Dump PSP Games on Linux

2025-02-19

I like the Gundam Extreme VS series of video games. The latest entry, Gundam Extreme VS 2 OverBoost, is only available to play at the arcades in Japan. Hackers smarter than me have been able to get EXVS2 running on their gaming PCs even with online multiplayer, but I can’t be bothered to attempt running bootleg arcade games on my crappy old machine.

There is a legitimate console release of a previous version, Gundam Extreme VS Maxiboost ON, that is exclusive to the PlayStation 4. I own this version of the game and it’s a blast to play, but a lot of my game friends aren’t keen to pay for PlayStation Plus solely for online multiplayer.

What if we went back further? The precursor to the Gundam Extreme VS series was known as Gundam VS Gundam (developed by Capcom!). A variant of this exists on the PlayStation Portable subtitled as NEXT Plus. It has loads of playable mobile suits, supports multiplayer, and I love the quaint early-2000s look! I thought it’d be a silly good time to see if my game buddies would be down for some 2-on-2 PSP mobile suit battles.

Gundam VS Gundam NEXT Plus would require all of us to be in the same physical room if we played on actual PSPs. That’s difficult when we’re spread across the US. Thanks to PPSSPP we can play PSP multiplayer games across the internet!

Before playing I need to get my game disk into an ISO, then we’ll be ready to smash robots.

Get on with it

You’ll need a few things to create a disk image of your PSP game:

Place the game in your PSP’s UMD drive. Open the VSH menu by pressing SELECT in the PSPs main menu. Remember I am using ARK as my custom firmware, so your process may be different here.

You should see a menu pop up with the following items:

ADVANCED VSH MENU
RECOVERY MENU ->
SHUTDOWN DEVICE
SUSPEND DEVICE
RESET DEVICE
RESET VSH
EXIT

Select “ADVANCED VSH MENU” to which you’ll see a larger menu, but we only care about the option at the top, “USB DEVICE”. Scroll left or right with the directional pad to find “UMD” for our desired USB device. Leave “UMD” visible.

We’re now done with the VSH menu. Let’s exit backwards into the PSP’s regular menus.

Plug the PSP into your Linux machine with the mini-USB cable. Enable “USB Connection” on your PSP if it doesn’t start “USB Mode” automatically.

Most likely your Linux distribution will automatically detect and mount removable storage media, but mine doesn’t. I prefer the pmount utilities for removable media.

$ pmount /dev/sdb psp

The UMD content is available as a virtual ISO within the mount point.

$ cd /media/psp
$ ls
UMD9660.ISO

There it is! I like to use rsync for copying off the UMD, but cp does fine too. I find rsync’s progress output to be helpful since reading data from a spinning disk is a bit slow. I can be confident the process hasn’t gotten stuck.

$ rsync -ah --progress UMD9660.ISO ~/games/psp/gundam-vs-gundam-next-plus.iso

Once the command completes, we have a playable game image. This image will work with PPSSPP or on your PSP running from the memory stick. Don’t forget to unmount (pumount psp) the storage media before disconnecting the USB cable if you used pmount.

I hope you found this guide useful. Happy gaming and I’ll see you online!