Today the American FBI took down Megaupload and its sister sites on the ground that Megaupload was intentionally designed to promote piracy. I could have decided to not care, until I realized we (the /talk community) host hundreds of perfectly legal homebrews there, independent games and creations that are now potentially lost forever.
Mamosuke confirmed to me today that Teck4′s exploit for the PSP Emulator in the vita is still working on 1.52. Note that it doesn’t guarantee 100% that some of the techniques used to get HBL to work on top of this exploit haven’t been patched, as I haven’t tested myself. But for now I’m confident. I might update to test that, at some point.
The 1.52 Vita firmware can be downloaded here
I just got contacted by Virtuous Flame who informed me that PS Vita update 1.52 is available (which is confirmed on the official site), and as for version 1.51 back in December, this update is compulsory if you want to use some services such as the PSN (which makes sense) or the possibility to copy files to your Vita with the Content Manager (which doesn’t).
It’s been 6 months since the last release of Wagic, and I’m sure some of you might have thought the project was on a halt. The truth is, we’ve been working on several major things on Wagic that postponed this release. This release is a major milestone for us, as this is the first official release were we support iPhone/iPad and Android.
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. Read the rest of this entry »
I managed to port HBL to the US version of Teck4′s exploit in exactly 45 minutes (including writing the savedata exploit and the binary loader), which is a new personal record, thanks to the scripts included in HBL’s repository, and also to the fact that the different versions of the game are internally fairly similar (which is to be expected because technically the game is supposed to be the same, just translated, but I seem to recall it wasn’t that easy for the Hotshots golf exploit)
We’ve seen through Teck4′s exploit that PSP exploits run flawlessly on the PSP emulator of the Vita. I’ve spent the past 3 weeks working on leveraging Teck4′s exploit and port HBL to it. I’ve been receiving lots of questions (probably from people who haven’t used HBL back when it was the only possible way to play homebrews on the PSP Go) and will try to answer them here.
Virtuous Flame released an update to his Open CMA tool a few days ago. Open CMA allows you to connect your playstation Vita to your PC through the Content Manager without needing to be connected to the internet. This is useful if you need to transfer some files while away from your network, or simply if like me you don’t see why it should be required to be connected to the internet when you transfer files between two pieces of hardware you own.
This update (revision 3) patches the PC side of the content manager further, preventing it from auto updating. Without this patch, Sony’s driver is silently updating itself whenever it’s connected to the internet even if you were using open CMA so far, which makes this r3 an important update.
In the past days I stabilized HBL for Teck4′s exploit and got some major homebrews to work. In the video below I’m showing a few homebrews running on the PS Vita. I also included Picodrive again to show that fixing the sound issue is relatively easy as it is just a setting in the emulator. Check the video below. Read the rest of this entry »
Japanese site emuonpsp reported today that a combination of keys was found in the settings menu to display some hidden information about the firmware installed on your Playstation vita. Read the rest of this entry »
A quick report: I’m making some progress on porting HBL to the Vita. Although I’m sad to say that I can’t get syscall estimation to work, I got some major homebrews such as Doom to run already, so overall I think it’s in an acceptable shape. Because it is roughly stable now, today I focused on porting HBL to the EU version of the exploited game (I was working – obviously – on the Japanese version of the game so far). This went smoothly and I can confirm HBL runs fine on the EU version of the game, although of course I could only test on a PSP, not on a Vita.
I used the opportunity to refresh my two guides, how to write a binary loader and how to port HBL. The guides are now simplified, and the binary loader tutorial now has download links to the tools used in the examples.
Writing the first “usable” version of HBL for the patapon exploit took several developers and about 4 months. Thanks to the portability of HBL, bringing it to Teck4′s exploit took me only a few days. Adapting that to the EU version took a couple hours (including porting the exploit itself), so I am confident for the US version.