[PSP] How to rip and compress your PSP UMD games

If you have a PSP running custom firmware you can easily backup your games that are on a UMD disc to your PC. Once on your PC you can rip any useless files out the backed up game (such as system updates, other languages) then compress the image so it's as small as possible.

You can then copy the game back to your PSP and play it directly from the memory card, this is useful as you can easily carry many games around on your PSP, it will also help to improve battery life as the PSP does not need to power the UMD drive.

You will need:

• A PSP running custom firmware, see this tutorial to run custom firmware on any PSP.
  
• A USB cable
• UMDGen

Ripping the game:

On the XBM of your custom firmware PSP press the select button, this will bring up the VHS menu.

Go down to USB Device and select UMD Disc, exit the VHS menu then put the PSP in USB mode.



Now you can copy an ISO of your PSP game to computer



You can open the ISO in UMD Gen on your PC, here you can delete any files not required to save space. I usually just delete the system update folder.



When you are done go File > Save As > Compressed CSO



Set the compression level to 9



Your ISO will compress to a CSO, basically a compressed ISO.

As you can see my Lemmings game has been reduced from 429 MB to 168MB, saving 261MB of my memory stick.



Thats it, you can copy your compressed game to the ISO folder on your PSP's memory stick and play. Dont forget to set your USB mode back to the memory stick.

Thanks thats a great little tip, perfect as the homebrew application I had to do this no longer works since updating.

I have used UMD gen for many years to compress my games, never failed me yet.

How tu run the UMD backups?

Hi. Excellent tutorial man! Last week happened to be the first time I get to hold on to a PSP. Now is hacked thanks to your guidance.

I have a question, now that I have ripped a UMD, How can I run the back up on my PSP?

Thanks,

Simply create a folder on the memory stick called ISO and place any games in there.

The games will show up under the games menu on the PSP.

Really? I'll try that again. Should the ISO folder be placed inside the GAME folder?
I used some of the emulators you uploaded but many of them crashed, are those the best ones yet?

Thanks a bunch InsaneNutter, you are the man!

Yes, place the ISO folder inside of the GAME folder and place said ISO/CSO files inside the ISO folder.

Depending if the thread is old, some of those emulators are probably really outdated. Retroarch is a really great multi-emulator (runs several different systems on the same program). It's still in beta for the PSP, so it may crash and some games may run slow but give it a shot.

Dang! I must be doing something wrong. I didn't worked. This is the path for my backup game:
G:\PSP\GAME\ISO
I rename the file GTA.cso
I backed up the GTA: Vice City Stories game and deleted the "update" part.

Please help buddies.

Your ISO folder needs to be G:\ISO\

It does not go in the PSP folder.

Also just to note, if you renamed your ISO from GTA.ISO to GTA.CSO that will not work, you need to properly compress the ISO (as showin in the tutorial above) not just change the file extension.

GTA is one of the few games that works bad when compressed as an CSO I found (it can be very laggy in places) I left mine as an ISO, most other games should be fine as a CSO however.

Help! I have a PSP 3000 with cfw 6.61 Pro-C and i have been following all of your tutorial.. and everything seemed fine but now as soon as i start the game, the psp screen goes black for seconds and whoops! the psp shuts down itself? What do i do with it?

What UMD ISO mode do you have selected? do other games work or is it just the game you have ripped that doesn't work?

it's now working and it was on M33 driver but there's this one issue, i ripped it into an ISO format, that;s the shutdown issue happened but as i converted it into a cso format, it's now working. but there are lags where game's cutscreen comes, constant.. Can you help me recognize the issue? (just curious though)

Some games do not work well when compressed, GTA is the best example of this I can think of. You could try lowering the compression level to see if that helps, however i generally find if a game is going to work well compressed it will work at compression level 9.

and what about the shutdown issue? it happened when i compressed the God of war chain of olymous in iso format..

I'm not sure about that, try a different UMD ISO mode and see if you have more luck.

how do we convert this type of rar files into an iso file?

Extract the .rar file with winrar, I can tell from the screenshot you have it installed, so just right click on one of the files and select extract.

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS TOOL I NOW HAVE A FULLY FUNCTIONING CSO file For Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep

What does the update folder do ?
I mean like what is the purpose of that folder
And why sometimes it has a really big size
Dose it effect the game ?
Also would deleting the update folder while keeping the format as iso work ? (For better loading times)

It contains firmware updates for the PSP, which for a PSP with custom firmware you will never need.

Back in the days when storage space was limited on the PSP every little helped, if you have 32gb of storage or beyond now it probably doesn't matter too much either way.

Loading times will be the same, sometimes slower if the iso is compressed to a cso.

I have a small question to ask
What does the
BOOT.BIN
Do inside the sys folder?
And how safe is it to delete it ?