VHBL: there’s light at the end of the tunnel

Yesterday I announced that Vita’s firmware 1.80 was blocking VHBL. Many talented devs heard my distress signal and started working on solutions. It’s been a long day, but I am now basically convinced that the VHBL release will happen on 1.80, it is just slightly postponed.

Some of you might have already seen that Neur0n (and others) figured out a way to install VHBL on firmware 1.80. As I mentioned yesterday, VHBL runs fine on 1.80, but copying it to the memory stick is the hard part.

Neur0n found a way to do it, but he was not the only one to find ways to copy our files to the Vita on the latest 1.80. Actually a large amount of people, known hackers or unknown members of our forums contacted me with solutions. I won’t name them all, but I want to thank all of you who have contacted me with ideas/solutions, it’s great to be part of such an active and helpful community

It turns out the changes in Firmware 1.80 were probably not an attempt at shutting VHBL down, rather than enforce stricter rules on file naming conventions for PSP savedata. These rules were already enforced on the PS3, and some of you might remember that it was not possible to install VHBL on the Vita from a PS3 because of these limitations. Funnily enough, I had already started working on taking these limitations into account for VHBL a while ago, but never really finished that because “I want to copy VHBL to my Vita from my PS3” was not such a huge use case.

Bottom line is, we freaked out yesterday over something that had probably nothing to do with us in the first place. To quote a nice conversation I had yesterday “you guys [hackers] often mistake a simple bug for a new security feature”, and I think this is what happened here.

So what’s next? Well, although I haven’t seen it by myself yet, I believe VHBL should be able to run and be installed on firmware 1.80 relatively easily, although there is of course some work to be done to get it compatible with these changes. I will get in touch with neur0n, and as far as I can tell for now, the VHBL release is a bit postponed, but not cancelled (I still need to confirm that with my own eyes, though!).

I will of course keep you updated once I have more info, stay tuned!