Recent Events and The Future of the Vita.

Recently the have been some monumental changes within the PSVita scene as you all (should) know. But where do they leave us now? And where do we go from here?

To summarise, we’ve had a user known as Sam Jordam (or Ipadboy to those of us on Wololo’s Forums) Coldbird leaving the scene, and a very cleverly named eCFW released by Total_Noob. These are incredibly significant in not only the current state of the PSV but also what’s to come.

Sam Jordam is a name that we all know, and probably hate right now for being a bit of well… an ***. He wasn’t very liked on the forums, and as Wololo has stated, he had also been threatening to hack this site and close it down although clearly these threats were empty however, it never occurred to me that someone such as himself would have such a large impact on the future of the Vita. If you are interested finding out more about Sam Jordam and his antics and Coldbird’s departure, you can find more information here.

If you decide to watch his other videos (Sam Jordam), you’ll notice he starts off by saying things such as “not my files, not my problem” and that he is actually helping us, then he releases a video claiming that it was a mod from Wololo’s forum’s fault THEN he releases another video claiming to apologize for the departure of Coldbird, however it’s just under a three minute long video of several images of dead birds, and two videos of people throwing about and otherwise abusing the corpses of some – not worth watching, and sickening if you do. Furthermore, he ends this video with a troll face, which sadly sums everything he has done up until now which may have destroyed our chances of a fully customisable Vita and full use of its hardware – however, there are many skilled Devs on the case, so only time can tell.

Coldbird had already left the scene in the past due to the ridiculous demands placed upon his blog by people that seem to believe that Devs have no life of their own, and simply sit in front of computers all day doing nothing but coding, which is of course; completely and utterly incorrect (and a ridiculous thought to boot). Finally getting fed up of this, he left the PSP scene returning to the Vita scene over a year later. He had been actively participating in the Vita’s development, and had spent four months writing his own Custom Firmware which had not long been complete when Ipadboy leaked this to public – though, I won’t go into the ins and outs of how he got these files. I guess this just restored the idea of how dramatic and aggravating people can be for Coldbird who had enough and decided to leave the scene once more, which is a massive blow, as there are few people who are as skilled and dedicated to the scene as he was, plus, he joins a list of many other Devs to have quit the scene, due to either the public or specific individuals. So from us all; Goodbye, Coldbird – thank you for all your amazing work!

Total_Noob has been working very hard, and released a Custom Firmware that works on the Vita known as 6.60 TN-A. What’s more is that Total_Noob has promised to release a new Firmware at the end of this week labelled 6.60 TN-B – if you want to know more about this, click here.

This may look like a positive thing coming from a very, very bleak circumstance, and it is – we have a lot to thank Total_Noob for. However, what’s to come in the future? Well, although this remains purely down to speculation I will still state some possible outcomes as I see them: there are multiple groups still working on the Vita, and probably a lot of independent Devs, but the issue arises that there is a possibility that they are using the same, or very similar kexploits (kernel exploit). These files are readily available, as such they can easily patched by Sony in the future which would hinder future developments, or possibly completely stunt them altogether.

The outcome of this is that yes, we have a Custom Firmware with Homebrew and Iso loading capabilities (which for those of you who are unsure, is limited to PSP Iso files), however it may be that sadly, we may never unlock the full capabilities of the console.

What do you think is the future of the console?