VHBL Ninja releases are like the Fight Club. The first rules of the ninja releases is that you’re not supposed to talk about them. Then again, there’s always the difficulty of letting people know that they should be ready for an upcoming hack, without saying too much… TomTomDu80 confirmed to me that he will be releasing his VHBL (compatible with OFW 2.06) port sometimes soon.

The release date is of course not disclosed, as this is a key part of the success of such releases. But at this point, it is not a question of “if”, but a question of “when”.

As for all previous VHBL ports, running this exploit will require you to purchase a specific PSP game on the PSN (the exploit relies on a vulnerability in that one game). Given the history of these exploits, we know that Sony take the problem seriously enough to pull the exploited games from their stores, usually within hours of the public announcement. For this reason the announce is secretly made to members of our community before it is announced publicly.

As a reminder, VHBL is a homebrew loader for the psp and in particular will not let you run psp isos or vita isos. VHBL has an ok compatibility rate with the most popular PSP homebrews and emulators (snes, nes, gba, megadrive, …), although this highly depends on the exploited game. I haven’t tested this port myself yet. For those of you on 2.05 or 2.06, this will probably be your best bet for now to run a psp emulator hack on your Vita. For those who are running on 2.02 or lower, with CEF or ARK, the choice is more difficult, as you’ll have to choose between running a PSP Custom Firmware, and get to the latest Vita firmware but stick to a less compatible homebrew experience with VHBL. In general I would recommend to keep your eCFW over updating in order to get VHBL, but the choice is yours.

As usual, I recommend that you do not update until you actually know for sure that you want to.

Stay tuned.