I'm gonna start off by saying this is not for everyone. I'll give you a little background on why I found it necessary to do this.
The Problem:
I have an early model Panasonic 1080 tv that only supports 1080 and 480 resolutions. When I try to run European games that only support 720 and 576 resolutions I get an error saying the display mode is not supported.
PSN Games vs. Retail Disc Games when editing the PARAM.SFO file:
It's an easy fix for disc games by just editing the PARAM.SFO to support 480 and the game will play fine. The problem comes in when you try to do the fix for PSN European (PAL) games that only support 720 and 576 resolutions.
The Problem with PSN Games and editing the PARAM.SFO file:
After editing the PARAM.SFO like you do for disc games and placing it back in the game folder, you still get an error about the display mode not being supported. The reason for this is that when installing PSN content the info from the PARAM.SFO is stored in an index file. The PS3 will look at this file before looking at the modified PARAM.SFO so if this info is not corrected, then the changes aren't recognized. You would think that just editing this index file would fix the problem, but if not done correctly, then it will trigger your PS3 to reindex the content on your system. That's not really a big deal, but reindexing causes all of your game categories to be removed, so you have to sort everything out again.
To get around this here's what you need to do.
- After replacing the PARAM.SFO of your PSN game with a corrected one, you need to change the available display modes in your PS3 settings to include 720 even though your TV doesn't support it.
- Then you're going to launch the game. This will trigger the PS3 to read the corrected PARAM.SFO and to fix the entry in the database.
- When the game starts the screen will be blurry and unplayable. Quit back to the XMB and restore your display's original settings.
- The next time you load the PSN game it will display at 480 resolution and work like it should. Some TV's might support including 1080 when you edit the PARAM.SFO. I've just had better compatibility changing from PAL to NTSC instead of trying to upscale it.
The games that I've found that this fix is necessary for are:
- Hydrophobia Prophecy
- Punisher No Mercy
- Child of Eden
I'm sure that there are more out there but that's what I've found so far.
On a little side note to anyone that's been paying attention I put up another tutorial about sorting PSN content alphabetically. People were asking about sorting in a custom order but at the time it couldn't be done because the PS3 was restoring modified PARAM.SFO files for PSN content using the info from this database.
I now think it would be possible to do, but would need help from someone willing to lend a hand that has more coding experience than I have. The file I'm looking at is metadata_db_hdd located in dev_hdd0/mms/db .
It looks like it's just one massive index of PARAM.SFO info so I am basically looking for someone to write a modified SFO editor that can read the entire index and change a generally useless entry in the SFO so that the games could be sorted in a custom order by pointing the info in the explore_view.txt found in user folder's etc folder.
The entries would need to be changed to something like 10.00, 10.01, 10.02, 10.03, etc, etc. Then when the sort is applied it would be in the user specified order instead of alphabetically or by date
My main goal is to help people with compatibility problems and to get a hand continuing to work on the PSN sort from someone more experienced in coding than I am. Also a couple extra pairs of eyes never hurts anything. If anyone thinks they'd be able to pitch in then please drop me a line
Introduction/PIC by tthousand
Edited by Jay-Jay
Daily Digest
Recent Threads
Recent Comments
