Mathieulh, one of the members of the M33 team, has discovered an interesting little bit of code in the Playstation Portable video game Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee 2. Apparently, the American UMD of the game sports a 3.96 update which isn't on any of Sony's servers.

According to the changelog, "support for PLAYSTATION Network titles has been expanded." LAN.ST forums admin SilverSpring did a comparison with the 3.95 firmware and found it to be almost identical to the PSP FW 3.95:

Seems identical to 3.95, only sysmem.prx changed (grew in size by 68-Bytes). The other prxs just had a single byte change (version bumped up to 3.96). Even pops.prx is binary identical (same SHA1 hash) so not sure how PSN support had been expanded.

The current consensus regarding this update is that it is nothing more than a compatibility update to make the game run. Still, if the update does do more than this, we're confident that more information will be made available soon as it has piqued the interest of some of the best minds in the PSP community. As Mathieulh seems to be a bit busy for the moment, he does promise to look further into it soon.

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