My friend Jd8531 just wrote an article, that the new Firmware 3.00 will be released very soon, and there it is.
The PS Vita Firmware 3.00 is now LIVE (In the USA and Europe atleast), and adds a bunch of new functions and stuff. Let’s take a look at it.

First things first. The Firmware was released to prepare the PS Vita for the PS4 launch, which means that our Vitas will now be able to get and use the new and fancy PS4 Link App. From within the PS4 Link App you can choose to Remote Play or Second Screen the PS Vita for the PS4. Those settings both require the PS Vita to be registered with your PS4. Since most people do not own a PS4 yet, we can’t dig any further in this App, for shame.

The next new App bubble you should see at your PS Vita is the Parental Control App. When you open the App, you have to enter a 4-digit passcode, which prevents using the App without authority. Inside the App itself, you can block the PS Vitas Browser and Location Data to be used, which seems to be a bit hard. Otherwise you can set the Parental Control Level for games, which will be (un-)playable at the PS Vita.

Since my PS Vita uses a german account, I was greeted with those horrible USK (Unterhaltungssoftwarekontrolle) pictures. Every german hates the USK, since they cut games and still release them as 18-only. I kinda envy those PEGI users, but thats not important.

Like at the good old PSP, you are now able to set the level from 1 to 11, where 1 means that just games for Everyone are playable, and 11 means that everything will be playable. Turning the option off has the same effect as level 11. Another function in the Parental Control App is for changing the password, nothing special.

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The last function is pretty interesting and well made. You can restrict the Play Duration. But not only X hours a day, no, it is even possible to say, that you just can play 1 hour at mondays, 2 hours at tuesdays, 0 hours at wednesdays and 9 hours at friday. You can restrict how much you play at which day, and how much in total. The first thing that popped into my head was, that when you get 2 hours to play, why waste 30 minutes to update the firmware? But Sony did add a little footnote, which states that updating the system software does not count as playtime. Good guy Sony.

The following 2 features are well known from the PS3 Firmware 4.50, which added, well should have added, the data transfer via Wifi, from PS Vita to PS3, and the other way around. It is now also possible to hide specific trophies from the eyes of other users, just like at the PS3 firmware. Nice features.

Otherwise there were a few small changes, like the PlayStationNetwork got renamed into PSN (SM), the Voice and Messages App got a new Icon, the Messages App itself was updated to work with the iOS/Android Playstation App and the Remote Play App got renamed into PS3 Remote Play. Nothing interesting here.

Those were the most changes in the new Firmware, feel free to watch this YouTube video, if you want to see every change, or if you just want to know my impresion of the new Firmware.

Now let us talk about things you really would like to know, hacking related things.

First things first. Simple hacks like a Hello World or even the Half Byte Loader should just work fine. Ive tested a little hello world of my own, and it is still working, phew.

With this new Firmware 3.00 around, we should see the release of the eCFW TN-V4 pretty soon. We now have the PS4 ready firmware, and TN said he will release it somewhere between November and January, so it might drop sooner or later.

Another thing is, that now with the new Firmware 3.00, we might need a new OpenCMA, since it seems that the Firmware 3.00 CMA does not work anymore with the OpenCMA r5, but more about this later.

Wololo wrote an article about “exploits, that devs wont talk about”, and he stated that the Package Installer can be accessed on the PS Vita Firmware, if you have a way to call it.
Some people were enraged about this, that Sony might remove this, because this is such a cool feature, but it was stated, that Sony cant remove it, without completely changing the whole Firmware structure, and well, it seems that this is correct.

Calling the Package Installer is still working at Firmware 3.00 😉

This last part is about the Vita Half Byte Loader itself. I posess some VHBLs, but after trying to launch one of these VHBL, I was kinda shocked. Either did Sony remove files from the memory card, fixed the usermode exploit or did something else, because calling my VHBL does not work anymore. It would be a shame if this one would be fixed 🙁

I will investigate, if they fixed the usermode exploit, or if it something else, something worse. But up to now, thats it.