I’m of course talking of the return of Carmageddon, as a Kickstarter funded project, by the creators of the original game!

Some of you might be too young to know Carmageddon, and many others probably preferred GTA (You call it GTA1 now, but back in the days, there was only one, so we called it GTA). We used to fight with my nerdy friends about who would win a fight between GTA and Carmageddon. I’m wrong very often, and this was no different back then. I can still hear myself telling my friends “Meh, in 10 years, nobody will talk about your GTA game anymore, but Carmageddon will stay in people’s memories”.

Well, I wasn’t totally wrong. It seems Carmageddon still is in the heart of thousands of people, enough of us that we can dream of seeing a new episode coming out, made by the same people who created the first one.

I’ve spent countless hours playing Carmageddon at lan parties, this game was a huge pile of fun, and I can’t wait to see this next episode being released.

Youtube video below: careful, extremely violent content, although, 15 years later, the graphics probably help toning down the violence, but the fun remains (believe it or not, back when it was released, that game was almost banned in several countries, and pedestrians had to be replaced with green-blooded zombies in some versions)

Think it would be fun to see a modern version of this game? As I write, the project is 75% funded, and still needs a little more help, you can pledge here.

How about you guys, Are you interested in the way Kickstarter works? Are there any projects you’re backing?

Recently, some interesting things have been released through the PSS, such as a NES emulator. Technically, Sony are giving us the tools to develop homebrews on their platform, so in theory their shouldn’t be any need for more hacks, right? Well, I believe that’s not true, and I’ll explain why.

Ok, first of all, don’t worry, I did say to Eurogamer I am considering to stop hacking the Vita myself, but if you think about it, it’s not like I did much so far. 3 exploits were revealed in the past 6 months on the vita, and none of them were directly by me. I merely helped with releasing them and porting HBL to them, but I was not actively the person hacking.

My point here, and this is also indirectly what I meant when I said that to Eurogamer, is that for once I wouldn’t mind using my programming skills to create an official game that can make a few bucks. I doesn’t mean I’ll stop using my other skills to help with the hacking of the Vita

Sadly though, my free time is not what it used to be, and it has become extremely hard for me to make progress on anything PSP/Vita related recently (I was barely involved in the latest Wagic release, for example). This includes both hacking and trying to program an actual game on the PS Suite. I actually only installed the PS Suite, and never found the time to even open the editor yet.

Anyways. I’m not leaving the scene anytime soon, so you can stop crying

Back to why I think the PS Suite will not replace VHBL, or hacks in general:

Well, first, looking at the NES emulator that was released, I heard it is currently fairly slow, and it will be difficult to make it run better than, for example, NesterJ on VHBL. But the difficulty is not only technical. After all, after some tweaks, maybe that emulator will run at a decent framerate. But the issue is that the PS Suite SDK Beta will end at some point.

At this point, somehow, Sony will manage to prevent people from installing those “work in progress” cool homebrews. I have no clue how they plan to do this, but if my understanding is correct, in order to install one of those homebrews, one has to connect their own PS Suite software to Sony’s server? OK, I might be completely off here, I was on holiday when most of the hype on the PS Suite was happening, so I am not really sure. But somehow, it will not be possible after the beta to install this emulator.

In a way, this is the same as VHBL: VHBL is available to a limited number of people, and stops working if you update your firmware. But I am thinking that in the PS Suite case, even without updating their firmware, people might lose the ability to copy PS Suite homebrews freely (in all meanings of the word) to their Vita. At least for VHBL there is the option to keep your old firmware, also I am convinced that unless Sony does massive changes to their CMA system, we should be able to have more PSP hacks available for a while on the Vita (knocking on wood).

That’s not the only reason. VHBL comes with a gigantic library of PSP homebrews (thousands if /downloads is correct). A majority of them run with VHBL. By comparison, finding games that run through the experimental PS Suite nowadays is quite difficult. We’re not going to get hundreds of games overnight, while VHBL brings 6 years of homebrews development with it.

Of course, once the PS suite gets out of beta, we *will* see hundreds of indie games on the PSN store. They will probably be of much higher quality than your average homebrew, since money will be involved. But don’t dream, you won’t find emulators in this list. NesterJ, GPSP, Snes9xTYL,… these guys run on VHBL today, but you will never see them on the PS Suite. What about ports of games such as Doom? I can’t start to imagine the nightmare it would be to port to C#, and then the legal nightmare to get it to the Vita…

A game such as Wagic would also not make it to the official PS Suite, not only because it is programmed in C++ (not C#), not only because it is borderline legal, but also because the PS Suite terms and conditions specific that after the beta, the PSN will not accept free games, or open source games (check the T&C and see if I lie about this… I’m pretty sure I read that correctly). I’m not saying this is bad, but it will prevent a huge group of good games to ever see their name on the Vita.

I could go on for hours, trying to give valid reasons why hacks in general, and VHBL in particular will still be a valid alternative to the PS Suite. Of course, the main reason is that hackers don’t need a good reason to hack. I’ve seen comments saying that now that the PS Suite is out, there is no justification for hacking. It’s as if hacking ever needed a justification in the first place. That’s a gross misunderstanding of why most hackers do what they do: because understanding how the device works is what they believe to be the game in the words gaming device

This week, the same dev apparently got PS1 games to run on the Vita, as shown in the video below (thanks to the Z)

For those who wonder, I have no reason to doubt the authenticity of the video, I wouldn’t see any good reason for a guy who has proven he has a kernel PSP exploit to then produce a fake.

It is important to clarify that our forum member the Z is in contact with this anonymous developer, but they are (AFAIK) not the same person. I tried to contact the developer through the Z, but sadly, he rejected my offer for an interview, as I am craving for details. The offer still stands, if he reads me

The developer says he will release his files if he manages to get sound to work on his hack. Without much details, I can only assume he has been porting popsloader to the PSP emulator of the vita. For somebody with good experience working on the PSP (especially HENs or CFW) this sounds like a doable task.

This comes at a time where Sony is struggling to get PS1 classic games support to the Vita, despite this being one of the major requests players have been sending to the company. It wouldn’t be the first time hackers handle things better than Sony on one of their consoles (to be honest hackers usually don’t have to deal with contractual constraints though).

But don’t jump of joy yet. Although the anonymous dev said he would release his files, they will be useless without the associated Kernel exploit. When contacted through the Z, the dev confirmed he would not release the exploit itself, as he, like many other hackers who have access to those exploits, knows there are not enough of them.

Until then, the only way to run unsigned content on your Vita is still VHBL

Source pspking, via the Z

1. 77$ for the best VHBL menu

The first part of this contest is open to anybody with a bit of programming skills. (If you’re not a programmer, skip to the second section of this post). The best replacement for VHBL’s wMenu will get 77$ in cash. The current menu, wMenu, is fairly limited and could benefit from many improvements… Create the best replacement for wMenu, and get 77$! Once all entries are in, we’ll have a poll on /talk to vote for the best entry. Your entry does not have to be open source, although that would of course be awesome.

You have until June 9th to submit your entry in this thread on /talk. The thread also contains details and technical help on how to create a VHBL menu.

2. 70$ for the best youtube VHBL video, and 10$ each for 2 vhbl videos randomly selected

You’re not a programmer, but you still want to win a prize? Upload a video about vhbl to youtube (preferably, a video showing VHBL in action, but it doesn’t have to, if you have more creative ideas) before June 9th, and post a link to the video in the comments of this blog post. My favorite one will get a cash prize of 70$. In addition to that, I’ll randomly select 2 videos from this thread, and they’ll each get 10$. 10$ was not chosen randomly, it is the price you paid for Super Collapse 3. So by uploading a VHBL video you get a chance to get your copy of Super Collapse 3 for free

Important: Do not upload to youtube a video that you haven’t done yourself. Only one entry per person, please (I reserve the right to disqualify people who enter more than one video). A link to http://wololo.net, or to this blog entry, in the description of your video, is really appreciated (but not compulsory). You can enter the contest with a video that was uploaded before May 17th, if you want to. 

Why 167$?

The total prizes for this contest represent a total amount of 167$. This symbolizes the current PS Vita firmware, firmware 1.67, the highest firmware on which we can run VHBL for now

Anything else?

Entries for both the programming contest and the video contest need to be posted before June 9th. Entries for the menu programming contest must be posted in this thread, while entries for the Video contest must be posted as comments to this blog entry. Prizes will be sent either through a paypal payment, or an amazon gift card, depending on your preferences.

There are still remaining issues with the VHBL port of Super Collapse 3 that I couldn’t solve yet, I am still investigating: the Duke3d engine is crashing (Duke3d, zombie crisis), Daedalus seems to be crashing when loading roms (I probably won’t investigate this, as Daedalus is slow on VHBL no matter what), Geometry War Portable crashes at startup, Picodrive will crash if you press the “select” button, etc…

So, still lots of incompatibilities of course, but this is getting better, and I sure hope you guys will enjoy snes9xTyl. Interestingly, I had to hook sceAudioOutput with sceAudioOutputblocking, which led to a terrible performance result on the PSP, but is not that visible on the vita. Once again, the superior hardware of the Vita is helping us out.

While I’m at it, here’s a tip for those who didn’t know: if you press start and select simultaneously while in a homebrew, you will be taken back to the VHBL menu. This is useful for games that don’t have an exit button. you can also change this key combination in the VHBL hbl_config.txt file.

Oh, and stay tuned, as in the days to come I plan to announce a fun VHBL contest with money prizes. Nothing’s final yet, but people who are not programmers will be able to participate as well

Download

Download this new release of VHBL on the vhbl page, as usual

So what does this really mean for the end user? Well, in the short term, absolutely nothing, but read along for more details.

A bit of background

Flash0, PSP Emulator, PS Vita, Kernel hack… unless you’ve been in the “scene” for a while, these terms might be a bit confusing, so let me do a quick explanation on the security implemented on Sony’s devices. If you know about this already, feel free to skip to the next section.

Basically, the PSP has 2 levels of permissions: user, and kernel. If you use a shared computer at school or work, “kernel” is a bit equivalent to the “admin” rights of your computer. The user mode has a limited access to the PSP features, basically everything that’s required by games to run properly. The kernel mode, on the other hand, has access to everything, including the possibility to verify/decrypt games with DRM, or the possibility to update the firmware of the PSP, among other things.

From a hacking perspective, this means that getting access to a PSP user-level hack will give us limited features, while accessing a kernel-level hack gives us access to everything on the device, such as the possibility to rewrite the firmware (which is necessary, for example, for Custom Firmwares).

Similarly, a program running on the PSP in user mode does not have access to all files on the PSP or all sections of the memory. In particular, the “modules” used by the firmware are stored in a portion of the (Flash0) memory that can only be accessed in Kernel mode.

In addition to all that, on the Playstation Vita, the PSP emulator runs in a “sandbox”, which means that it does not have direct access to all the features of the PS Vita. In other words, a “Kernel exploit in the PSP emulator” does not give you a full access to the Vita, at best it gives you full access to the PSP emulator, which in itself is fairly limited.

Current (AFAIK) situation

Based on the explanation above, and the stuff that is publicly known, here’s what I can tell you: The only publicly available hack for now on the Vita is VHBL, which runs in User mode, inside the emulator sandbox. Davee has access to a kernel exploit that gives him access to more features of the PSP emulator, and apparently another hacker does too, since this person was able to access the PSP emulator firmware files on the Vita.

Just for reference, the schema below dirtily summarizes the permission levels (things in gray are unknown/hypothesis). And for reference, I included “where” we should be if we wanted a PS Vita iso loader, just so that people stop asking. It is worth mentioning yet again that I personally do not have any PSP Kernel exploit, and therefore it is also useless to ask me if I plan to release a PSP iso loader for the Vita.

OK, some hackers are gonna kill me for such an inaccurate diagram, apologies in advance

So what about that flash0 dump?

My awesome diagram shows that the Flash0 dump is at the kernel level, so I already see people saying this thing could give us access to the PSP Kernel inside the Vita… well…no, because I suck at diagrams. Yes, Kernel access was required to get that information, but no, it doesn’t magically give us access to the Kernel. If your admin takes a screenshot of his desktop and sends it to you by email, that doesn’t give you any admin rights, but it allows you to have a look at what the admin has on his desktop.

And this is, in essence, what this “leak” is about. We do not get PSP kernel access with this, but we get access to a few files we couldn’t get otherwise. So what will this lead to? Well, first of all, it means Davee is not anymore the only one who can investigate Kermit, the library that handles communication between the PSP emulator and the vita. Secondly, it will allow (motivated) devs to investigate the differences between an actual PSP’s firmware and the one on the emulator. We already know Kermit is one such difference, but maybe there’s more.

More unlikely (but we’re allowed to dream), the PSP emulator could reveal some more interesting secrets… some universal drm encryption key maybe? This is extremely unlikely, but after all, at some point the PS3 helped us to hack the PSP, so who knows if the PSP emulator doesn’t have a flaw that would lead to a Vita hack?

Nevertheless, from the end user’s point of view, this brings absolutely nothing. This can’t lead to a PSP Kernel access, or at least, not in a way that would be any easier than finding Kernel exploits in the actual PSP (and reusing them in the emulator). After all, if Davee (Proxima/some1) got access to such an exploit, it was (obviously) one that already existed on the PSP firmware, which anybody with a PSP and enough free time can investigate whenever they want. There’s also no telling that enough developers will be interested in looking into these files and reverse them… but who knows, it only takes one guy.

Don’t get me wrong, this is still very interesting, because it gives us access to files not everyone could access before, and it tells us there are at least two groups of people with access to the PSP kernel on the Vita. This is still, of course, very far from giving us a full control of the PS Vita, but it is exciting nonetheless

What do you guys think of this? Feel free to discuss here, or in the dedicated /talk thread

I believe this will improve compatibility with a bunch of PSP homebrews, but sadly, not all of them. I couldn’t get any revision of Daedalus, ScummVM, or any game relying on the Duke3D engine (Duke3D, Zombie Crisis) to run. But I think even if this only fixes SNES emulation, it will be worth it.

The video shows of course Snes9XTYL, but also Lamecraft, NesterJ (running the famous NES game Contra on a PS Vita, how cool is that?), and GPSP (a version I got from this thread, many thanks to Hysen)

By the way, I am aware of some attempts at running emulators through the PS Suite SDK, which is a nice idea, but with a few shortcomings IMO, so this doesn’t make VHBL obsolete yet. I’ll try to blog about this in the days to come.

Also, if you’ve sent me PMs recently, please wait a bit before you complain from my lack of replies, I’ve been swamped since I got back from holiday, thanks for your understanding.

I’ll try to release this VHBL update asap, stay tuned!

Ok, so, first of all, many thanks go to Zethfox and Mike, who have driven 95% of the improvements to Wagic since the last release. Many thanks also go to the other devs of the Wagic team who contributed to this release. As usual, we bring an insane amount of changes in this version, but let me introduce Wagic to those who don’t know about it yet:

What is 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 and entirely customizable: you can create themes, mods, new rules, or even new games (check for example Knights VS Dagons on our forums, a game strongly inspired by strategy games such as warcraft). Wagic is available in several languages (English, French, German, spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Serbian), and open source. It currently runs on the Sony PSP (as well as on the PS Vita if you have VHBL), Windows, Linux, maemo, meego, Android (phones and tablets), and iOS (iPhone, iPad).

Changelog

Almost 1000 new cards were added to this release thanks to the work of Zethfox and Dr Solomat. This means we now have more than 9400 unique cards in the game. Among these cards are the long awaited Planeswalkers, as well as a few new sets. We also dramatically improved the Android and iOS ports, especially the deck editor. Check the changelog below for more details

• Close to 1000 new cards, Wagic now supports more than 9400 unique cards, including (finally!) Planeswalkers support, and Dark Ascension
• (iOS/Android) replaced some psp specific shortcuts with buttons for the touch screen. This makes the deck editor, in particular, much more usable
• (iOS/Android) more intuitive way to scroll cards left and right in the deck editor, which should make it easier to build a deck
• On Android, it is now possible to choose if you will download the game files on the internal memory or your SD card (experimental)
• Many bug fixes, and minor gameplay improvements on all platforms (too many to describe them all)

More Info

Remember that in addition to the news in this blog, you can find more Wagic news on twitter and facebook thanks to Leungclj

Download

If you enjoy Wagic, please consider a donation. Thanks in advance!

Alternatively, if you like Wagic, please spread the word! An article in your blog, a post about this release in your favorite gaming forum, a video on youtube… everything helps!

download here

The link above takes you to the download page where you can choose the correct archive depending on your platform
As usual, enjoy this new release of Wagic!

A few days ago I released VHBL for the game Super Collapse 3, and I’ve seen lots of people running into various types of issues, so let me try to summarize a few hints and tips here.

First of all, apologies for my lack of activity in the past days. I’m on a holiday with my family, with close to no internet access, and absolutely no time. Things will be back to normal in a few days, but until then I cannot actively work on any of my projects, including VHBL.

This is a nice transition to the first thing I want to discuss: people are having trouble running various homebrews on VHBL for super collapse 3, including some homebrews that should definitely work such as Snes9xTYL, the super NES emulator. Based on the descriptions of the issue, I’m thinking this is a simple bug with a hook for one of the audio functions. It should be easy to fix, but again, as I am not available for a few days, somebody will have to step up and fix the issue, or you guys will have to wait for me to come back and look into it. As a reminder, HBL is open source and anybody with a bit of free time and a PSP could fix the issue.

In general, if you are having issues running a specific homebrew on VHBL, head over to our /talk VHBL subforum. You should be able to quickly find information on most homebrews there, working versions if any, or explanations on why the homebrew doesn’t work for you. Again, most issues have a solution, and if the solution is not on our forums yet, it usually only takes one guy to figure it out…

Some people are having trouble installing homebrews. A typical symptom is a clicking noise in the VHBL menu, but nothing happening, or the menu crashing. This is usually happening because your install.zip file was not correctly prepared, in particular it should be an uncompressed zip file. You can use Homebrew Preparer to do this correctly for you (be sure to use revision 0.2 or higher, as version 0.1 has a critical bug that will cause the exact same bug I’m describing in this paragraph). Alternatively, you can probably find a bunch of pre-made homebrew packages for VHBL in our forums. Finally, let me remind you again that anybody could create their own menu for VHBL, create one that supports a better installation method if needed, etc… so please feel free to step up to improve the experience

Some people are contacting me to know if VHBL for Motorstorm or Everybody’s Tennis will work on firmware 1.67. The answer is no, so stop asking.

Some people missed this third release of VHBL for the game Super Collapse, and are asking me how they could be made aware of our future releases in advance. The answer is simple: trusted member of our /Talk forums get some information before everybody else. If you are registered on /Talk, it does not guarantee you will get the information before others, but if you are not registered there, you can be sure you will be one of the last to know about it. I believe we’ve made that system pretty clear for the past three VHBL releases.

Stay tuned for more VHBL updates, in particular bug fixes for the Super Collapse 3 version of VHBL. In the meantime, enjoy the homebrews that are already working, and when a homebrew doesn’t work, before you complain, remember that before HBL, people used to be happy with just a hello world (but don’t get me wrong, constructive criticism or genuine attempts at making HBL better for the community are more than welcome)