Who cares about E3? OK, we do… but still, the big news of the week for the vita hacking scene is the official announce of an upcoming PS Vita hack with native support, from YifanLu. The platform will allow anyone to run native PS Vita homebrews, and there is strong hope for great emulator support, given the specs of the PS Vita.

PS Vita Hack limitations

There are however, a few limitations to “Rejuvenate” as of now. How fast these limitations can be removed, if at all, is still a bit unknown, but hopefully this upcoming release will ignite a scene of proportions similar to what we had with the PSP, meaning hackers could get more excited about the platform.

So, what limitations did Yifan lu mention so far? There are a few, and unfortunately pretty big ones for now:

PSM Dev App required to launch homebrews

It’s been said so many times now, that the PSM Dev app was required to launch homebrews, yet many people seem to have missed the download window. Homebrews will be enjoyed by the few who managed to get it in time (luckily, that’s at least a few thousand people, if we’re to believe the PSM stats)

USB connection required to launch homebrews

Ugh… that’s a pretty big one. The exploit requires a PC in order to run, and this means your console will need to be connected to the PC in order to launch homebrews, via the USB connection.

Now, I can see a few ways this limitation could be mitigated. We can imagine a “homeebrew launcher” such as VHBL, which would need to be run once, and serve as the launcher for other homebrews. If anything crashes in the process, you’re SOL, but at least this could give a way to only connect to the PC “once in a while”.

An alternate, crazy idea, would be some sort of hardware dongle (I know…) that could simulate the necessary steps for the Vita… This assumes understanding exactly what is required to trigger the exploit, possibly Reverse engineer loads of code, and might not be worth it, but who knows.

Hopefully too, hackers will be motivated by this groundbreaking step, and could dig into ways to trigger different exploits, without requiring a connected PC.

NO PSTV / Vita TV support

Lack of PS TV support was the bad surprise of the day, and it’s a direct consequence of the above limitation. The Vita TV can only be connected to your PC via Wifi, and there’s no reason to believe this limitation will ever go away (even though the vita TV has a usb port…).

Because the hack requires to be connected via USB to the PC… we’re SOL here. Again, a different type of exploit could remove this pretty big limitation

Other limitations

The other limitations mentioned by Yifan Lu are rather minor compared to the two ones above.

First, you’ll have to connect to a network at least once a day to keep the PSM License “active”. Yifan lu has found ways to not require Sony’s approval to keep the license active (more on how this works will be explained soon), but no ways at this point to *not* have to do the daily call home. This does not feel like a big limitation to me, unless you’re going on holiday with no network access…

The “connect to PC” limitation also requires specifically a PC running Windows. This is because Sony’s PSM tools were made for Windows, and no other platform. Again, a different exploit, or some heavy reverse engineering could lift this limitation.

Finally, Yifan Lu recommends firmware 3.00 or above in order to enjoy the hack. He mentions the exploit actually works on 1.69 and above, but the tools have only been tested on 3.xx. If people on lower firmwares are interested in ports, he might consider it. Then again, given that the only good reason to stay on a low firmware was the webkit exploit, which, at this point is less interesting than what Yifan Lu is giving to the community, I’d say there’s little to no reason to stay at such low firmwares today.

What do you think about these limitations? Do you think the scene will be able to lift some of them?

More info on Yifan lu’s blog