Thread: Cobra USB Review: Is It Worth The Cash?

So recently I noticed the cobra dongles were relatively cheap and I had just come into a good bit of money so i thought I'd grab myself one.

The Cobra firmware seems to be one of the best out there at the moment and comes with many extra features that mother firmwares do not have.

So here's a little review I decided to right to let people know what to expect from cobra dongles

Tested on CECHG fat model non-backwards compatible PS3. All files used were from the official cobra site. (this console is also QA flagged so it could possibly interfere with some of the cobras firmware, i will test again when i get time without the qa flag installed)


I ordered the Cobra Usb dongle from Lightake.com. It cost me roughly 25euro which is pretty decent. It was shipped on the 11-Jan-12 and arrived at my house on 24-Jan-12 which isnt a bad time for free shipping considering the distance. (Hong Kong to Ireland)

The dongle itself comes in a nice "fake snake-skin" style box.
The dongle is much bigger than most usb sticks, about twice the size of my 8gig flash drive

Firstly i installed the cobra 3.55 pup on my ps3 then inserted my dongle into my pc expecting to have a simple gui to install the usb firmware but instead was given a small windows command line tool and a set of drivers. Realising there was no way to use the cobra dongle on ubuntu or any OS other than windows i had to reboot and boot to windows just to install the firmware.

Upon booting back to windows i realised the the instruction pdf file was well out of date and had nothing of the new manager in it at all!

Eventually after getting everything ready i placed all the pkg files needed on my external hdd and put the dongle in my ps3 and booted.
First the ps3 boots, after a second or two, blue light on dongle flashes, then red light for a another few seconds, then eventually green and then the ps3 starts in jailbreak mode.
BOOT TIME IS INCREASED SIGNIFICANTLY


So the firmware boots anyway, now lets see what works and what doesnt work.

1. Didnt like the old simple install package files menu so tried to install Package manager. No luck, does not work, it will stay with the original install package file option which is very annoying

2. Ps3 backups: work..obviously. but all games seem to work discless which is a big plus

3. Ps2 emulation: works to some extent. i placed an original copy or Primal for ps2 in the ps2, it booted but lagged a bit but wasnt too bad. Copying the game worked fine, put the iso in its respective folder and it loads up again without a disc in the drive. after a reboot though i couldnt load the game again it just hung on black screen but it worked the next time, so it works sometimes but then again it is a very experimental emulator. Also the in game xmb does not function in ps2 games. (Would love to test this on my original 60gig but unfortunately its on 3.60)

4. Ps1 emulation: works perfectly! not much needs to be said about this, does exactly what its suppose to.

5. PSP emulation: does not work at all for me. As far as i can figure out im doing everything right (again an up to date instruction manual would help) after mounting the iso it shows up on the psp launcher app but after loading it all i get is a black screen and i cannot exit without the ps3 crashing and rebooting (sytem beeps and reset) this could possibly be beacause of my QA flag but posibly not, will test again when i have time

UPDATE: it seems somehow ALL of my psp games got corrupted during transfer and after recopying them they now work. So ignore the above paragraph. PSP Emulation does work although it is slightly buggy for now


6. Dvd/bluray backups: well it works but the files need to be decrypted on a pc anyway to be played and all this can be done on a pc anyway so its not really needed.

still have not tested "black screen games" from internal hdd but will test when i have time


Overall points
Its a pretty decent firmware but needs work.
The price is very good which is a plus and it does do a lot more than most other firmwares out there.
A lot more work is needed to go into this cobra firmware, i thought it would be a lot better than it was. It is good but still experimental.
The fact its incompatible with some things like package manager is very very annoying and will hopefully be fixed in some update.
Ps2 games run decent enough so thats a big plus too.

Other points
Because the dongle takes up a port it can be very annoying to use on ps3s with only two ports, especially if your external hdd takes up two ports (really need to downgrade my 60 gig console, 4 usb ports ftw)
Also when i boot without the dongle present, according to the instructions it boots in ofw mode, but sometimes it keeps the install package files and app_home option and sometimes it doesnt? possibly because of QA flag?

Update: Qa flag seems to have no negative effects on the firmware so far, and i doubt i will have any problems in the future.

Any features i have yet to test i will test over the next few days when i have time. Also if there are any features i have left out that you want tested please comment and i will try my best to do it as soon as i can.

Also i will pull apart the pup when i get a chance and see what i can change/make better. If i can merge this with my modded rebug firmware Ill be very happy but lets see how things go

Thanks for reading my review. Please +rep if this was useful to you

It was a helpful review, thank you for your effort for writing this.

But there if you think simply, for a non-backwards compatible ps3 owner, cobra usb is almost meaningless. The main reason people buy this dongle is the ability to play ps2 back-ups. Since it can't run ps2 games and psp games properly on a non-bc ps3, it's not worth it. Also we can play ps1 games on our ps3's (only psn releases, but the library is big enough, and it gets bigger almost every week). So, if they improve psp emulation and ps2 emulation it's a "must-buy" if you ask me. But if they don't, then you should stay away from it (unless you have a backwards compatible ps3), as you should stay away from true-blue.

i do have a backwards compatible console, unfortunately it is on 3.60
after a while i eventually got psp games to run on it fine, most of the ones ive tested anyway seem to run very well.

also you said only psn releases of ps1 games work? as far as i knew all backup ps1 games worked fine on ps3, any ive tried have anyway. althought they did have to be played from a disc.

Originally Posted by Glitch420

i do have a backwards compatible console, unfortunately it is on 3.60
after a while i eventually got psp games to run on it fine, most of the ones ive tested anyway seem to run very well.

also you said only psn releases of ps1 games work? as far as i knew all backup ps1 games worked fine on ps3, any ive tried have anyway. althought they did have to be played from a disc.

What I actually meant is, a ps3 owner doesn't need cobra dongle for ps1 support. They also have lousy psp support, most of the games still don't run properly and if you don't have ps2 compatibility it doesn't provide you a chance to play ps2 games.

So I don't see a reason to buy it. Even if you have a backwards compatible ps3, you could wait until it's hacked.