December 2009

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Portuguese and Italian translations updates, and translators needed

December 28, 2009 in Uncategorized | 18 comments

Users vesgo and icarus respectively updated the Portuguese and Italian translations of Wagic, to better match version 0.10.1. If you want a better experience in one of these languages, download the corresponding file and put it in your Res/lang folder in Wagic:

Portuguese Update for Wagic 0.10.1

Italian Update for Wagic 0.10.1

I also see on various forums that people expect the cards to be translated in Wagic. This is actually doable, and quite easy, we only need motivated people to work on this. The system is fairly simple, and you have examples with French and German in the foler Res/lang. Just have a look for example at Res/lang/fr_cards.txt

Looks easy right? Name of the card, “equals” symbol, then translation in your language. Just name the file **_cards.txt (for example it_cards.txt for Italian) and put it into Res/lang, and you’re done. Of course, if you go through that kind of work, don’t hesitate to post it on our forums so that other players can enjoy your work too. By the way, the French and German cards are not entirely translated either, so if you want to help updating those, that will be greatly appreciated too

Fake!! JPEG “Exploit” on OFW 6.20 by tontunaspi

December 27, 2009 in hacking | 4 comments

Damn I miss the days when we would all rely on Freeplay to debunk lame youtube attempts at “hacks”. Anyways, since Freeplay’s youtube Channel is gone, somebody’s got to do the job.

So, you might have seen this video on major PSP news sites:

Well, too bad, it’s as fake as fake can be.

cypriotbro gave me enough information to understand that this thing is fake, but a video says much more than text, so here’s my own hack:

Pretty cool, huh? Too bad it’s a crappy fake. The “Fake” file is courtesy of Ruyor at upsp.ws’s forums. You can download it there and try for yourself.

It seems the “thumbnail” generation function on the PSP has some kind of bug: A black image can have a green thumbnail in some circumstances. I wasn’t aware of that bug, so the fake almost got me when Magixien showed me the video. I turns out the bug doesn’t happen on older firmwares (I was testing on 5.00 m33).

So yeah, nothing to see here people, you can go back to sleep, and insult tontunaspi on his youtube Channel, lamers deserve it. Datel’s exploit is much more interesting.

As usual, you should not trust something unless you can test it by yourself, or if the people announcing it have been long enough on the scene to be trusted. Remember: so far, the PSP has never been hacked by somebody who “came out of the blue”, only by people who were “known” on the scene.

tontunaspi

Wagic donations – Where the money goes

December 26, 2009 in Wagic | 5 comments

I want to thank people who have donated in the past and who will donate in the future for Wagic.
I have a job that pays for the server so money is not a problem for me, but as a matter of principle, I want Wagic to be able to provide the funds for its own needs. (You have probably seen that I put ads recently on the website to help with that).

That being said, I don’t use the donations money for the server. The donations received in 2008 were initially supposed to go to team Typhoon for the release of the HEN, but they agreed on this money going to the Red Cross instead. I thought this was a very cool idea.

Here’s how the money received in 2009 was used:

A donation was made to the Wikimedia foundation. The Wikimedia foundation is the association behind Wikipedia. I’ve been using Wikipedia for years, and I strongly believe in the freedom and sharing of knowledge. Wikipedia is one of the most famous sites in the world, and people can easily forget how fast it could disappear if it ever lost its independence.
A major part of the donation money was sent to the Red Cross, again. It is one of the rare humanitarian organizations that accept paypal donations. If you know other trusted organizations that accept paypal, please give me their name. I am especially interested in organizations that dedicate their work to children.
I bought a book called “La Bataille HADOPI”. It is a book about the recently voted “three strikes, you’re out” law in France. I strongly believe that the current copyright laws in many countries of the world are completely obsolete and should be thought again. I think that the recent laws voted in Europe such as the French HADOPI law make things even worse. The benefits for this book were sent to the French association “La Quadrature du Net“, which fights for fundamental rights on the internet, including the right to share culture. (I unfortunately can’t recommend the book, as most of the articles inside are extremely biased)

I’m extremely happy if Wagic can contribute to good things. It feels like I brag about it, but I mostly want donators to know where the money goes… Wagic was built using shared knowledge and tools, and I think this is a way of “giving back” somehow. Well, that, and the fact that Wagic is free and open source, of course

One of the donators suggested that I buy a Mac and start working on an iPhone port. I am far from having enough donations for that, but the idea of an iPhone port (through cydia, of course, not an official app) is nice, so if you’re an iPhone dev and think you can work on a port, please, please do so and/or contact me, I’ll gladly help! (On a side note, there are games on the AppStore named Wagic, they are NOT related to us in any way)

Merry Christmas – Wagic 0.10.1 released!

December 24, 2009 in Wagic, release | 13 comments

MTG10

Ho ho ho, here’s our present to all Homebrew fans: A new version of Wagic, full of Christmas joy!

MTG5 We’ve worked very hard in the past two months to fix bugs and add features, so I hope you’ll enjoy this new version. Many thanks go to the people who have given their time for this release, especially Abrasax, Daddy32, Dr.Solomat, Ilya B, J, Jeck, Lakeesha, Leungclj, Psyringe, Yeshua. I also especially want to thank Raphael for fixing the purple screen bug, a bug that had been in Wagic for several months now.

What is wagic?

Wagic is a fan-made heroic-fantasy card game, in which you fight with your army against the computer. As you win battles, you earn credits that allow you to improve your deck and unlock more cards, and extra game modes. Wagic started as a small project, but has grown over the years, and is now often compared to commercial video games for its replay value and its high quality graphics.

Wagic is free, runs on Windows, Linux, and the Sony PSP. It is available in many languages, and fully customizable. you can create your own themes, your own cards, and even your own rules. Because Wagic is community driven and open source, it gets regularly improved with original contents and mods.

What’s new?

MTG3

MTG4

MTG2

It has become difficult for me to summarize a release. It’s not only about new cards anymore, every release seems to bring more new stuff than the previous one! The major new features for this release are the “trophy room” and the “tasks mode”. The trophy room is a cool place where you can see details about all the sets and modes you have unlocked. The tasks mode is a very fun way to get more credits when you play: In the shop, press “start”, and see the “available tasks”. They are usually pretty clear on what you need to do to get extra credits. The tasks require you to build very clever decks that have a very specific purpose, such as winning a battle with insane amounts of life

Of course, we also added many (many!) cards in this release. Actually, we added as much cards as we could, and Wagic now has more than 5000 cards you can play with, in more than 50 sets.

You think that’d be enough for a new release, but we didn’t stop here. Wagic 0.10.1 has two new themes included: Final Saga by Ilya B (that’s now the default theme), and the Christmas theme by Lakeesha. There are also 50 new opponents, which brings the total of AI decks to 100. Overall, unlocking all the modes/cards and “beating” Wagic should take you a fair amount of time, definitely more than it takes to beat Uncharted 2

And so many other things: ingame music, bug fixes, language selection (no need for international players to wait for a patch anymore)…

Complete Changelog:

More than 1500 new cards. Wagic now allows you to play with 5149 cards, from more than 50 expansions, including Magic 2010, Zendikar, Revised, Alara, Conflux, shadowmoor,…
Added a “cheat” mode (don’t ask, I didn’t add it, I can’t tell you how to unlock it )
Deck statistics improvements
Bug fixes with audio
InGame music
Language is now an option, no need to wait for patches, you can choose English, German, Italian, French, Spanish, or Portuguese
New parser abilities: PreventAllcombatDamage, becomes…, horsemanship, myTurnOnly, asSorcery, myUpkeepOnly(and similar…), 0 mana activated abilities now work, equipment, threshold, cycling, protection from(target), nofizzle, autohand, autograveyard
Minor AI improvements, and bug fixes
New theme: final Saga (thanks to Ilya B)
New theme: Christmas (thanks to Lakeesha)
External rules system now allows you to create your own rules. Check mtg.txt in res/rules
“Purple Screen of despair” issue solved, thanks to Raphael and Yeshua.
New feature: Trophy Room
New feature: Tasks. Get more credits by fulfilling the quests given to you by the shopkeeper!
hundreds of bug fixes for specific cards

Note for beginners:

Wagic requires you to know the basic rules of the game that inspired it. If it’s you’re first time playing, you might feel that the decks of your opponents are too tough. I suggest in that case to play against the 10 first decks of the “choose opponent” list, as these decks are historically less strong than the other ones. Good luck

Download:

If you like Wagic, please consider making a donation. I do my best to use the money wisely. Thanks in advance!

Go to the download page

As usual, enjoy Wagic!

Confirmed:Datel hacks all models of PSP & PSPGo for Christmas

December 24, 2009 in hacking | 24 comments

Before PSPGo owners start jumping of joy all over the place, let me be clear: this information is probably not useful for you if you thought you would get the joys of homebrews and underground PSP on your PSPGo or on your PSP3000 or on your TA88v3.

A few days ago Datel announced a new Action Replay software, compatible with all models of PSPs, including the PSPGo. The PSP scene was quite suspicious regarding this announcement. Today the product page features a Demo that anyone can download and try. I tried this Demo, other people tried the full product, and, yes, Action Replay runs on an official firmware.

It means that Datel wasn’t bluffing, and it also means that their code is signed. Only Sony is supposed to know how to sign EBOOTs, so we could think that Datel has some kind of agreement with Sony, but the documentation of the Action Replay is clear on that part:

Action Replay PSP is a 100% unofficial product and is NOT sponsored, endorsed or approved by Sony, nor any games developer or publisher.

To further confirm this, after installing the demo, you can have a look at your memory stick: Action Replay gets installed in the “UPDATE” subfolder of GAME, which is usually reserved for official Sony updates. It therefore means that Datel has figured out how to encrypt/sign EBOOTS, but needs their product to be in the UPDATE folder for some reason (easier to encrypt? Use of some specific access granted to this folder?)

Now, this is not very useful for hackers (and even less for pirates, ha). Yet another encrypted EBOOT to analyze will not bring anything. However, Action Replay allows users to patch memory with codes, so maybe something can be crafted in order to inject unsigned code in the PSP through Action Replay, which could unlock (at least) user mode (and therefore homebrews).

For the time being, it seems Datel has done what hackers have been trying to do for almost 5 years: figuring out the PSP’s encryption process. I’ll quote Silverspring here:

Seems they have done it for real. If so, it’s finally game over for SCE. There’s nothing they can do to stop it.
Probably fw updates will attempt to block it, however all Datel need to do is release an new update. They can sign any code they want now.
They’ve finally done what was the ‘Holy Grail’ of the PSP scene. Pretty impressive work

Who knows, maybe Datel will now come up with their own Custom firmware…

Christmas Theme by Lakeesha

December 23, 2009 in Wagic, release | No comments

This is probably the first time we get a seasonal Theme for Wagic, and this one not only perfectly fits the Christmas season, it is also very well done and funny, so I hope you’ll fall in love with it the way I did.

I’ll cut the crap, screenshots and a download link are all you need:

MTG0

MTG1

MTG2

MTG3

Download

To install, just unzip the Christmas folder to your WTH/Res/themes folder, then in the game, go to options > User and choose the “Christmas” theme

don’t forget to go to the original thread and thank Lakeesha for this awesome work!

By the way Wagic’s next release is coming real soon, so stay tuned

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