MajorTom rickrolls the scene, also confirms Vita games modding is now possible
PS Vita Hacker Major_Tom (née TomTomDu80) showcased a mod of Playstation All stars Battle Royale (video below). The mod replaces the game’s intro video with… well the title of this article probably gives it away.
Besides the rickrolling, MajorTom stated he can now decrypt games on the Playstation Vita.
I can already hear the piracy and the anti-piracy crowds raging in the comments, but it doesn’t seem that what MajorTom’s discovered would enable piracy at this point. He later said on twitter that although he can decrypt and mod the game’s resource files, the binary itself is still encrypted.
@d227642870 it should not, DRM are not bypassed that way, you still have to own the game to mod it
— Major_Tom (@MajorTomVita) August 1, 2016
What this means is that Vita game piracy will most likely not be enabled with this work, although some might say this is the first step towards “backups” loading on the PS Vita.
Game modding, however, is definitely a possibility with Major_Tom’s work. Besides the silly rickroll intro videos, many things could now becoming possible. Unofficial translations of Japanese games, a popular sport in the modding community, might become a possibility. But that’s assuming all the localized assets (including strings) are located in resource files rather than in the (encrypted) binary itself, which in my experience is quite unlikely.
Gameplay modifications also look like they’ll be possible, depending on how the game resources are setup. Major_Tom shared a screenshot showing potential mods for Minecraft.
haxing much minecraft cheat on vita for free pic.twitter.com/p0Y7hpQgus
— Major_Tom (@MajorTomVita) August 1, 2016
Texture modifications and other fun stuff however seem like they’re coming our way for the PS Vita. Major_Tom hasn’t given a release date, but knowing him I’m sure he’ll share more info very soon.
Lots of similar security breakthroughs and announces have been happening on the PS Vita over the past few days, after the release of HENkaku, a Vita native exploit running on the latest firmware 3.60.
He’s a Major for a reason. MajorDankMeme is best.
First!
Boooooooo!!!!! :p
Sry broskie.
Good times guys
Does anybody wants to kiss wololo website right now? After so much patience…..!!!!
Kissed my screen just now!
Minecraft forge mods on vita! 😀
Do you want piracy? Because thats how you get piracy.
Anyways, its awesome work 😛
Pd: wololo, when you gonna put the monthly entries of /talk?
Heck yea I want piracy!
‘mod’ the game to dump its eboot.bin
Seeing the main page filled with nothing but progress on Vita hacks is almost as exciting as the hacks themselves :D.
I want piracy. Without piracy Vita is definietly dead.
It’ll still died anyway
after backup games what will come next? Emulator?
So if it’s dead, whats the problem if we run backups? Like gba or nes roms… When I took my vita to install MolecularShell, it have a dense dust cape. That cape was there forever, but if we can play backups, we will use the vita so not die for us. For the market is dead, assume that
If anything worth can come to vita, its counter strike 1.6..
..wish someone makes that 🙁
We all want piracy.
lets be honest: what did the new hack offerd us so far?
same old BS homebrew we already know (quake, doom) ResidentSleeper….
No, we don’t want all piracy!
What we get we HENkaku is a much easier way to run homebrew, make custom themes and such stuff and open other ways for other stuff like mods too.
Piracy is only useful for people who don’t want to spend money for fun.
You want emulators to run old games in dead consoles (like vita right now), and I doubt that you have these games. Teoricaly you are a pirate and you want piracy too, the difference is that I am honest.
actually, no. Emulators are NOT any form of piracy. The games are not being sold, so it can’t possibly be piracy. it was added a WHILE back into the laws that emulation of “retro consoles” IS legal. there is a time frame on how old the console/games are required to be to be legal to emulate. probably one of the reasons psp was integrated into the PSV so that they can still say “well we are still selling the games” and making it illegal to emulate them. Piracy is when you “steal” the game. (aka when you keep the dev of the game from making money on the sale). EMULATION IS NOT PIRACY. END OF STORY!
The sales of the ps vita games are ridiculous or directly nonexistent today. The secondhand market are more active in that terms, at least in Europe. You’re not stealing money to anyone if you play vita backups. Probably you help (to increase Vita sells) more than you harm. So sorry but I see the same thing emulating old systems in compare to play backups in dead systems.
So, I’m not actually pirating PS2 games anymore? its legal?
@ThatGuy466
Actually, no. You’re wrong, at least as far as Nintendo ROMs are concerned. It says on Nintendo’s website that downloading ROMs of games from their old systems is still illegal, and this is also why coolrom has had all its Nintendo ROMs taken down since a year or two ago.
Anyways…
I kinda do want piracy in the sense that I want emulators. I’ve already bought a ton of these older games, and the ones I haven’t bought are incredibly hard to come by these days. I don’t think it’s fair for me to have to pay for a game again just to play it on another device. That said, I do NOT want piracy for actual Vita games. Accessible hacks that allow for emulation and other things are great and will boost Vita sales while not hindering software releases/sales. Hacks that allow for piracy of native Vita games will indeed boost unit sales, but they will also destroy software releases/sales.
That is completely and utterly not true. There is no time besides the copyright running out which only happens 70 years after the creator dies. Emulation is not piracy as long as the emulator does not use any original parts of the software of the emulated system. This includes the Bios of the system.
For the games you have to dump them from your own cartridge and the Bios from your own system. Otherwise its piracy even if you own the original game and download it.
If any of that statement were true, you would have all sorts of emulators and emulator machines pre-built with ROMs in them sold on legit store shelves. With the advent of things like Virtual Console, old games are still being sold for profit. The length of copyright protection for works created after 1978 is 95 years after publication or 120 years after creation.
Emulators are legal (assuming you dumped your own BIOS if required), the ROMs are not unless you own the game, and possibly not legal unless you DUMP your own game.
Emulation is piracy, you can find the games on eBay and Amazon for example.
So they are on sale.
What it offers is the ability to fully utilize the PS vita’s hardware, rather than just playing around in a bigger PSP environment. There’s not much available yet, but the hack just came out a few days ago.
TheTruth: speaks the truth.
We want PS Vita games, after all that is why we bought the console.
Old homebrew is just a added bonus ..
How is the game being launched? From the cartridge then re-directing to the modded rick roll data/video stored on the VITA?
NVM, I re read the post and understand that some of the files are not encrypted and can be replaced.
I am very excited about the fact that the Vita itself is getting attention!!!
I don’t care anymore honestly. I bought PS Vita years ago and I’ve barely gotten any use through it. If Sony didn’t even bothered supporting it then I don’t think there should be anything wrong. I want PS Vita back ups to enjoy my time with this system. Its not worth spending anymore money on it. Oh and I have to buy a new bigger card for it as well which is gonna cost an other fortune.
You want to enjoy “backups” but don’t want to spend any more money. That just sounds like you’re not planning on playing backups and straight up pirating games you don’t have or intend to buy.
That’s the plan, isn’t it? Backups is more of a euphemism.
Yo ho yo ho, a pirate’s life for me!
That song made my day!
I would welcome piracy, by downloading the purchased games I “lost” on my old banned PSN account.
Thats the old freak!!
You got banned?….for what?
Suks man….! 😀
I just lost all of my vita games because I had them all in one case. Not sure where I lost it Sucks to have to buy them all over again. Please blow this thing out the water. I am not buying any more replacements. 🙁
Take care of your possessions better? It’s not Sony’s fault you misplaced your games.
I dunn really care about piracy, but can we undub games using dis (with or without piracy)?
I really like original voice for better immersion. lol
lol
so this means we can finally remove the dummy files/unneeded extra languages to save space? I don’t care if it allows piracy or not as long as I can cut down game size
First!!
fan translation, undubs and uncensor/nude mods!
So many possibilities..
Uncensored version of Criminal Girls incoming.
noice, i can nude mod muh senran kagura games on vita, yay!!!!
in a near future we should be have a “BOMB PATCH”. LoL
well I hope it does lead to backups. Scea has ruined this console in the states, and hacks are what will justify me paying $200 for this around launch.
Lmao rickrolled,. That is some funny *** stuff.
Fingers crossin
Maybe someone can mod a Smash Bros. mode for All Stars. Percentage and all…
Bring the piracy who cares on to the xbox1 ps4 and nxe and whatever consoles come after enjoy it if u have no life and time to play thousands of games
Bring on the backups. Why should Vita be any different than any other hacked consoles in history. All these “holier than though” people can choke on it.
Vita is flat dead, just crack it wide open if possible.
I know, right? Smea is one of the guys you described. Incredibly anti-piracy, yet he enabled users to pirate/emulate retro games that are still illegal to download. The hypocrisy!
I am certain these people say it on record so they don’t get into any trouble with the fuzz.
*** it we want piracy
I just want to see a nice ps2 emulator. That’s all.
Well to be honest , i dont belive in piracy but i do belive that piracy will make more people come to the scene there for more attention for devs , there for more homebrew , i currently own two vitas , one for hacks and stuff and test , and other on OFW and latest ( now with henkaku ) i really enjoyed playing quake and doom on my vita , but i do love to play some jap games that will never come to NA and for that you have to factory reset your vita and switch to another account and test or play that only game , but u will miss the others , so i think backup loading will be something good , and good for testing stuff also , if i like a game i will definetly buy it no matter what , because most of the demos are not even 1 lvl test
“never gonna give you up
nerver gonna let you down
never gonna run around
and desert you”
was what MajorTom have been saying to his vita all this time.
I don’t really care about vita games piracy. I already own the games I want to play so far, and there isn’t so many games planned that I would need it.
But I would be really interested in bringing back PSP ISO compatibility. I already bought again the titles that were available on my store, but half of the games I still play every now and then are sold on the european store, and FF Type-0 isn’t officially translated on the Vita (despite being the best platform for it).
I honestly don’t whats up with some of you, The vita is commercially dead apart from the odd indie game which are mostly tat anyway. Piracy certainly isn’t going to kill the Vita as its dead already it would probably keep the system sales on life support as it did do for the PSP and for the Wii. Those systems still sold long after Nintendo & Sony officialy abandoned them & why support a company who has abandoned us loyal owners so early into a systems lifespan anyway.
How is it commercially dead when Atlus, Aksys, XSEED, NISA, IFI, Koei Tecmo and Namco Bandai are still releasing localizations in 2017? Some are even exclusives.
“Vita is dead because all of its games suck!”
“Wow I can’t wait to pirate all these Vita games!”
We all want whatever it is to make us happy ‘piracy or no piracy none of our business with buying the console we want is directly making us the primary owner of it and the decision to install piracy on it or not is ours to make and not sony’s , so f*ck SONY f*ck them all… they block and we open, is just that simple, a law without a breaker is as boring compared to a fat ***!! The same human right they have got in selling to retailers is also the same rights we have got to *** on very console we bought from them… they’d sell a console for us all and try to tell us what to do and what not to do with the console, hmm do we look like slaves to them eh that’s impossible? let them stop selling their products just so they’d stop piracy for good and let’s see who gets to lose lots!!
WELL I GET BANNED THAT WHAT I WANT TO KNOW I BOUGHT ALOT STUFF FROM PS STORE ALONG THE YEARS??
If we get some homebrew devs that can breathe new life into the system and show what it is truly capable of, maybe we can sort of revive the system. Sony failed at advertising and marketing and doomed the system to obscurity. We may be able to give it the support it deserves.
heck, some developers might be watching the scene, experimenting with homebrew, creating their own to test the waters, and later may release fully licensed games on the Playstation Store. I really hope that happens.