With two months still to go in the ReVITAlize competition, I don’t think we’ve seen as many homebrews crop up from the Rejuvenate hack as could be. One could speculate why this is: maybe because the vita-toolchain is still in development; or maybe the appearance of the RetroArch Vita port made some people feel we are bound to have all the emulators we could need sooner rather than later. However, emulators are not the end-all-be-all of homebrew and the Vita has many flaws that the Vita scene could and probably should be trying to cover to make it a better do-it-all device.

However, I know many of you might be tempted to say one of the following two things:

But why would we need that when we can just run old PSP homebrew that was released way back when?

A: Using that logic, why would we even need Rejuvenate in the first place? Sony has put many roadblocks in front of us: from blocking access to the GAME folders to memory limitations. Rejuvenate means we can build a new scene from the ground up and use the full capabilities of the Vita, PSPemu be damned.

But I have xzy phone and I can do many things like that with it!

A: Well yeah but, doing pretty much anything on your smartphone that doesn’t involve texting/calling/chatting is a HUGE drain on the battery of any phone. I own a Nexus 5 and I get more juice out of my Vita listening to music than I do out of my Nexus and that’s without even going into the gaming aspect of it. The Vita in terms of battery vastly outperforms most phones in the market!

So with that out of the way and without any further ado, here are the homebrew I feel we could have on the Vita that would make our devices just a little bit better (in no particular order)!

An Actual Media Player

Admittedly the Vita’s music player isn’t the worst thing in the world (just as the PSP’s wasn’t awful and we still got many alternatives) and the 3DS is far worse off when it comes to that. However it only supports MP3 and MP4 files (audio) and I’ve always thought the the process of copying songs to the Vita is quite the pain (also, have I mentioned the built-in Vita music player does not support skipping songs by pressing L or R? This was a basic feature on the PSP and a terrible downgrade). The screenshot I used above is from an old pspbrew called Xandu’s Media Player (a cool alternative was called LightMP3) and here are some of the features it had that the Vita player still doesn’t:

• Support for OGG, MOD, S3M, IT (along with the obvious MP3, WAV) audio files;
• Music Quiz;
• Themable;
• Editing of song ID3 tags;
• Lyrics!

I remember rocking this as my default music player on the PSP for years, until I finally parted with it. How cool would it be to have something like this on the Vita? I know that you could technically use it if it is compatible with the PSPemu/actually detects the songs on the Vita filesystem (or you could spend tedious hours waiting to upload them to the PSPemu using FTP), but it would be really cool to have a Rejuvenate version of a full-featured media player.

An Alternate Shell

Remember IRShell? Most of you probably do, given you were a part of the PSP Scene. Well, this is mostly a pipe dream of mine but how cool would it be if someone made something just like it, but running in Rejuvenate? It could even be a shell to control Rejuvenate itself, allowing you to launch native Vita homebrews directly from within it (which has been proven to work). However, this shell could do other simple things like running an FTP server so you don’t have to open VitaFTP every time you need to transfer a file and who knows, it could double as the media player I just referred to earlier.

The possibilities are endless but I think this is the hardest thing to create on this list, if the vita-toolchain even supports it.

A Comic/Manga Reader

Considering a huge part of the gaming community is also big into geekier stuff like manga and comics, I am honestly surprised that a comic reader for the Vita still hasn’t appeared (it kind of did but it wasn’t all that practical). The 3DS scene just recently got a bare-bones one, so I’m honestly surprised no one has thought of this yet.

The screenshot used above is from a homebrew that many of you should hopefully be familiar with called PSPComic that is still an amazing homebrew, but due to the fact that the PSP native resolution was 480x272px and the Vita upscales that to fill its amazing 960x544px… things get pretty awfully upscaled to the point some stuff is unfortunately unreadable. The Vita has some features the PSP did not that could make for a better reader too: the already mentioned superior native resolution, touchscreen to make changing the pages more natural and in the case of the OLED-model: more vibrant colors.

I am also aware that this could be done on a smartphone and I have addressed this earlier in this piece but I am willing to go a bit further and say: if you could centralize your gaming and other hobbies on the same device… wouldn’t you? I certainly would.

A Native Ebook Reader

While I wonder how many of you here use their digital devices to read ebooks, I think there is no doubt that simply having a homebrew like this would give us a viable alternative to other devices we may own. There is reason BookR was made for the PSP in the first place! However, considering all the features that are expected of an application like this nowadays, I’d say that support for file formats like .epub is key. BookR isn’t awful by any means, but by nowadays standards support for only .pdf files is not stellar since the rise of digital books has given birth to many other formats and PDFs have become used mostly for other purposes. The PSPemu upscaling also hits BookR pretty hard since, like PSPComic, the pixelation of the screen causes texts to be harder to read forcing you to zoom in, which can sometimes make things even worse.

Other cool things that could be created for Rejuvenate:

An instant messenger program: While instant messaging isn’t as popular as it used to be in the early 2010’s (mostly due to Facebook and Whatsapp’s growth), many people still use services such as Steam, Skype and to a lesser extent, GTalk to do their talking (even Facebook has a semi-open protocol that can be used to connect to their chat) and since these apps are also huge drains of smartphones batteries, an alternative on the Vita would be nifty!

A port of an open-source engine: It recently came to my attention that the LÖVE engine was ported to the 3DS and since I am aware that many people are interested in making their own games, a port of LÖVE or something like it could be pretty cool for people to dabble in game development and figure out whether or not they want to try and do something related to it. In the meantime why not try out Lua Player Plus (that was released for the ReVITAlize competition too!) and see what you can create?

That’s all I got for this part! In the next part we’ll be talking about what everyone really wants: games! Do you, however, think I’ve forgotten something? Do have anything you’d like to suggest? Drop a line in the comments and add your own two cents about on this topic!