Trouble with VHBL?

Hey everyone, just a quick post for those of you who are having trouble running VHBL.

A few days ago I released VHBL for the game Super Collapse 3, and I’ve seen lots of people running into various types of issues, so let me try to summarize a few hints and tips here.

First of all, apologies for my lack of activity in the past days. I’m on a holiday with my family, with close to no internet access, and absolutely no time. Things will be back to normal in a few days, but until then I cannot actively work on any of my projects, including VHBL.

This is a nice transition to the first thing I want to discuss: people are having trouble running various homebrews on VHBL for super collapse 3, including some homebrews that should definitely work such as Snes9xTYL, the super NES emulator. Based on the descriptions of the issue, I’m thinking this is a simple bug with a hook for one of the audio functions. It should be easy to fix, but again, as I am not available for a few days, somebody will have to step up and fix the issue, or you guys will have to wait for me to come back and look into it. As a reminder, HBL is open source and anybody with a bit of free time and a PSP could fix the issue.

In general, if you are having issues running a specific homebrew on VHBL, head over to our /talk VHBL subforum. You should be able to quickly find information on most homebrews there, working versions if any, or explanations on why the homebrew doesn’t work for you. Again, most issues have a solution, and if the solution is not on our forums yet, it usually only takes one guy to figure it out…

Some people are having trouble installing homebrews. A typical symptom is a clicking noise in the VHBL menu, but nothing happening, or the menu crashing. This is usually happening because your install.zip file was not correctly prepared, in particular it should be an uncompressed zip file. You can use Homebrew Preparer to do this correctly for you (be sure to use revision 0.2 or higher, as version 0.1 has a critical bug that will cause the exact same bug I’m describing in this paragraph). Alternatively, you can probably find a bunch of pre-made homebrew packages for VHBL in our forums. Finally, let me remind you again that anybody could create their own menu for VHBL, create one that supports a better installation method if needed, etc… so please feel free to step up to improve the experience 🙂

Some people are contacting me to know if VHBL for Motorstorm or Everybody’s Tennis will work on firmware 1.67. The answer is no, so stop asking.

Some people missed this third release of VHBL for the game Super Collapse, and are asking me how they could be made aware of our future releases in advance. The answer is simple: trusted member of our /Talk forums get some information before everybody else. If you are registered on /Talk, it does not guarantee you will get the information before others, but if you are not registered there, you can be sure you will be one of the last to know about it. I believe we’ve made that system pretty clear for the past three VHBL releases.

Stay tuned for more VHBL updates, in particular bug fixes for the Super Collapse 3 version of VHBL. In the meantime, enjoy the homebrews that are already working, and when a homebrew doesn’t work, before you complain, remember that before HBL, people used to be happy with just a hello world 😛 (but don’t get me wrong, constructive criticism or genuine attempts at making HBL better for the community are more than welcome)