First of all I want to thank every user of this site for the good reception for the first part of my Wishlist for Rejuvenate that was more focused on the applications side of the spectrum. However, while skimming through the comments section like I always do, I came across some negativity I had no idea was around when it comes to the Rejuvenate hack. So I think it’s time we delve a bit into this and analyze if Rejuvenate is indeed what the native PS Vita hack we have all been waiting for by starting with the drawbacks of Rejuvenate.

Drawback 1: You will lose access to the PS Store (forever tied to a 3.xx FW)

(…)with all the hassle it’s not worth it, honestly not even the psp exploits are worth losing psn or playing online(…)

–Badaaq (wololo.net user)

While I can sympathize with this user about the woes of not being “connectable” on a PS Vita, we should stop and think here for a second… what are we truly losing? I don’t think anyone outside of the very small /r/vita subreddit even cares about online gaming on the PS Vita (that subreddit stands at 49,000 users, which is about 0.4% of the total Vita ownerbase that according to VGChartz stands at about 12.5M) and even if they do, there are so few games that can be played online actively right now outside of Killzone and Freedom Wars that I don’t think there’s much of anything being lost here.

Now the other big thing that comes with being tied to a unconnectable firmware is downloading games and DLC onto your Vita memory card if you’re big on the PS Store (which I am). This is where having a PS3 (or knowing someone that does) is pretty useful: just download your games onto the PS3 and then using the QCMA/Open CMA trick (scroll down a bit for it) then just keep backups on your computer for easy access/transfer.

So all in all, you aren’t losing much by not having connection to the PS Store unless you don’t have a PS3 or you’re a part of the extremely small fringe that still plays online on the Vita. I will agree that the workaround methods aren’t the easiest but they are still pretty good.

Drawback 2: Running homebrew is not really practical

The difficult setup and the portability issue of Rejuvenate is really killing it for me. I’m sure most people are in the same boat.

–Gaze (wololo.net user)

This one is a little bit trickier: it is true that Rejuvenate needs a PC USB connection and the process to setting it up can be a bit complicated, but ever since it came out we got a few things that made the usage of Rejuvenate a lot less painful and to an extent, more portable. While I don’t know how many Rejuvenate users own Android smartphones, however in my own experience I’ve found that Android Defiler is the best tool a Rejuvenate user can have: it frees the hack from the clutches of USB and after that is done, you can enjoy your homebrew on the go (most Android phones nowadays have the option to create a portable Wi-Fi hotspot which ensure you can run Android Defiler pretty much anywhere you could possibly need. I also feel the need to add that no matter how impractical you may believe the defiler method to be, the now-dead Tubehax for the 3DS was just as impractical and…

over the two months it was available, tubehax was used from no fewer than 203,258 unique IP addresses. good run.

— smea (@smealum) 15 october 2015

As Wololo himeself pointed out: that’s 0,4% of the total 3DS userbase at the time that article was published (funny pattern with numbers here), which means that over 200,000 people did not mind having to be anchored to the Internet in some way to access their hack, even though Ironhax was available the entire time.

For those who don’t mind being bound to the USB but still find the entire process of running homebrew to not be very user-friendly, you could always use a tool like gui4rejuvenate to make the entire process of running homebrew easier.

Drawback 3: Something better will come

(…)people are probably just hoping for a new hack to come along that will work on any version when hacked (i.e. no Sony dependency). At least with hacks from the past you pretty much knew you’d be able to hack it again in a more recent version at some point in the future.

— Elliot Wright (wololo.net user)

Let me take you on a trip down memory lane here: ever since the inception of the Vita, we were very aware of all the roadblocks that were put in our paths to achieve any sort of homebrew. For years we thought the best we would ever get was the PSPemu hacks and even those started getting patched with the most recent firmwares. The fact that remains is this: Rejuvenate is the best bet we have for now. Email hacks got patched, PSPemu is now very limited for homebrew and there aren’t any alternatives on the horizon.

Without wanting to sound like a broken record, even if something better comes, why would it get released if the community itself doesn’t get behind Rejuvenate now? The Vita SDKs are ready for everyone to develop with but if there is no homebrew being created what is the point of having a SDK or even a hack? Hackers and homebrew developers have shown more passion for the Vita than Sony has in the past year. We need to get behind them and show support now or we may not get a second chance.

But with all of this said, why should we bother with Rejuvenate? All I’ve talked about for now are the drawbacks. I did so because before getting into the advantages of Rejuvenate, I wanted to address all the criticism surrounding it. With that said, I think it’s due time to start talk about pros of Rejuvenate!

Pro 1: It works equally on either Vita 1000, Vita 2000 or Vita TV

You know what Sony does that Nintendont? Hardware consistency (even if they fail at everything else). If you don’t own a New 3DS and you are interested in homebrew, the 3DS, 3DSXL and 2DS are not what you’re looking for. The performance is vastly inferior to the New 3DS and most emulators won’t even run properly. Really the only reason to have an old 3DS model is to play region-free and/or enjoy romhacks.

With Rejuvenate it doesn’t matter what model of Vita hardware you own, it will run equally on all of them and with the added bonus of running just plain better: almost all working cores of RetroArch Vita work flawlessly and you don’t need to create threads telling users which hardware runs which core and at what speed. As of today’s nightly you can play Genesis/Master System/Game Gear, NES, SNES, Gameboy, PC-Engine and a few others all at full speed or very close to it.

Pro 2: We can actually use native Vita resolution

Let’s be honest here: stuff like ARK and TN-V are all well and good, but they are bound by all the limitations of the PSPemu biggest of which in my mind is the resolution. If you paid enough attention to my Wishlist for Rejuvenate article a few weeks back, you’ll notice that there was one complaint about all the PSPemu homebrew I mentioned in there: the resolution. There is no getting around the fact that PSP homebrews (and games for that matter) look awfully pixelated and when you’re trying to use something like a comic reader or a ebook viewer the pixelization is going to strain your eyes and make your experience terrible.

The first thing I noticed when I jumped from PicoDrive for PSP to GenesisPlusGX or when I opened VitaQuake was how much crisper and less pixelated everything looked. This is what we can get if people start caring and developing for Rejuvenate. Why wouldn’t we support that?

Pro 3: An active hacking scene brings more owners

This point, I will admit, is more conjecture on my part than anything backed by hardline facts or figures like I usually do but even so, listen to my argument for a second here: we all know the PSP “flopped” in comparison to what Sony expected out of it (because, you know, selling 80M and being the 9th most sold platform of all time just barely behind the GBA and ahead of the NES can be considered a failure) and for that reason the support for it started dying a bit towards its later years but I feel that a big part of what kept the PSP alive and kicking was the amazing homebrew scene behind it. Everyone I knew that owned one always wanted to have emulators or ports of PC games (and yes, of course, ISO support) on it and that was all thanks to the strong scene backing the console: a scene so big that the PSP just with that dwarfed platforms that were made specifically in mind for stuff like homebrew like the GP2X and the Pandora.

Honestly I wish I could back this with hard numbers, but unfortunately the only proof I have of this is the proliferation of hacking-related websites that always had the PSP front and center as the main focus and the thousands of people that filled those forums.

Pro 4: Better specs mean better homebrew

There was something that constantly bummed me whenever I saw a homebrew PSP developer say it and that was: “we can’t make this work because the PSP isn’t powerful enough”. I think one of the main things I remember might have been that Sega 32x emulation in PicoDrive was never achieved or that we would never get a better-working N64 emulator, all because the PSP didn’t have enough juice to run those. Now we are at a point where we have a new, better platform that just might have that extra juice needed to get stuff like that working (and who knows what else!). You might also remember that by this point, this is maybe the only way you’re going to get new stuff on the Vita since Sony has pretty much given up on it at this point… but I’ll leave that can of worms for another article.

Oh, just don’t expect something like Android to be ported onto the Vita. That will never be possible due to lower specs plus the fact that Rejuvenate runs on top of the VitaOS that itself is already consuming many of the resources and don’t forget the drivers needed to get stuff like GPU/Sound/touch to work are literally nonexistent.

With all of this said, this concludes my analysis of Rejuvenate. In conclusion, there is much potential to be had but we need to support this, both devs and users. There are many limitations, yes, but we need to remember that so did the recent 3DS hacks and those took off. It all comes down to us as users to show interest as the SDK evolves and more stuff becomes available for us to use. Is Rejuvenate a Nay? Not even close. It has all the potential to be a huge Yay but only time will be able to tell if that actually comes true. Remember you are a huge part of what it takes for Rejuvenate to take off.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m to explore more possibilities of stuff we could do with Rejuvenate I may want to write on soon enough!