After a few piracy-free months, PSP has finally been cracked open by persistent hackers, with ISO files of Vampire Chronicles, Ridge Racer and Wipeout Pure having now been 'released' on to the internet.

The first batch of games to have been successfully copied from UMD discs and into the ISO image format (a file type used to pack and store multiple files - in this case those files found on PSP UMDs) made it on to the internet sometime last night and indicate that PSP's piracy-free days are numbered.

While the games have been made available to download, there's currently no way of actually playing them on your PSP, as no UMD writing device exists to perform the necessary action of creating a pirate UMD game.

So why bother pirating them at all then?

Well, aside from the simple answer "because they can", these ISO files containing all the PSP UMD disc data will be a massive aid to PSP 'homebrew' programmers, who are currently beavering away on unsigned software applications for the machine.

Illustrated by the picture on the right, one techie has already managed to get his unsigned software application running on the machine, a program which has been placed on PSP's memory stick and run through its own main menu.

Hackers are now developing software that will allow the currently-pirated games (which range from 100MB to 500MB in size), along with any future 'rips', to run via the memory stick in a similar fashion.

Story source: gamesradar.msn.co.uk.