Important note: at the time of this writing, it seems the games are still available in the US store. If you’re in another country and missed the exploits there (they have been removed at least in EU), you can create a US account (explanation here) and buy some US PSN Credit from Amazon (explanation here) to get the games in the US.

 

At this point I must admit that I’m lost about the ins and outs about this recent exploit announce for the Vita 2.60, but I’ll state what I know: the exploit (or at least part of it, since the same exploit is available in several games from the same company) was most likely found by several hackers, and several of them worked independently on porting VHBL to it.

Acid_Snake precised to me that many hackers found this exploit independently, and that most of them worked together in order to keep the secret. The first public announce (a few days ago, on another website) of the exploits which triggered this “messy” release has been confirmed to not be a leak, just poor communication from other devs who were working independently on the exploit. The whole thing was in the end just a sad coincidence, but we’ll try to give more precisions about this in a further article.

Nevertheless, what we are releasing exclusively today is what I believe to be the most advanced and highest quality VHBL ports available for these exploits, following Acid_Snake’s announce yesterday. Not that I think other VHBL ports around here for the Arcade Dart exploits are bad, but because I’ve personally worked close enough with Acid_Snake and Qwikrazor87 over the past few months that I trust their skills, experience and the amount of beta testing their work has gone through. At the end of the day, a VHBL port still involves some craftsmanship and I’ll trust people with experience (Qwikrazor had done an incredible job on the 2.12 release not so long ago) more than anyone else.

That being said, know that other VHBL ports for this exploit are floating around the interwebs, and you might want to give them a try if this release is not satisfying to you, for one reason or another. We just won’t offer the same amount of support for these “other” releases than we can offer for Acid_snake’s work.

While I’m at it, for other hackers who made a VHBL port of this, let me remind everyone that VHBL is released under the gplv3 license, and that if you distribute binaries, you should distribute your sources as well. Beyond all the drama, let’s please respect the open source license of the original HBL/VHBL creators who, for the most part, have nothing to do with any of the recent mess.

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Hmm, now that this is out of the way, I am proud to release the files for VHBL on Vita 2.60, from Acid_Snake and Qwikrazor87. Credits go to (copy/pasted from Acid_Snake’s announcement):

• – Acid_Snake, who originally found the exploits in Pool Hall Pro and World of Pool.
• – Frostegater, who found the same exploit in Arcade Darts, confirming that more than one game had the same vulnerability.
• – qwikrazor87, who ported VHBL to Arcade Airhockey and Bowling, as well as his great work in the community.
• – The Z, for confirming the games’ availability in all stores.
• – All of Console Heaven’s VIP members, who kept this exploit hidden for so much time.
• – Fate6 and gdljjrod, who pointed out that Pool Hall Pro was secretly patched in 2.60
• – Total_Noob and the PRO Team for their great work on the scene.
• – Wololo, who made the initial VHBL port of Pool Hall Pro a possibility and his great work in the scene.

These files will let you run homebrews on a Vita 2.60, as long as you own a legit copy of one of the following games:

• Arcade Darts
• Arcade Airhockey & Bowling
• World of Pool
• Arcade Pool (also known as Arcade Pool & Snooker in Europe)

Donations

If you enjoy this work, please consider making a donation to Acid_Snake here, or to Qwikrazor here. Thanks for them 🙂

Download, install, and run

The Download links are on our VHBL page, as usual. Install and run instructions can be found there as well. (there are lots of files here, so apologies in advance if I messed up a link or two. Just kindly let me know if anything goes wrong, and I’ll fix it asap!).

For pre-packaged homebrews, please do check Smoke’s giant VHBL Homebrew thread here

Enjoy! Please report success/failure, post videos screenshots… go crazy and spread the word! 🙂