I see that the majority of you run some sort of custom firmware. Call me chicken sh*t, but I'm just hesitant to start running downgrades over the Sony firmware. Do you need to run custom firware in order to run various emulators (GBA, SNES, SEGA, ETC)? If I stay with the Sony FW 3.03, will I ever be able to play non UMD games?

Any of the custom firmwares will let you run isos, emulators, any other homebrew.

If you stay with sonys firmware, youll never be able to play homebrew.

Depends on what you want to run. If you just want to run emulators for it just downgrade to firmware 1.5, but Im not sure if you can downgrade if you have a sony firmware above 2.0

i downgraded from v2.7
i would just wait till new downgrade for 3.03 comes out and don't upgrade your psp mainwhile...