Learn Ways to Play Your PSP Games from a Memory Stick

One of the most frequent complaints about the PSP is how slow many of the games load. This is largely due to poor optimization, but the complaint remains.

The spinning of a UMD can also be quite loud, and can be a bit annoying, especially if you decide to play next to say, a girlfriend who is a light sleeper. She says "go to sleep," and then you're annoyed with her, and it's all a big mess. Wouldn't we all rather just play from the memory stick?
Where, here is where you get into a nebulous legal area.

The UMD is yours, so shouldn't you be able to play it as you please? This opens the door for piracy however, so it makes things rather difficult. Much of Sony's firmware updates have been in response to piracy, and how easy it is to do with lower firmwares. However, this is the only way to run UMD games from a memory stick. So if you are wondering, how do you play psp umd games from a memory stick, read further.

Now, then, how to play psp games from memory stick. First, you need your original UMD. You need to rip this into an ISO. An ISO is a disk image. The ISO format is used in basically any digital media format. It's a one-to-one copy of data on a disk. When you use a ripping program, you are taking the information from your UMD and putting it on to your hard drive, in the form of an ISO. From there, you need to put that ISO on to your Memory Stick Pro Duo. Of course, the game won't run just like that.

Devhook is one of the most prominent homebrew programs out there, and can emulate all known firmware updates. Unfortunately for Sony, it can also run ISOs, whether they are ripped from your own UMDs or not. All you have to do is put your ISOs in an ISO folder on your memory stick, and tell Devhook to run this "virtual" UMD.

Presto, you can run a game from the memory stick. You will notice that games load much faster over a memory stick than over a UMD. Flash memory is always quicker than hard drive or disc-based media, so this is no surprise. It can be very tempting to run ISOs when games load particularly slowly, and this is an unfortunate feature that many PSP games tout.

Sony is now re-releasing Playstation One games for use with the PSP, and these run directly from the media stick. The files are protected in such a way that they cannot easily be copied, but the games run fairly quickly, as they run from flash memory. This feature is only available if you have a PS3 however, so most will be unable to enjoy this feature for quite a while.