You are currently browsing the monthly archive for June 2010.
It’s been confirmed by trusted sources that the upcoming PSP Firmware 6.30 patches the Patapon exploit, which is the vector to HBL. I know many people will come to us in the future, telling us they didn’t know about the exploit and foolishly upgraded…well that’s life…
Nobody can say if/when a new exploit will be discovered. So, as usual, if you like homebrews, DO NOT UPDATE TO 6.30.
Just when you thought the weekend couldn’t get any better, here’s a new revision of HBL. It only fixes a few minor issues (mainly, a memory leak in some cases), but I wanted those fixes to be in before I announced my side project for HBL: wMenu.
We, the dev team of HBL decided to not accept bug reports for the menu as part of bugs of the HBL. This is why we moved the menu as a separate application, to allow the HBL project to be free of any user interface. This should allow several menus to appear in time, and this will allow users to choose the interface they like. wMenu is my humble contribution to this, and hopefully you’ll like it. From now on, I’ll include it in my “distrib” compiled versions of HBL. I will not include it in the dev version, because it is currently slower than the default menu.
Tell me what you think 
Download HBL R92 and wMenu on the HBL download page, as usual.
wMenu is compatible with HBL 91 although HBL92 (or above, if you read this in the future) is recommended.
This new revision brings 2 major changes for the user: First, the menu is now a standard eboot. It means that if you are a homebrew coder, you can create your own menu with the usual SDK tools, and are not limited to the Patapon SDK anymore. Second, HBL is now able to come back to the menu once you quit a homebrew. This function is highly experimental for now, so don’t cry if the second homebrew you run doesn’t work as expected… This feature can be disabled by setting return_to_xmb_on_exit=1 in the file hbl/hbl_config.txt. I still recommend revision 85 for now if you are looking for maximum compatibility and performance, but revision 91 sure has some benefits
For those who haven’t seen it yet, here is a video of what it looks like (stay till the end of the video to see the “go back to menu” coolness )
I especially want to thank Noobz and Fanjita, as most of this new code is a ripoff of their eLoader. (If you have never heard of the noobz eLoader, you missed the PSP’s golden era )
If you own a unhackable PSP, it is very likely that you are running homebrews through our cool HBL project. Half-Byte Loader has a few issues here and there. One of them is that Wagic (0.12) doesn’t run “out of the box” with it.
It is actually very easy to run Wagic through HBL, there’s only one file to delete.
To run Wagic in HBL, delete or rename the file exception.prx from the WTH folder. Actually, you can delete everything except EBOOT.PBP and the “Res” folder. The game should then start flawlessly on HBL.
Enjoy this short video:
Oh, fans of the HBL project might have noticed that I am now able to come back to the menu and load other homebrews, a feature that people have been expecting for a while…well just teasing you here, it is still work in progress, but it should be available soon
Wagic can be downloaded here and it’s the best homebrew ever!
The long awaited release is finally here! It’s been a while, but don’t worry, as usual, it was worth it! I want to especially thank Dr.Solomat, Salmelo and abrasax for being the real people behind the latest Wagic improvements (guys, many thanks for both your involvement in the code and on the forums!). Also Thanks to Ilya B. For the amazing new graphics!
Is it still necessary to introduce Wagic? Often compared to commercial games for its replay value and quality, Wagic is a heroic fantasy card game, in which you fight as a wizard against the computer. As you win battles, you unlock new game modes and earn credits that allow you to improve your army. Wagic is community driven, entirely customizable (you can create themes, mods, even new rules), available in several languages, and open source. It currently runs on the Sony PSP, Windows, and Linux.
Ok, so what’s new this time? Well, lots of new cards (more than 700 new unique cards, which brings the total to more than 10000 playable cards – almost 5500 unique), some new graphics for the default theme, and a “Story mode” in Beta Version. I’ll talk about the story mode below, but let’s start with a full changelog:
This release has a new game mode, the story mode. You can give it a try, you will see that the example stories are actually a simple tutorial and a manual for the game. But these are only here to show you the possibilities that exist with the engine. It is now possible to tell an entire story within Wagic. Want to have epic battles with a cool scenario? Then go to the forums and we’ll help you create your own campaigns. The story mode is still very young, but with everyone’s ideas we plan to make it the “main” mode of Wagic. I’m not a good storyteller, but I’ll definitely improve the code if you need something and have interesting ideas! The story mode already allows the player to choose different paths in the story, earn awards for winning battles. New win conditions can easily be written with the rules engine, so you can even design challenging battles such as “win before the end of the turn”, etc…
The story mode is a completely new way to play wagic, but it’s up to you to turn it into THE way to play Wagic So give it a try and start writing your own campaign!
If you enjoy Wagic, please consider a donation. Thanks in advance!
(Please note that because of the growing size of the archive file, some themes have been removed from the wagic download. These files will be available again soon in a separate file)
A few days ago I submitted revision 90 to the valentine SVN. People have been asking me where to find revision 90, and, although you can find it in various places already, it’s probably fair to have it here as well.
I haven’t fully tested this version myself, and people have been reporting bugs in the new menu, so right now the version I recommend is still version 85. There were some important internal changes between revisions 85 and 90, but as far as I can tell, nothing that affects game compatibility (in a good or a bad way) for now.
Stay tuned, I’m back from holiday and will keep you updated every time we improve Half-Byte Loader.
Download here, as usual
As coyotebean revealed an update for the PSARDumper a few days ago, it appears the number of people in posession of a kernel exploit for the PSP is growing.
We already know that Team Typhoon has one (actually, they’ve had a HEN ready for newest firmwares for a while now)
It seems coyotebean has one too now, and I know from trusted sources that other people have a kernel exploit and are working on “solutions” for the newest PSP firmwares, including the PSP Go. (Don’t hold your breath, I heard nothing about making those public)
There is an implicit agreement among hackers that these exploits should not be disclosed, because kernel exploits have become extremely rare since firmware 6.00 (it is believed a major cleanup of Sony’s code happened at that time to protect the psp go), so it is quite likely that these kernel exploits are actually one single exploit (so revealing it would ruin the efforts of other teams that try to keep it secret). Also, depending on the hacker, kernel exploits are kept secret for personal and/or ethical reasons .
But the more people are aware of an exploit, the more difficult it gets to keep it secret. (yeah, I know, thanks captain obvious…). This is what happened for the Patapon exploit, that was found almost simultaneously by several teams, which led a kid to leak it by fear of being double-crossed.
Hacking brings two kinds of rewards: personal satisfaction of accomplishing a challenging task, and having other people know about it. When we worked on the HBL, we wanted to come up with the most polished product as possible. Our goal was to say : “no guys, it’s not just a Hello World this time, you can already run most homebrews” (of course because of the leak, that’s not exactly how it happened).
For Kernel exploits, I believe some people think pretty much the same way as I do. They want to release something as good as possible, so they’re keeping it secret as long as possible to keep working on it. But if somebody else reveals the same exploit, then your whole work is pretty much screwed. Whatever people tell, your own exploit will be in the shadows of the first guy who revealed the holy grail.
I’m pretty sure that kind of thoughts goes through the minds of hackers who have a kernel exploit. With the number growing, as it becomes more difficult to trust the “others”, one of them will end up revealing their work. Oh, and usually what happens after that is that all the other hackers insult him/her, officially because “that was the scene’s last kernel exploit, now everyone’s screwed” (which is often what they truely think), but also because internally they might be thinking “dude, I was ready before you were, I had the same f###ing exploit, if I had released it one day before you, I would be the one getting the fame and thanks, but I didn’t because I agreed this had to be kept secret, damn I hate your guts”
Good luck to all the guys who have a kernel exploit and fight to keep it secret…but I believe something will happen soon (don’t quote me on this, it’s not like I have a kernel exploit myself 
).
Edit: a link to the Wikipedia entry about the prisoner’s dilemma which is exactly what I’m talking about! Thanks atv’ 
In casual usage, the label “prisoner’s dilemma” may be applied to situations not strictly matching the formal criteria of the classic or iterative games, for instance, those in which two entities could gain important benefits from cooperating or suffer from the failure to do so, but find it merely difficult or expensive, not necessarily impossible, to coordinate their activities to achieve cooperation.
