructions in 6A, green text. Basically, don’t follow all the instructions in that guide, just that portion.
5. If you made a Pandora’s battery by cutting the trace and don’t want to buy a second battery, gently fill in the trace with pencil; the graphite should adequately conduct electricity to the circuit. It worked for me.
6. Frolic.

And when I say frolic
I’m not tacitly suggesting “sign up for Giganews Unlimited and download every game ISO ever.” There are a lot of excellent reasons to hack your PSP that have nothing to do with piracy. #1 in my mind is running games YOU OWN off a memory stick instead of UMD – it speeds everything up, extends your battery life, and is quiet. I really thought the PSP slim would be a solid state front end to a Sony iTunes Store knock-off; UMD is lame. Anyway, there are tons and tons of other productive, legal things to do with your newly-opened hardware – enjoy.