How to Install DLCs on your modded PlayStation 3

If you’ve got a modded PlayStation 3 you’re probably having great fun playing all the games you ever wanted to. But one thing a lot of people ask me about is how to install DLC content.

If you’re not familiar with what a DLC is, it’s basically an add on pack for your game that you would have bought on the PlayStation Network and then downloaded and installed into your game. This might have given you some extra levels, new cars, extra skins for your characters and so on.

So in this video I’ll show you how to install DLCs.

What You Need

First off you’re going to need a few things.

This process only works on modded PlayStations so if your PS3 is still stock you’ll need to mod it. Please have a look at my CFW and PS3HEN videos to get yours up and running. You’ll need to make sure you’ve got some sort of file manager installed. If you follow my modding videos you’ll have multiMAN installed. If your DLC files use a .rap licence file you’ll also need the Apollo Save Tool set up to handle licencing. Again you’ll find full info for that in this video on how to play all the PS3 games.

You’ll then need to have the game the DLC is for running on your console. It doesn’t matter how you install it onto your PS3. ISO files, packages or just running form a disk, it doesn’t matter as long as you’ve got the game.

We’re going to be copying files to the PlayStation so you’ll need some method to do that. I’ll be using an FAT32 formatted USB drive in this video. If you ‘re not sure how to create one of those do check out this video. You can also set up an FTP connection to your console to transfer files over your network so please go through this video to get that up and running.

Finally you’ll need some DLC files. As usual I can’t tell you where to get hold of these, but they are all out there on the internet waiting to be found. As usual do check that you’ve got permission to download any software before saving the files to your computer.

Checking Your DLC Versions

One extra, very important, note on the DLC files. These have to match the version of the game you’ve installed onto your PS3. Usually this means matching the game region. For example I’ve got Gran Turismo installed onto my console as an ISO file. If I have a look in my ISO folder you can see that I’m using the USA version of the game. So I can only install US DLCs.

You can check this by verifying the game code number. This is a number assigned to every PS3 game and version.

To find the number the best place to go is this GameTDB website. If you search for your game title you’ll get a list of versions pop up with their code numbers. These numbers tell you about the format and region for the game. The four letters at the start tell you the format. The third character is the region. E is for Europe, U for US, J for Japan and A for Asia.

So I’m expecting my game to have the code BCUS98296 for the US version of GT6.

If I now look on my PS3 hard drive in the game folder, as long as I’ve actually played the game on the console I should find a matching folder for the game code number. So this confirms which version of the game I’m running.

These code numbers will also help you find DLC content. Just search for something like BCUS98296 DLC downloads.

When you find the files you should get a .pkg file which is the code, and a .rap file which is the licence file. If you don’t get a .rap file the content my already be unlocked so just use the .pkg file.

Installing the DLC

Getting everything ready is actually the hardest part. From here it’s very straight forward.

So I have a downloaded DLC file here. It’s come down as a zip file so I need to extract it to get to the .pkg and .rap files. Once I’ve got those I just need to copy them over to the root of my USB drive. Now I can take the USB drive over to the console.

With the USB drive plugged in start up multiMAN and go across to the far right of the XMB to the mmCM option and then select the FileManager / mmOS link. This will open up the multiMAN desktop interface.

Use the right analogue joystick to move your mouse and the X button as your mouse button.

We need to double click the PS3 Root icon to open up a file manager window.

First we need to copy the .rap licence file over. In the file manager window open up the dev_usb000 folder and you should see the rap file in there. Select it with a single click of the X button. Then press the circle button to bring up the context menu. Select Copy.

Now we need to paste it onto our hard drive.

Doble click the .. listing to go up a level and then open the dev_hdd0 disk followed by the exdata folder. Move your mouse to the blank area in the window and press the circle button and then paste in the file.

That’s the DLC licence in place.

We’ve finished with multiMAN now so press the PS button on your controller and exit back to the main XMB.

The last step is to install the package file.

On the game menu go up to your package manager and select the Install Package option followed by the standard option. If you put the .pkg file in the root of your USB drive it should appear. Simply select it to install it.

That’s the DLC installed.

Playing the DLC Content

If I now boot up the game we should get our new content bursting into action.