Ebooks on your psp

Right, another one, got given a broken Psp, sorted it, and now want to hack it. Having harnessed the awesome power that is Google, I find that I need GTA Liberty City Stories to do this. (Will post this process when I get it) So, ordered it, but waiting for it.....what to do in the meantime?

I do have thousands of ebooks sitting on my PC, and I find myself asking 'Can I read these on an unhacked Psp?' Turns out you can....

Step one:

Download your ebook....

http://www.getfreeebooks.com/

http://www.free-ebooks.net/

Step Two:

Now, chances are, the Ebook you just downloaded was a .pdf, and this isn't a format the Psp will read as standard. So, what we need to do is, go here:

http://www.a-pdf.com/text/

and then here:

http://download.cnet.com/Psp-Ebook-Creator/3000-2125_4-10499628.html

Both of these programmes are free, and have pain free installation processes.

Step Three:

Once you have your Ebook, the .pdf text extractor, and the Psp Ebook Creator, your good to go. First open your .pdf text extractor, open the .pdf you want the text from, hit extract, choose a destination folder and hit save.

This will then create a text file of your .pdf.

Step Four:

Open Psp Ebook Creator, (does have a 10 second delay, but it's free) through the 'File' menu chose the text file you want on your Psp, set it up to your specification (page orientation, colour....), then, finally, chose an output folder, and hit 'Build Ebook'.

Now what this programme does, is convert your .txt file to a series of .jpg files, which your Psp can read as standard. All that remains is to copy the .jpg files from the destination folder chosen by yuorself, and copy them all to the 'Photos' folder on your Psp memory card. Nice and easy..

n.b Most of my ebooks if I'm honest have come from p2p sites, run an ebook search on http://isohunt.com/ and grab some from there, big selection

Hack your Wii some more

Right, so if you read my earlier blog, you know how to softmod your Wii,and play your games from your hard drive. But what if you want to use your Wii for a bit more than game playing...

Your Wii, although Nintendo won't tell you this, is pretty cool considering how cheap they are now, in fact, I have my Wii setup to play a whole bunch of files.
The most widely used video format seems to be .avi files, and I have loads of these on my hard drive. I was using my DivX Dvd player, and burning six or so films at a time to a DVD-R and watching them that way, but it turns out that you can watch them all through your Wii, so I'll just run through the process of getting your Wii to play your digital movies.

Step One:
The best app you can have for your Wii has got to be 'Homebrew Browser', available here:

http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Homebrew_apps/Homebrew_Browser

And this very simply allows you to download Homebrew applications to your Wii in the most pain free fashion. This app will only work if you have your Wii online, but it does make life a lot easier.
So go to the link above, download the zip file, and extract it to the 'apps' folder on your SD card.(If you don't have one, just create a new folder in the root, caled 'apps')

Step Two:
With your SD card in, turn your Wii on, open 'Homebrew Channel' and select 'Homebrew Browser', load it,and wait for it to kick in,(does take a while, don't worry if it seems to crash).

Step Three:
Once it's loaded choose 'Media' from the top bar, and scroll down till you find either.....Mplayer, or Geexbox, both apps do essentially the same thing, Geexbox has a slightly nicer GUI, but I prefer Mplayer. Install your choice, and it's done. (You can install both if you want to, gives you a chance to try them both out, check out formats supported by both player through the links at the bottom of the page)

Step Four:
Now you have a media player on your Wii, you just need to feed it something to play. If you read my earlier blog, chances are you have a hard drive with a couple of partitions, one formatted to WBFS, and another spare, this can be formatted to any file system you like, but I prefer NTFS. So stick a few .avi files on there, (or a lot) some .mp3 files, plug it into your Wii, load whichever media player you prefer from the Homebrew Channel, and off you go, happy viewing.

n.b If you don't have your Wii online, both media players are available to download:

http://wiibrew.org/wiki/MPlayerWii

http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Geexbox

Again, as Step One, download the .zip files, and extract the contents to the \apps folder

Hack your 4.2 Wii

Ok, so a friend and I have just softmodded our Wiis, and got them hooked up to an external hard drive, and have a whole bunch of .isos (Games) stored on them. This means that we can play our games without the discs, and also means that we can copy any of our friends games....nice.

The thing is, we spent a bit of time playing on Google, looking for the most straightforward way to do this,and I'm not intending on posting a blog to tell you how to do it in it's entirety, but I will post the links you need to make it as painless as possible:

Step one:

http://www.digital-kaos.co.uk/forums/f16/wii-4-2e-softmod-tutorial-easy-follow-guide-67927/

Go here, follow the instructions.

Although the instructions may appear complicated, they are in fact relatively painless.

Step two:

Once you've got your Wii modded, it opens up a whole new range of possibilities, the one I like the best is the one I mentioned to start with, copying games to an external hard drive, and playing games from there. So, get the hard drive you intend to use, and download 'WBFS Manager' from:

http://wbfsmanager.codeplex.com/

Nice and straightforward installation, once it's up and running, plug your hard drive into your pc, find it in WBFS manager in the drop down menu, and hit the 'Format' button.This does mean that any of your data will get wiped, so backup first.

(If you're intending on using your Wii to play movies, music etc too, then it might be useful to only format a partition of your hard drive, I have a Tb hard drive, with a 200Gb partition for my games, currently using about 100Gb for 40 games, and the other 800Gb for films and music, my next blog tells you how to play these on your Wii).

Ok, so now you have a Softmodded Wii, and an external hard drive your Wii can recognise/read/write to.

Step three:

Now you have the neccesities, all that remains to be done, is to plug your hard drive into your Wii, this is also nice and easy. I have my Wii lying down, and it goes into the port at the bottom, with it standing up, it goes in the port below the USb symbol, not the writing (vague description, but you'll manage) . Now we have it all ready to go, turn it all on, and go to the 'Uloader' channel, hit Start, put a game in your Wii, hit the 'Home' button, select 'Add Game' and wait for the copying to be done. You now have your first game copied to your hard drive! This can obviously be done with as many games as your hard drive can store, and Uloader lets you play them all directly from your Wii.

Additional ramblings:

One of the nicest features of Uloader is that it adds covers to your games for you, just like Windows Media Player does with your album art. Once you have a shed load of games ready to play, hit 'Home' on the game select screen, and select 'Add PNG Bitmap', Uloader will then download all the covers for your games making it much prettier than before.

So you should have, after going through this, a Wii, capable of copying games from their original discs on to your hard drive, and playing them back.

n.b For those of you with your Wiis offline, all of the covers in .png format can be downloaded from:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wii_game_covers

And also, WBFS Manager lets you transfer games from one hard drive to another, so get a friend to bring his round and swap games.

Just to start

Ok, so this is just me playing around with blogspot after chatting with a friend. The plan is, that anything I get up to worth passing on to anyone will just get stuck up here, in the hope that it proves to be at least marginally useful to someone else in the future. It might just end up full of nonsense, but we'll see how it goes,,,,,,