PS TRIPLE games are free now if you have a decent PC as well
I haven’t looked into it in a while, but it used to be one of those things where you had to be lucky enough to have a certain firmware.
For custom firmware you need either a phat or some of the early slims, but you can do pretty much everything you’d want to do with hybrid firmware, which can be done in any model.
I modded my slim in a few minutes its pretty easy now if you have the right model. Basically installs the software via a browser in a few minutes.