Uncategorized

I try to avoid posting personal stuff in this blog, but I’ve received many emails asking if everything was ok for me. Japan was hit by a massive earthquake yesterday. Luckily I’m on holiday in China so I actually learned about it when I saw a massive amount of emails from old friends. My wife is in Tokyo but I could talk to her yesterday and she is fine.

Thanks to everyone for your kind words, and my thoughts go to the families who were hit by this disaster.

I’m still away for a little while, and connecting here at the hotel is quite a pain, so I still can’t post any scene-related updates… my only advice would be to be careful with the permanent-hen thingy until it’s clear what are the benefits of such a technique. As for everything that is work in progress, don’t go and brick your psp if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Starting today, the official price of the PSP 3000 went down to 129.99$ in the US, which is a nice price cut if you still don’t have one. And you might want to install a Homebrew Enabler or a Light Custom Firmware on it, while you’re at it.

Sony also mentioned in the press release that the PSP now has almost 600 titles to play with, including some major hits such as Assassin’s Creed Bloodlines, LittleBigPlanet, or Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker for 19.99$. (Note: as I type this, these 3 games are actually available for less than 15$ on Amazon)

This is probably a way for Sony to get rid of the last stocks of PSP before they start massive promotion of the upcoming NGP, but given the good game library of the PSP and the price, it sounds like a good deal to me (that, and the fact that most PSPs are hackable nowadays, there’s no fear of getting one that wouldn’t run homebrews)

Unlike the PSP Go, the PSP 3000 supports UMD games, which can be found for relatively cheap on the second-hand market. Despite being less portable than the PSPGo, the PSP3000 has many good points compared to its sister

source: ign

I wish a happy new year 2011 to everyone reading this blog

Many thanks go to the PSP scene, in particular all devs, testers, and users of Wagic and HBL. These two projects have been a major part of my life for the past 3 years, and they wouldn’t be so cool without the support of the community.

Thanks to people who donated for Wagic and HBL. This year, part of the money was used in a PS3 dongle (which I gave away on this blog), and I sent the rest to Wikipedia and the Red Cross.

• (From the wikipedia FAQ) Wikipedia is the world’s largest and most popular encyclopedia. It’s online, free to use for any purpose, and free of advertising. Wikipedia contains more than 17 million volunteer-authored articles in over 265 languages, and is visited by more than 408 million people every month, making it the fifth most-popular site in the world. It is a collaborative creation that has been added to and edited by millions of people during the past nine years: anyone can edit it, at any time. It has become the largest collection of shared knowledge in human history. The people who support it are united by their love of learning, their intellectual curiosity, and their awareness that we know much more together, than any of us does alone.
• Red Cross: The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement is an international humanitarian movement with approximately 97 million volunteers, members and staff worldwide which was founded to protect human life and health, to ensure respect for all human beings, and to prevent and alleviate human suffering, without any discrimination based on nationality, race, sex, religious beliefs, class or political opinions.

In 2010, we released 4 major updates to Wagic (the latest one is 0.14.1, it rocks and I highly recommend you download it, it’s hundreds of hours of fun for free). 3 user mode exploits were publicly released (Patapon, Hot shots golf, Minna no sukkiri) and you’ve seen HBL growing from a proof of concept to a full blown exploit-independent loader that supports 90% of homebrews. The year ended with a bang with the release of Total_Noob’s Hen, the first time we got Kernel access on the PSP Go, and the symbol of freedom for all users who had been waiting since the last kernel exploit by Davee almost 2 years ago.

And guess what? Despite this, you’ll still find people to say that the PSP scene is dead (of course, people who’ve been in the scene long enough know that the scene has been said to be dead for the past 4 years already…I think the first time I read “the scene is dead” is when firmware 1.51 was released )

For new year’s eve I had to watch Arashi for hours with my wife and her family… how about you?

We had a banner contest a month ago for our forums. The winner has been decided a few weeks ago, but my laziness postponed the actual release of the new banner. But it’s now ready and you can see our new shiny forums here!

Congrats and thanks a lot to kafa1942 for his awesome banner and his help with updating our forum’s css, it’s definitely a great change compared to the previous default phpBB banner

Also many thanks to everyone who participated to the contest!

As I mentioned earlier, Jeerum released a major Demo exploit at the worst possible time earlier today.

some1 had been working with m0skit0 and JJS on porting HBL to this exploit. It is unfortunate that the release has to happen like this, but some1 had to release his files much earlier than expected because of the leak.

You can download HBL for the sukkiri exploit here (recommended link) or here (mirror). I haven’t tested it yet, and we will be working on a “proper” release in the days to come. If everything goes well, we will probably drop support for the previous exploits (the golf ones at least), in favor of this one.

This release makes HBL work on 6.35, in theory (haven’t tested yet)

We have an ongoing contest to get a new banner on /Talk. We received lots of very impressive entries, and now’s the time to vote.

My apologies to all the great banners that didn’t make it to this first public round, congratulations to those who are still in the race, and thanks to everyone for the awesome entries!

Everyone can get to choose the future look of our forum, so join the fun here!

Several trusted sources have confirmed to me that 6.35 blocks the hot shots golf exploit.

If you use your psp for homebrews, I highly suggest you don’t upgrade until we come up with a new solution

Sony announced an upcoming release for a new firmware 6.35 very soon.

This firmware will add compatibility for Qriocity, a soon to be released online music service (remember when Sony registered that name a while ago?)

I would be surprised if this firmware patches Total_Noob’s kernel exploit, but it will probably patch the Hotshots golf exploit. I’m not too worried though, we have other cards up our sleeves

I want to thank Sony for keeping updated with some (relatively) meaningful content for the PSP (I mean, not only security patches). Although I probably won’t upgrade in a while, it is nice to see that our console is getting some love, so, thanks for that Sony.

Source Playstation blog, psp-hacks.com (also thanks to Muffinheadicus for the tip!)

As most of you probably noticed, our banner on /talk is…well it’s the default phpbb banner, which kind of sucks

Some of the members of our forums started a banner contest a while ago, and I finally found the time to come up with some rules and a deadline. If you think you have what it takes, or just want to show your graphics skills, join the forum and submit your own banner.

Entries will be subject to a vote by all members of the forum, and the winner will become our official banner for the /talk community.

The deadline is December the 5th, so you have 2 weeks to come up with something good. For more details on the rules, and how to submit your entry, go here

Have fun

Update: many of you reported that Sony claimed this product is a fake. Try to remember the last time Sony said “yes, it’s true” to rumors about their new products. The answer is “never”. It’s their job to say that the product does not exist. It’s engadget’s job to reveal stuff. Who do you trust? The site who revealed the iPhone4, or the Sony guys whose job is to lie and control information?

The famous site engadget.com got their hands on a prototype of the upcoming PSP Phone, and confirmed it is real. Judging by the pictures, they got access to a debug version of the phone, but the final product could be released before the end of the year (although 2011 sounds more likely).

The device is apparently much more powerful than the PSP, and will most likely ship with Android 3.0. Will it be compatible with PSP Games? There’s a high chance Sony will try to leverage the PSN with this phone too. Engadget mention a “Sony Marketplace”, this might be a dedicated version of the PSN…

Image from Engadget.com

Source: engadget.com

Today is the day against DRMs. Although having days for this and that is pretty silly, I guess it’s good to remind people that DRMs are a huge danger for the future of mankind’s knowledge and culture.

(I won’t mention Steeve Jobs this time to avoid scoring a Godwin point… Although if you want to see what it looks like when Charybdis criticizes Scylla I highly recommend his blog post about Flash)

If you don’t understand why DRMs are evil, you can read one of my old posts on the subject, what happened to me when I tried to honestly rent a movie from Sony’s PSN

For a month and a half now I’ve fantasized about this release. I didn’t expect it would happen like that…

Anyways, as you probably know by now, malloxis leaked an exploit for the Patapon2 demo on the PSP a few hours ago. The good news is:  Sony can’t patch it unless they do a firmware upgrade, so PSPGo owners who want to get the joys of homebrews can have hopes, as long as they don’t upgrade (no doubt a patch will be out soon).

The bad news is: we are not ready. Our hope was to release a full working eLoader for everyone to enjoy homebrews, but this is not going to happen yet. Instead, we’ve decided with m0skit0 to go public in order to get help.

What we have currently is a partially working eLoader. It loads some homebrews, most of them crash at the loading screen, nothing that a player would call “interesting”. So this is for devs only. Documentation is poor, but we’ll get there.

We are publicly asking for help on developing this beast. If you think you can help, first try to compile the eLoader, understand its inner working, and load a homebrew. Then improve it and send us a patch. I’ll open a forum here to discuss these matters, but another one already exists on m0skit0′s forums as well.

Here is the project’s SVN:

http://code.google.com/p/valentine-hbl/

For non devs, here’s some hope, a video demonstrating that Wagic almost loads fine through this exploit (again, don’t whine, it looks like crap, because we haven’t had enough time to work on that…but at least that’s proof we’re getting somewhere)

So if you don’t know already, an exploit for the demo of patapon2 was released by malloxis today.

Although I’m always happy when new exploits are found, this saddens me deeply because that’s not how things were supposed to be. For the record, malloxis found a crash in the game patapon 2, and was able to overwrite ra. That was back in February. I wrote the binloader with the help of N00b81 (as Davee would say, not that it’s difficult, but still), the SDK, adapted the hello world, based on Sparta’s SDK by Freeplay and mattiaz. To prove it, I have all the necessary files on a SVN (currently private), and this article on how to write a binary loader that I wrote after adapting the binloader.

There was an agreement with malloxis that this exploit had to be kept secret unless we could come up with something “useful” for it. But this confirms that the PSP scene has trust issues, so, way to go malloxis, probably nobody will help you anymore (and, let’s face it, you need help when it comes to these things).

M0skit0 and myself have been working on adapting m0skit0′s eLoader for this thing. It’s far from being ready yet, but it doesn’t hurt anymore to announce it I guess.

I want to apologize to the following people: maku, Flyer, pspLow, who all independently found the same exploit and accepted my recommendations of not releasing the name of the game until something was ready. I also want to apologize to the scene, for this exploit will probably be patched in Sony’s next firmware while we have nothing useful yet. Blame the guy who leaked the exploit.

from    wagic thehomebrew <wagic.the.homebrew@gmail.com>
to    malloxis <XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX>
date    Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 9:59 AM
subject    Re: Project Valentine: current status
mailed-by    gmail.com

Cool, I actually have the files on my harddrive at work:
attached is:
-encrypted savedata with the binloader
-hello world h.bin (to put in ms0:/h.bin)
-source code for the binLoader.

Note that all I did was adapting the code from SpartaSDK, so if you want to see how it is done I suggest you look at the spartasdk (google for it), I just changed the addresses to match valentine.

The hello world itself is roughly the same as the one in spartaSDK, I just changed the text to put our names

Please don’t leak that, I trust you on that

wololo

Many people have played Wagic 0.10.1 and don’t want to lose their progress while updating to 0.11.1. Well, the process is simple: install the latest version of Wagic (0.11.1) to a new folder, and copy the following folders from your 0.10.1 folder to the 0.11.1 folder:

• player
  
• profiles
• settings

And that’s it

I haven’t tested it myself, but this should keep your collection, your credits, your decks, and the list of unlocked decks and modes you had unlocked in 0.10.1.

Oh, by the way, we added the linux binaries for 0.11.1 in the download section

OK, so we had a system upgrade last week, and apparently our server didn’t really appreciate it, so wololo.net was down today, but we fixed it (’cause we rock!) hopefully this won’t happen too frequently.

Oh, and, of course, the CFW from Mad Daemon was a fake, but that was quite obvious from the start, right?