5 must-have homebrew for TheFlow’s imminent FW 3.65-3.68 hack: Homebrew that make your PSVita/PSTV Great Again!
In a few days, many people will go hurrah at the sight of hacked console but after that, many will think “What should I do next?”. To answer that question, this article will look at 5 pieces of homebrew that I personally think are essential to the PSVita experience.
1. Adrenaline, an ePSP hack on steroids by TheFlow
Without a doubt, a sizeable amount of folks who have a PSVita also have a PSP lying around in their house. Unfortunately, some PSPs, including mine, tend to break after a few years of continuous usage and this is where Adrenaline comes in and fills your nostalgia gap!
Adrenaline doesn’t only allow you to play PSP games but it also features:
- The full XMB experience so that you can relive the glory days of the PSP
- Support for PS1/PSX games in PSP EBOOT format
- Homebrew support, even offering 64MB RAM support in order to allow more complex homebrew to run
- A variety of screen filters that make games look better
- Many other great things such as right analogue stick support (can be achieved either by official Sony settings or via the Camera Patch Lite plugin by Freakler), save states and the VSH recovery menu
2. VitaQuake III by Rinnegatamante
VitaQuake III is a personal favourite because it’s a homebrew game that allows you to enjoy a few minutes of killing AI bots with a decent framerate and great controls. Furthermore, you can also join in local or online multiplayer servers so that you can frag your friends rather than computer-generated bots!
For the best experience, it’s recommended you set the resolution setting to 480×272 so that you get a framerate that’s above 30FPS most of the time, mostly hovering around 40-60FPS in the shareware maps I’ve regularly played. If you’re a Quake fan, there’s also VitaQuake and VitaQuake II which you should check out if you’re a fan of FPS games since the PSVita’s official game library is quite lacking in that genre!
3. Various mini-games including Sudokucpp, Pickr VITA, Tetromino and StarKiller 2D
The PSVita homebrew library excels in providing small games that are fun to play for a short amount of time (say, 10-30 minutes). Only mentioning one of these great mini-games would be causing a great disservice to the various others that exist so a list of them is the best way to get around this! Among my favourite homebrew mini-games, there are:
- Tetromino by Svenn, and its Touhou Edition by Aurora (i.e myself), which is an excellent way to play Tetris on the go!
- Hendoku by Kuni59, a simple yet entertaining Sudoku homebrew that you control with the L/R buttons and d-pad.
- Pickr VITA by Joel16 is a very simple game in which you have to tap on the slightly different colour in a 4×4 grid of the same colour.
- StarKiller 2D, a PSVita-exclusive homebrew game by Freakler similar to Sokoban which has you turning off stars while trying not to get trapped in the maze
- SpiderVita by LeeStorm, a spider solitaire homebrew game for the PSVita. There isn’t much to say here except that it’s an excellent way to pass 10 minutes!
- Many others including Flood It! and Eucloid
4. Vita Homebrew Browser by devnoname120
As its title suggests, VHBB is a utility that lets you install homebrew directly on your PSVita. VHBB gets its homebrew from VitaDB, Rinnegatamante’s homebrew data base, and lets you install homebrew on your Vita with the touch of a button. VHBB not only installs downloads and installs homebrew with minimal effort BUT it also installs separate data files for games that require them!
VitaDB has a selection of 215 homebrew titles and 74 plugins so it’ll be quite a while until you browse everything! After you browse through that, you can also check Brewology’s store which has some ONELua homebrew, such as Sudorku, ONEMenu, ONETranslate and App Manager Plus, that isn’t available on VitaDB.
5. AutoPlugin by TheHeroGAC
While you won’t be using AutoPlugin after setting up your PSVita/PSTV, it’s still an excellent utility to get you going. AutoPlugin installs commonly used plugins and does that job in an excellent way as it even modifies taiHEN’s configuration files itself! This utility can automatically install the following plugins:
- DownloadEnabler
- NoNpDrm
- NoPsmDrm
- Adrenaline fix double touch
- Gamesd
- Shellbat
- Vitabright
- pngshot
- Kuio
- PSV-VSH MENU
- Vflux
- Repatch
- NoAVLS
- ds3vita
- ds4vita
Fortunately, TheHeroGAC believes in choice so you can choose not to install all the plugins listed above if not all of them interest you!
Conclusion
Quite obviously, there’s still a lot of other great homebrew available for the PSVita but if all were to be listed, this article would be extremely long! To get the homebrew listed above, simply follow the links below or the in-text hyperlinks.
This article includes a great deal of my personal opinion so please comment in a civil way if you disagree with my picks!
Adrenaline GitHub page: https://github.com/TheOfficialFloW/Adrenaline/releases/latest
VitaQuake III /talk page: https://wololo.net/talk/viewtopic.php?f=116&t=48955
Vita Homebrew Browser: github.com/devnoname120/vhbb/releases
AutoPlugin: https://github.com/theheroGAC/Autoplugin/releases/
Some homebrew that deserve honourable are the Whitelist hacks for the PSTV which allow you to play ALL PSVita games on it and the various open-source game ports by usineur, Rinnegatamante and rsn8887
Great! Now to wait for the hack.
Thanks for the heads up!
make the psvita great again lol
Very nice
How can you miss flppy birds?! I played it for hours. It’s so addicting.
The permanente hack for FW3.65 need edit the Kernel config skprx file for recognize sd2file? Or bring the fix un the newest soon
Nice, but you’ve forgot about the most important one:
https://img.joemonster.org/images/vad/img_44751/7bda9e3985f2f9ad8f2d429c675796a9.jpg
lool
Nice list, but I’d rather you put the link at the end of each description instead of piling them up at the end of the article.
First
Nice article. Lets see what other suggest in below comments.
Good job, I prefer Sudorku over Hendoku though.
https://github.com/ONElua/ONEMenu-for-PSVita this is also good
I already have all the basic emulator in bubbles using the vhbl home brews. I cant wait gor adrenaline. It will be so nice to play some PS1 and psp games on my vita.
Is there a link for the vita games?
Chocolate Doom is good too.
Thanks Aurora for your work, always bringing news of the scene so clearly. Don’t you think that this would be the ideal time to hold a new psvita homebrew contest, which along with TheFlow’s new hack would surely revitalize the scene, promoting new creations or improving many of the already existing ones? I think of the much desired N64 emulator, a good native port of DOSbox, ports of other games and open source tools, a better web browser, better native emulators etc etc … maybe we can collectively fund the contest so that there are prizes in different categories. I think the work of TheFlow has been something like an extra life for our psvitas … with this new hack and the abandonment by Sony perhaps the last but one that reopens the roads for the community. What do you think ??
I’m still on 3.60. I have a full 200 gig card so I’m wondering should I risk updating? I know when nonpdrm came out it removed my persona dlc, and bugged some of my Mai installed games.
Also if I should what needs to be done beforehand? Is there a save app that will backup all of my saves / activation? And do I need to update all of my old apps or remove them to prevent any risks of bricking my vita? The last time I did anything with it had been soon after I purchased the sd2vita v1. I never installed enso either just filled it with junk.
TROPHAX from Silica its a must have, where is PKGJ? omg!!!!!! only 1 and 5 worth it
What happened to not bringing in politics to wololo? Guess that bit with Net Neutrality wasn’t an exception after all.
Out of curiosity, silly question, is h-encore going to work better on 3.65, 3.67 or 3.68? Because I am on firmware 3.63 at the moment and I don’t really know to which one should I update to.
Adrenaline has been updated to 6.4!
Vita Homebrew Browser is BROKEN! Does NOT work!
Just wondering if Aurora is a Qanon fan?