Firmware 1.5 is mostly known to the people to play back-ups, due to a flaw in the FW it allows homebrew programs to be run.

All in all, that ain't so bad, being able to play old console and handheld games on your PSP is fun, and you even got a bunch of old PC games such as Doom, Quake and quite a few others working on it.
Ofcourse playing games you don't own is illegal, while companies aren't to bothered about this as there is very little money to be gained in old games, Sony is bothered by this a lot, as the most used homebrew program is 1 that allows you to download and load games from your memory stick.

So while Sony kept bringing out newer FW's to remove this exploit, newer exploits were found to run homebrew on later versions, or to downgrade it to FW1.5

Now gamers who buy their games legitimate might wonder why it's good for everyone, well that's quite simple, loading times, not having to bring UMD's with you and playing old games that you own.
A while ago i read a article on here about the awful loading times of games on the PSP, when you load games from the memory stick this ain't a problem, most games load like 5 times faster, this is because a UMD is quite slow, and it needs to look the info up, memory is almost instant, and is quite fast, i don't know how fast it is compared to a UMD, but the loading times are much faster.
Ofcourse if you got like a 4 gig memory stick then it holds on average 3 to 8 games, so you don't have to carry around your UMD's around anymore.

The question remains, is it legal, i have to honestly say that i don't know wether it is or not, you have to ask yourself though, do you care? You can just buy the game, and then download the game and put it on your memory stick, the end result is you having a game that loads faster, and the companies having their money.

As for homebrew, the whole legal thing has a question mark there aswell, but the way i see it, if you own the game then it can't be illegal, and if they don't even sell the game, then they shouldn't complain at all.

In the end you make up for yourself what is right to you, but there are definetly some real advantages for FW1.5 gamers.



Btw, do NOT pm me with questions to links or whatsoever, i can't check for what purposes you will use it, and therefor i won't supply you with such links.