Nice post. The ps3 is great fun if you like to tinker with this sort of thing, are on a budget, or even if you just want to relive some old games that never got ported to future gens.
I picked an original phat model for $20 a few years ago. It came with a 60 gb hdd which I replaced with a 320gb hdd I had laying around that would otherwise just collect dust due to it’s miniscule size. The console made a ton of noise and would get really hot, the thermal compound was completely siezed due to it’s age and heavy work load, so I replaced it with some fresh mx4 and gave the console a good cleaning. I installed Rebug and set the minimum fan speed to 60%, it’s still loud but it doesn’t get hot anymore. Once that was all done I loaded up a 2tb external drive with my favorite games from that generation.
To be honest, I had a lot of fun jailbreaking and tinkering with it, but I can count on one hand how many times I’ve gamed on it since. I should probably give it to someone who will get more use out of it lol.
I’ve been playing Mount and Blade II: Bannerlord. About 35ish hours into this save and so far I enjoy the game a lot. It does some things better than Mount and Blade: Warband but unfortunately some aspects of the game are less developed than in it’s predecessor. Overall I think unmodded Bannerlord is better than unmodded Warband but Warband has an absolutely massive catalog of incredible mods. Maybe Bannerlord will get there one day.