As the title says, I'm changing my PS3 (had a US one, getting a HK one as it will do PAL and NTSC).

I have bought a few games from the online shop. Can these be transferred across in any way or do they have to go with the old PS3?

im pretty certain that if you log onto the PSN with the same username you will be able to redownload all your content

might need to double check that though...

You can download the games again on the same account on a different machine.

I hope you have thought that through. The HK PS3's although they are PAL compatible they won't play UK region 2 PAL DVD's or PS1 and PS2 games. The PAL on HK consoles is only good for region 3 PAL DVD's.

If you do decide to switch your PS3 you will be able to download the games again on it by using the same username and PSN ID account.

Thanks for the warning, I know the situation on regions and just don't care about PS1 and PS2 stuff.

Are the games tied to ID? If I remove my ID from the old machine will the game stop working then?

If not, doesn't that mean 1 person could buy the game and then download it for all their mates?

Thats intresting that i might have a look in a min as I have 2 accounts on my PS3 one what i bought MK2 with and one that just gets used for US content so ill have a try off that later.

Why change then

Because a US machine cannot output PAL video and a HK one can.

Please report back if you do.

Yes but how does that help you ? If you can't play any PAL DVD's or games then what is the point ? It's certainly not going to help you play PAL PS3 games on an SDTV which is the problem some people have with import machines here.

I thought it was me asking the questions?!

Okay:

I don't want to play games on an SD TV.

I got a US PS3 as a cheap Blu-Ray player to try it on my projector. It worked great and was surprisingly good at DVDs too so I wanted to make it my tool of choice for the projector but it couldn't play anything PAL screwed things up as I needed a DVD player too.

I'd rather have Region A Blu-Ray than Region B. I don't mind importing and it tends to be cheaper.

As I prefer Region A Blu-Ray a HK machine is a better choice than a UK machine for me.

I have a large number of region 3 and region 0 DVDs. I also have ripped all my favourite DVDs in my collection to my server and when I did that I removed the region coding. I haven't looked if I can play these over the network on a PS3 (I doubt it) but if I want one for movie night it will only take me a few minutes to copy one of these back to a DVD.

Is that ok?!

Fair enough. Just seemed a bit strange why you would want an HK machine because it's PAL capable. That makes sense though. To be honest I was only curious as I wanted to make sure you knew what you were getting into and were making the right decision. It's obvious you do know what your doing.

Thanks, I appreciate you asking really as it does clear up some of my concerns.

I know what I'm doing, but the information about what each machine is capable of in terms of video is somewhat sparse so the fact you aren't refuting what I'm saying is a good thing!

How about swapping HDD's.

Okay, with two PS3s here I have done some testing.

Yes, you can re-download everything you have bought before onto the new PS3.

Bought content still works on the old one if the username that bought it is still on the PS3. It doesn't apear to need to be logged in to work.

If you delete the username then the paid content stops working (well Flow and Tekken stopped working, Super Rub a Dub still seems to work and it didn't look like it was in demo mode).