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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?

If you ride the train or the subway, you’ve probably often seen those campaigns to respect “good manners” in public transports. Things such as “turn off your mobile phone”, and stuff like that. Tokyo is no exception, and a few months ago (maybe a year already?) Toyko Metro, the company in charge of Tokyo’s subway, started a quite aggressive campaign named “Ie de yarou” (Please do it at home). These posters show a bunch of people doing “bad” things on the train such as eating (please do it at home), being drunk (please do it at the bar), listening to loud music on their mp3 player (please do it at the night club), and so on…

I must admit that the latest one though is keeping me perplex…

What kind of message is it trying to convey? Please do not play video games on the train while sitting on your own luggage (instead of stealing old people’s seats) with your headphones in a place where you are not annoying anyone? This seriously doesn’t make sense. (They should rather focus on stupid salarymen who take the seats reserved for pregnant women and old people. Seriously, riding the train in any city is often similar to a jungle with nothing more than “animal” laws, but in Japan where people are usually so polite and nice, the shock is even bigger…)

So that’s it, I just think Tokyo Metro hates gamers. If you can explain to me how exactly that guy is a trouble to Tanaka-san (and his wife) sitting next to him, please comment!

Update: While I was writing this article, I finally understood what the issue was:  the guy’s partially blocking the door and prevents people from entering/leaving the train. Geez, they should hire a new designer…