Hey everyone, I’m back from holidays and will try to catch up by the end of the week on the stuff I missed in the past 2 weeks. In particular, I hope to have some time in the next few days to investigate the Snes9xTYL issues in the Super Collpase 3 release of VHBL.
You are currently browsing the archive for the Uncategorized category.
Update: Ok guys, that was of course an April Fools joke, I have no plan to leave the scene. congrats to those who saw that the first letters of each paragraph spelled the word “Fools”, which was not an insult to you guys, just a way to hint at the joke. Next year, I’ll try something less obvious I guess :p
For a while now I’ve been thinking about leaving the PSP/Vita scene. I’ve been active on the PSP scene for more than 5 years, first as a homebrew user, then as a homebrew programmer, then as a hacker, and recently focusing on blogging/managing the community as well as exploring the new PS Vita. It’s been a fun ride, but everything has to end one day or the other.
On the one hand, these 5 years have been some of the most exciting in my life. I’ve met plenty of awesome people, some of them who left before me, some of them who will leave after me. I’ve created a homebrew I’m proud of, which hopefully will keep going on, I’ve directly contributed to opening the PSP 3000, the PSP Go, and the PS Vita to homebrews, I’ve organized the biggest PSP homebrew competition ever, and I’m proud to think I’ve helped people gathering knowledge on these systems, through my tutorials and the /talk community.
On the other hand, all of this takes lots of time, and I’ve had my share of pressure recently with the Vita exploits. It seems the community is not ready for more hacks, and I understood the message.
Last but not least, I want to thank everybody who’s helped me in the past 5 years, it’s been a blast.
So long, PSP scene.
If you tried to visit wololo.net yesterday or today, you might have ran into issues. The site was down for more than 12h over the past 48h. I’m investigating the root cause. The FBI or Sony are not taking us down as far as I know 
It’s the end of the year, Christmas is here, and “traditionally” for me it’s time to summarize what I’ve done with the money coming from this website.
Read the rest of this entry »
Developer SKFU is back with an update to his PS Vita Firmware xTractor application, an application designed to extract the files inside the playstation Vita Firmware (duh…). Now that the Vita firmwares are publicly available, this application is becoming more interesting for more devs.
The new “download firmware” option simply opens your browser to the official Sony update xml file, itself containing URLs that you can copy/paste to download the firmwares to your PC. I tried it on the JP firmware 1.5, and, surely enough, it does extract the firmware files from the archive, including readable ones such as licence.xml or version.txt. Most of the other files are probably encrypted though, but that’s already a first step.
download
A few weeks ago, we started a quick poll on /talk, to know what portable devices people in our community would be interested to buy next…
Read the rest of this entry »
I just read about Steve Job’s death and thought it was some kind of prank related to the iPhone 4S. But since Apple’s official site has it on their main page…
I was never an Apple fan, or rather, I’ve been an Apple hater for as long as I can remember. Nevertheless the news came as a shock, even a guy who’s probably one of the richest in the world cannot prevent death at such a young age.
Steve Jobs, I didn’t really like your products and I hate your company, but you’ve inspired lots of good things in the tiny world of computers and geeky gadgets. Rest in peace.
This is by far my biggest project ever. It literally took years of planning, and months of development. Although I wasn’t directly involved in most of the development phase (I was only needed for the early stages, my wife did the rest of the development), I will be actively maintaining it and make sure bugs are fixed quickly.
Well, I don’t plan to release it publicly, so you wouldn’t care, but I plan to spend lots of time on this project in the years to come, so as a counterpart I will need to reduce my involvement in the PSP scene.
My new project, Wololo 2.0. It already required roughly 9 months of development, but there's still lots of work
It will become a bit hard for me to keep doing all the stuff I was doing so far, so I will probably post much less in this blog from now on, but this site and the /talk forums will stay open and maintained. I will also of course keep handling the genesis competition until it is complete (you still have 15 days to submit your entries!), and I will do my best to keep working on my pet project, Wagic (don’t be too worried for Wagic, I am not the only dev working on it anymore, and we have lots of stuff coming for Wagic soon, stay tuned!)
As far as the PSP scene is involved, I will of course try to follow it, but I believe my last major involvement with the scene will be the Genesis competition. It is awesome to see that the scene is still alive and kicking, I’m looking forward to what’s coming next for this console, although I must admit that Sony’s recent behavior with the scene is making writing this blog post much easier than I thought it would be.
This is not a goodbye, merely a message saying “don’t contact me if I don’t blog about the latest CFW, because I’ll be busy”.
I want to use the opportunity to thank m0skit0 and JJS for HBL, that was by far the most exciting era for me in my PSP hacking journey, and it was an honour to work on such a great project with developers that are so talented. Special thanks also go to Fanjita who shared the sources of the eLoader with me, this code was a major source of help for HBL, but also I was humbled to be contacted by such a great guy. Fanjita, thanks for letting my PSP run scummvm 5 years ago. Thanks to the wagic devs for sticking with the project for so many months/years, and to the people playing Wagic, or contributing to our community. Many thanks also go to the mods and admins on /talk, they are the ones who keep our forums friendly and safe. Finally, thanks to everyone I met directly or indirectly on the PSP scene. Despite being in this world for the past 5 years, I’m still amazed at what people can manage to do with their PSP, even when Sony try everything they can to prevent customers from actually using their devices.
I’m back in Tokyo where, despite the alarming news I could read in international newspapers, people are doing fine. The media should rather focus on the people living in the north of Japan, who are in desperate need for help.
Of course things in Tokyo are not working 100%, (electricity gets shut down on a regular basis, earthquakes are still occurring roughly every day), but hopefully things will slowly go back to normal.
People interested in donating for the Japan crisis can find information in the google page here . Especially, if you were thinking of donating to me for HBL or Wagic, now’s the good time to make a donation, but give it to the red cross instead (and let me know )
I’ll try to catch up on scene news in the days to come, especially the genesis competition, but it might take a little while so bear with me.
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.