This is the kind of things that needs a good plan, i think it would be good tryng to see if there are some significative groups of PS3 models with the same minimal firmware
Lets say... imagine we realize that there are a lot of PS3 fat models with minimal firmware 2.40... then that firmware version is a good candidate to create a CFW for it because lot of people could use it
Another thing that could be convenient (incase the minimal firmware doesnt makes sense) is to use the rounded versions... like 1.00 2.00 and 3.00 because this is when happened the biggest changes
Or the versions previous to them, so you can see how it was working inmediatly before the change to 2.00 or 3.00
The emulators can be taken from 4.85 i think there is no problem about it because works as independent programs, the only thing needed to do is to resign them well for the old firmware
With the PSP emulator maybe is going to be a bit messy because are lot of files
Well, but is true there has been lot of people along the time asking how to revert the look of XMB to an older firmware
Personally i like XMB a lot (is one of the most intuitive interfaces i ever seen) but i dont want to revert it, i like most of the improvements they did
The only things i dont like is the "spam" of the stores, the "preview" of the hakoniwa app in photo, and things like that... just because i find them excesive
Anyway... there is many people that wants the old XMB, but you are right that the best way is not installing an old firmware, maybe the XMB will look more "lighter" in an old firmware but they are going to lose features too
There is other for AVtool, this one is interesting because it have the emulators
https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps3/1.00_AV
Inside some of the emulators it can be seen a timestamp extremelly precise of the time when the firmware was compiled, by comparing them it can even seen how many time takes the official compilation enviroment to compile the emulators, lol (just a couple of minutes if i remember correctly)
Also, by comparing that timestamps with retail 1.01 it can seen they was working at full speed that first days when the PS3 was released in japan for first time, i was talking about this with
@Roxanne and we was impressed of how fast they was... there is a difference of few days in between some of that first firmwares, also, the first PS3 model shipped with 1.00 firmware was only available in shops
for one week only !, remember that days ? the japaneses was buying PS3's like candies sleeping at night at the door of the shop, lol
This is why s almost imposible to find a PS3 with firmware 1.00 installed (and never updated), because it needs to be one of that PS3 models sold in japan in the first week, and should be kept "boxed" until today, the probabilities for that to happen are near zero :P
Thats super important, lol, good you mentioned it, not sure what could happen with the hdd and databases manteinance, i guess was made automatically, and i guess it had some kind of warning texts too incase of problems
