With the hurried up release of the Fieldrunners VHBL port to firmware 2.61, many questions got left unanswered. The most frequent one is: “how the heck can I buy the damn game and stay on firmware 2.61, since the PSN constantly asks me to update to firmware 3.00???”

I hear you guys. Keep in mind that this release wasn’t planned at all, and just happened because Sony proactively patched the game with firmware 3.00, a bold move on their end which happens extremely rarely (I’m still baffled today at the amount of game exploits that apparently got patched with this firmware, I had never seen this in 7 years, and was definitely not expecting Sony to actually care that much about psp emulator exploits).

So let’s start with the basics. First of all, if you upgraded to firmware 3.00 (or above, if you’re a guy from the future… no, please don’t kill me, I’ve never seen this boy, and the Connors have moved out of the city a while ago anyway), you can stop reading here, this is not for you. The exploit will not work for you, and there is no way to downgrade your Vita. You can buy Fieldrunners if you want because it’s a fun game, but it will not let you run VHBL, TN Hen, or any emulator or hack. End of Story.

Now, if you’re on 2.61, you might run into a very different issue: you need to purchase the game from the PSN (and/or install it to your Vita), but the Vita keeps asking you to upgrade to 3.00 in order to access the PSN or connect the device to anything. If you’re tempted to update to firmware 3.00 and see what happens, read the paragaph above, once again.

Buying the game

Several solutions exist to buy a game from the PSN  for your Vita while keeping your Vita to a lower firmware. One of the solutions involves a PS3 and OpenCMA, and we describe it here: https://wololo.net/2013/04/17/lower-ps-vita-firmwares-for-dummies/. This is usually the first solution that we recommend, and we suggest you give it a try if you have a PS3. However, several people have reported that this does not work for them, as the Fieldrunners game does not appear for them to be transferable from the PS3 to their Vita.

Another solution seems to have proven successful, and involves famous proxy tool Charles Proxy. Credit goes to megaman781 for the tutorial, please do thank him in this thread  if this helped you

1. Download Charles proxy free trial here
2. start Charles, start new session, click Help on the top part and click “local ip address”, make note of that IP.
3. on your Vita connect to your Wifi and click on it to change some settings, go to Advanced settings, scroll down to where it says Address and input the IP address you got from Charles, on Port type 8888, go down and press ok.
4. Now go back to Vita Settings, system update, update using Wifi, you’ll see something come up on Charles on the left plane, right click on it and “Save All” to desktop.
5. Go to the file you saved on you desktop and open it with notepad or something like that, scroll to the right and every time it reads “3.00” just change it to whatever your actual firmware is, example. 2.61. Once you are done with that save the file and exit. Go back to charles.
6. On the left pane once again right click on the “http://fus01…” and go all the way to the bottom where it says “Map Local” click on it then click on Choose and look for the File you saves earlier to you desktop, click ok.
7. On the vita go back to settings then press Update and try to update through Wifi, if everything is fine it should tell you, you have the latest Firmware
8. You should then be able to access the PSN, run the content Manager assistant, etc… good luck 🙂

Installing the exploit

Here’s a great video from the Z explaining how to install the exploit and how to run it

Installing and running homebrews

The initial release of the exploit two days ago had a bug with the homebrew installation process. Frostegater released an update (and we announced it here), which fixed that. The update includes menu “138”. How to install homebrews with this menu is explained in this video from The Z (again 🙂 ). The video was made for firmware 2.12, but is still valid with this new VHBL release

Where to download homebrews?

We have a huge database of PSP homebrews here. However in order to run on VHBL, PSP homebrews need to be correctly “packaged”, and the process can be tedious. Instead, you can check SMOKE’s huge list of vita-compatible homebrews here. All downloads are made to run “out of the box” on VHBL