Two years ago, the PSVita hacking scene was rocked to its core with the release of HENkaku. Many people wanted to see their own favourite homebrew running on the PSVita and so wishlists were created. In this article, we’ll be looking at what happened to the homebrew titles mentioned in wishlists posted on Wololo!

Introduction

For the sake of not making this article extremely long, only 2 wishlists will be tackled in this part. In other articles, more of the wishlists featured on Wololo will be tackled! This includes 5 (one of which is a community edition) GekiHEN wishlists by Typhoon_Neon and one wishlist by myself.

If you don’t know what GekiHEN is, it was a PSVita/PSTV homebrew contest in which developers could write homebrew and have the chance of winning a monetary prize. This contest ran from September 2016 to March 2017 and it brought us some great stuff such as Vita Homebrew Browser, pfba, various fan-made Zelda game ports and UAE4ALL.

The following colour scheme will be used:

• Green – Software that got a working native port/release.
• Orange – Software that didn’t get a native port/release but that can still be played on the PSVita through Adrenaline or other means. It may also be applied to titles which saw a similar piece of software being ported to the Vita.
• Red – Software that didn’t get a native port and couldn’t be played through any of the currently available PSVita emulators

Part I of the GekiHEN wishlist

 

This was the first HENkaku wishlist on this website and it featured some essential software that actually saw the light of day further on! Now, let’s look at the fate of the mentioned homebrew:

 

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  Plugin Wrapper for Legit Games – Nowadays, plugins like OclockVita and PSV VSH Menu work just fine on legit games and games with encrypted EBOOTs run via NoNpDrm 

• Exult for Vita – Unfortunately, Exult and none of the Ultima games with open-source ports ever got ported to the PSVita. However, you can enjoy ExultPSP on Adrenaline if you really want to play it!
• OpenTyrian – This one got ported quite quickly by Cpasjuste as the second GekiHEN entry!
• XBMC/Kodi – This didn’t see the light of day perhaps because of how difficult it is to implement. However, there is Vita Media Center if you wish to play videos on your PSVita without messing with QCMA!
• GemRB – GemRB never got ported to the PSVita/PSP so you’re stuck running Baldur’s Gate 2 and other games with this engine on your Android device or elsewhere.

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  Playing Prince of Persia on the PSVita!

• Prince of Persia – Like OpenTyrian, this one was ported quickly by Cpasjuste and was the third GekiHEN entry.
  • However, you’re better off playing usineur’s superior SDLPoP port of the game! Make sure you get version 1.5.1 of the port tho!

Quite surprisingly, only one entry in this wishlist is currently not playable/usable in any way, shape or form on the Vita! Perhaps Typhoon_Neon had an insight in the future when he wrote this or he was really good at influencing developers with his articles 😉

Part II of the GekiHEN wishlist

The first wishlist did pretty well with around 90 comments to date so it was a no-brainer that Typhoon_Neon wrote yet another one to please the community. Without further ado, let’s look at what happened to this list:

 

• DosBox – Like Typhoon_Neon, DosBox is one of the first PSP homebrews that I messed around with. DosBox for the PSVita is available as a RetroArch core that allows for key mapping but is still in pretty rough shape. Sadly, performance is said not to be great but I have no idea if it performs better than the PSP port or not.
• Descent – No native PSVita port for this one but you can play the official PS1 port via Adrenaline right now!
• PCSX-R – We have Adrenaline and that allows you to run PSP/PS1 games via the PSVita’s native ePSP emulator. Quite interestingly, there was a RetroArch core of this before Adrenaline was released.
  • That being said, there’s 0 reason to use PCSX-R today as the native PS1 emulator works much better!
• Bomberman – There is both an official PSP game called ‘Bomberman Legacy’ and a homebrew port by Rinnegatamante of a game called Dstroy which is a Bomberman-esque game. The latter even supports 4-way splitscreen multiplayer on the PSTV!
  

  The split-screen mode in Dstroy works pretty well and it’s great if you have a PSTV. There are many different themed grids in which you can blow your friend/s up!

• T.O.M.E – If you want to play Troubles of Maj’Eyal, look elsewhere as there was never any talk of a port for this.
• XL Engine – This never got ported either but perhaps a port would be possible with Rinnegatamante’s VitaGL which brought us Half Life 1. That being said, some games, such as Star Wars: Dark Forces, which use this engine are available on the PS1 and as a result, can be played via Adrenaline.

Like the one above, the entries in this wishlist fared quite well with only 2 software titles not being available on the PSVita in any way!

 

Conclusion

Stay tuned for Part II of this wishlist throwback as it will be available shortly 🙂 If you want me to analyse other wishlists, simply leave a comment here or on Twitter!