May 2010

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Half Byte Loader revision 85  

May 26, 2010 in HBL, release | 95 comments

After discussing with the other devs, we’ve taken the decision to revert an important change from the HBL. Basically I wasn’t satisfied with the changes made in revision 80. They are good changes for the future of HBL, but they were too experimental for now. For these reason, the project is now split into two versions. We will try to keep the trunk version roughly operational, while the “p5″ branch will contain experimental developments. When we are satisfied with the experimental stuff, we will merge them back into the main project.

Anyways, it means more headaches for us with several versions to maintain, but hopefully more stability for the end users from now on. Revision 85 is basically revision 79 + all the important bug fixes from revisions 80 to 83 + a few extra fixes. There is no compatibility changes, but I’m happy to say that this is now the version I recommend to use. It fixes some issues with Wagic, Daedalus, gpsp, that appeared in revisions 80~83. It also fixes the issues with the power button (sleep mode)

Enjoy this release, meanwhile I have a horse race to win in Red Dead Redemption :)

Download here



Can Half-byte loader run isos?  

May 25, 2010 in HBL, security | 70 comments

I was of course expecting it from the start, we’ve received lots of help and great feedback when we released the Half Byte Loader for Patapon, but as usual there’s also a minority of people (who tend to believe they speak for everyone) who are dissatisfied with the idea that the Half Byte loader doesn’t run isos.

The idea is floating on the internet that I am against iso loaders, and that it is why there is no iso loader available for HBL. This is wrong in many ways.

First, I am not especially against iso loaders. I am against piracy but I believe those are two separate things. The fact that they are associated together is not directly my concern. What is true though is that I don’t care about isos. Actually I don’t use my PSP to play commercial videogames, or so rarely that I’m usually fine with the UMD format. In other words, I don’t mind if people code a HEN or an ISO Loader for the patapon exploit, but I won’t work on that myself because I don’t care. So people who contact me with (generally stupid) ideas on how to load ISOs can stop right now, I don’t even read those emails.

Secondly, it is not “because wololo or m0skit0 or ab5000 are against isos on their exploit” that no iso loader is made available through the Patapon exploit. It is because it is not technically doable. Loading isos (probably) requires kernel access and the Patapon exploit is a user mode exploit. Of course, if someone wants to prove me wrong and code an iso loader in user mode, please feel free to do it, I’ll be sure to test it and confirm it.

Finally, ALL videos I’ve seen on youtube so far claiming they have a HEN or an ISO Loader running through the patapon exploit or the Half-Byte Loader are fakes. The only true publicly known (but not available) HEN for the new PSP Models that I know about is the one showcased a while ago by Davee and Team Typhoon. And as many people know, Team Typhoon took the decision to not release this HEN.

Well, the conclusion is “stop believing everything you see on youtube”. A Mobile phone can’t bake popcorns. HBL Can’t run isos.

Half Byte Loader Revision 81  

May 22, 2010 in HBL | 13 comments

I have mixed feelings about this revision. I’ve been having troubles using the power button and home button to sleep the psp or quit HBL since revision 80, and revision 81 does not fix that. Revision 81 is just some code cleanup and a few bug fixes. If revision 79 is working fine for you, I do not recommend revision 81. I’m almost reluctant to post the binaries here, but even if I don’t other people will, so…

This revision does not improve game compatibility, for the time being I recommend revision 79.

Download here

Half Byte Loader a.k.a. HBL is a tool that allows you to play homebrew games on any PSP. This includes famous emulators such as gpsp for the Game Boy Advance, Picodrive for the Sega Megadrive, Daedalus for the Nintendo 64, ScummVM for old-school adventure games, and many other unofficial applications. Half Byte Loader works on all models of PSP including the PSP Go, and is compatible with all firmwares up to 6.20

Half Byte Loader R79  

May 13, 2010 in HBL, release | 64 comments

I’m excited to announce a new revision of Half Byte Loader that brings more compatibility, and some features that people have been expecting for a while. Let’s skip the details, but this revision improves compatibility for picodrive, gpsp (kai 3.2 is the one I used for my tests), and scummVM.

A major change of this revision is a system of config files and override config files. A basic config file hbl_config.txt goes in the hbl folder, and override config files can go in each homebrew’s folder.

Picodrive is a good example because it is the reason I added this functionality. Picodrive uses the function sceIoMkdir to create folders on your memory stick, when it runs. Unfortunately, Patapon does not have that function, which means HBL needs to “estimate” it. If you’ve been using HBL for a while, you now know that estimations sometimes fail. Estimations lead to crashes, crashes lead to anger, anger leads to…errr, nevermind.

But the good thing is: you can manually create these folders, and bypass this function call in Picodrive. This is done with a simple configuration file. You can find this file in hbl_config_samples/picodrive/hbl_config.txt. Just copy it in your picodrive folder, and voilà, picodrive will not crash at that specific point. HOWEVER, there is an important drawback: if you set that specific parameter in the config file, it means the function to create folders will not work anymore. For Picodrive it is not a big deal since you can create them manually, but for other games it might be a problem, which is why I set the system up so that you can tweak the config on a per game basis. For the time being, the config file only allows to play with sceIoMkdir, and also to set your Homebrew path (check hbl/hbl_config.txt), but in the future we might expand this configuration system to improve homebrew compatibility. Of course, feel free to help us with the code on that part!

Hmmm, I guess that’s it, improved compatibility for 3 major homebrews (and probably for others that I haven’t tested), possibility to choose where you put your homebrews, and advanced configuration system.

Enjoy :)

download here

Half Byte Loader revision 69  

May 8, 2010 in HBL | 12 comments

Revision 69 of the Half Byte loader is now available for download on the usual page. There are a few bug fixes and the overall stability is better, which increases the chances to load homebrews correctly. We know that HBL is still a lot of hit and miss but we are trying to improve it progressively. Enjoy this release :)

I almost missed it…  

May 4, 2010 in Uncategorized | 1 comment

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

Bye-bye Ubuntu…  

May 4, 2010 in Linux | 32 comments

People who’ve been following my blog know I hate Apple. What I talk much rarely about though are my issues with Linux. With years as a software developer, I’ve progressively become a strong believer in Open Source and interoperability. What sucks is that my favorite OS so far is Windows XP…

I’ve tried several Linux distributions in the past, and they all failed on me at some point. A few months ago I installed kubuntu 9 on my laptop (a 6 years old machine I use to watch videos, surf the internet, and software development).

Everything was fine…I mean, Kubuntu’s performance was far from what I could achieve with Windows XP (HD video is a no-go with kubuntu on my machine, while on XP it’s ok), but I lived with the idea that it’s the price to pay (especially with an Intel graphics card) if I want to benefit from the cool features of KDE (ripping an Audio CD in Konqueror is an extremely cool experience), Amarok, and of course all the development tools.

Anyway, 2 days ago Kubuntu suggested me to upgrade to the latest version, Kubuntu 10 (Lucid Lynx). I clicked on upgrade, the system installed all the updates, rebooted, and crashed.

I tried lots of things, it simply seems Ubuntu 10 doesn’t support my hardware anymore. At first I thought the upgrade had failed because of some of my configuration files, but neither the Live CD of Ubuntu or Kubuntu work… Basically whenever the system tries to start the X window manager, it crashes. Incompatibility with my graphics card? I don’t know, and the log files from Xorg or dmesg don’t seem to give any useful information or error.

For the first time in months, I booted this machine on Windows XP. And guess what, it worked fine, like it always did for the past 6 years.

I still need a Linux distribution on this machine though. I use some of the tools there on a regular basis so I can’t live without a Linux machine. I’ll give a try to other distributions, suggestions are welcome.

(For those interested, my computer is an Amilo M1405. The graphics card is an intel i810. If people with the same hardware configuration could report success/failure on Ubuntu 10, that would be great)

Half Byte Loader revision 65  

May 2, 2010 in HBL, release | 11 comments

I’m now confident that HBL loads a fair amount of homebrews. It is far from being complete of course, but we are improving it on a regular basis, and it is basically in the state in which I was expecting it to be the day we would announce it publicly.

I can run a modified version of Wagic flawlessly with the HBL on a PSPGo with firmware 6.20. The current version of Wagic (0.11.0) should run fine with HBL as long as you delete the files Res/sound/*.mp3, but if it doesn’t, please be patient and wait for Wagic 0.12, which will definitely be more compatible with the PSPGo.

There is still lots of work to do with the half byte loader, but I’m happy with it enough to open a dedicated page for it here: http://wololo.net/wagic/hbl

This page will contain binaries compiled by me. I will update it at the same time as I upload any of my changes to the SVN, so you can expect that page to contain the latest version for HBL before any other site! (whenever I’m the one submitting changes, obviously…)

Actually, this time, the page contains a binary that is not yet in the SVN, (although it will be in a few minutes),  revision 65, so you basically get an exclusive HBL from the future if you happen to read this post a few miutes after I posted it :)

To celebrate, here’s a video of a PSPGo running Doom. Previous versions of the HBL already allowed this, but it’s always cool to confirm it visually :)

Download HBL Revision 65 here