It's time once again for another edition of the QJ.NET How-To series. This time, we're going to focus on CXMB, a homebrew plugin developed by Poison (aka poisonhzkj) for the Sony PlayStation Portable.

One of the best things about having a homebrew-capable PSP is being able to pretty much tailor the XMB as you see fit thanks to custom theme files. Actually, you can still load theme files onto a PSP running official Sony firmware, but it just doesn't match up to the level of customization afforded by CXMB.

Let's start with the definitions, though. CXMB is a plugin that lets you easily switch between theme files without having to flash them to your PSP. It also lets you load CTF files instead of just the Sony-approved PTF file format. Here are a few screenshots of some popular CTF themes to give you an idea of what's possible with CXMB:


The plugin comes in two flavors: a Lite version and a Full version. The full version lets you convert traditional XMB themes into CTF files. This How-to edition doesn't include how to make your own PSP themes, but hopefully we'll get to that further down the road. For now, let's focus on installing the lite version.

First, you'll need a PSP running custom firmware. If you're still on OFW and want to switch to CFW, check out this tutorial. Next, download CXMB v3.3. This release supports CFW 3.71 to 5.00.
Unzip the archive and copy the contents of the "lite" folder to the root of your memory stick. This is only for those who haven't installed any other plugins on their PSP yet. If you already have other plugins installed on your PSP, copy only the "PSP" and "cxmb" folders. Manually add the line "ms0:/cxmb/cxmb.prx" to the "vsh.txt" file in the "seplugins" folder in the root of your memory stick.

Once that's done, turn off your PSP. Turn it on again while holding down the R Trigger to access the Recovery Menu. Once there, go to Plugins and enable cxmb.prx. Exit the recovery menu and let the PSP boot up normally. Voila! You now have CXMB installed.



If you looked through the archive, you'll notice that CXMB v3.3 already comes with a CTF file. That's just a randomizer, though, so you'll need to look for some cool theme files. You can find a lot of themes on DL.QJ.NET and on the QJ.NET PSP Themes, Mods & Media forum.

Once you've downloaded the themes you want, put them all in ms0:/PSP/Themes/. If the files you downloaded are zipped, just extract the CTF files to the aforementioned folder. You can choose which themes you want to enable by going to Theme Settings on the XMB.

And that concludes another issue of the weekly QJ.NET How-To series.