Silent Death said:
Sorry, I'm sure this has been answered but I can't read through a ton of pages to get the answer so I'll ask anew. I'm on the last update for the M33, and from what I've heard Dark Alex has exited the scene. I assume 5.50 Gen is the new standard for CFW. My question is how hard is it to move from M33 to Gen and how good is this Gen CFW? I've heard that emulators don't work and have seen Gen only rips of games. Will I have to re-rip all my games to play them on Gen or does it work with all the old rips? Thanks for the help.
Well, if you're too lazy to read through the last few pages, then I'm too lazy to help you! Joking, but in all seriousness, you aren't the first, or even the third, to ask these questions what with all of the recent activity of the past few days.
That said, to upgrade to 5.50 Gen, you need to be at at least 3.52 M33-3 or higher.
You can find pretty much all of the downloads you'll need to upgrade over at psp-hacks.com (or hit up the links I posted a few pages back). Your upgrade path should be to go from your current CFW to 5.50 Gen-A to 5.50 Gen-B to 5.50 Gen-B2.
Gen CFW is a bit rough around the edges in certain respects, and is missing one or two potentially minor M33 features, but it's certainly a viable alternative to 5.00 M33; which sadly, is quite obsolete these days. Upgrading it to the B2 iteration, in particularly, restores it to 5.00 M33-like homebrew/emulator compatibility levels, and allows you to play more PSP games than any CFW that came before. Not to mention that you'll have PSN access (for now), and full PSOne support as well. Or, as full as that support has ever been. Seems like some video encodes are still broken, so if you heavily use your PSP as a video player, you'll likely be affected by the upgrade.
Emulators work fine on 5.50 Gen-B2 (not so much earlier versions of 5.50 Gen), and no, your old game rips (PSP or PSOne) do not become obsolete. There are, however, brand-spanking new games who's (patched) rips will only work on 5.50 Gen CFW, and not on 5.00 M33. A quick scan of the last couple of pages, with a focus on posts discussing Yoshihiro's new 5.55/6.00 UMD Game Decryptor app, will net you full details.