PSVita: This is what’s inside the cobra blackfin
The cobra blackfin is back from the dead. This p2p Vita game sharing device implicitly promises to be Vita pirates’ wet dream, allowing people to share games with their “friends” worldwide. The Cobra team, behind the dongle, recently updated their website to announce that resellers started receiving the device. As a matter of fact, several end users have already received theirs: venerable Japanese hacking site emuonpsp.net, which as far as I can remember has been online pretty much forever, has managed to get their hands on a Cobra blackfin. According to them, they got it from a typical retailer (Myself and a few other high profile scene sites are still waiting for our sample items to review).
Emuonpsp used the opportunity to share a few screenshots of the inside of the cobra blackfin (see below). The screenshots reveal what kind of hardware architecture is powering the piracy dongle.
Unsurprisingly, quite a number of people on the scene are expecting to get their hands on the device in order to reverse engineer it. Although such a thing is pretty typical (the scene is always keen on reverse engineering the likes of TrueBlue, Gateway, etc…), in the case of the BlackFin I’m wondering if there’s even an incentive to do so. The concept sounds pretty “simple” and non-magical to me: the device uses actual, legit games at the authentication step, getting just enough data for the PS Vita to then accept to run the iso. I’m of course over simplifying things here, but the rest is mostly glue for all the software components to work together.
Nevertheless, I wouldn’t be surprised if the software running on the cobra blackfin is heavily protected with DRMs to delay knockoffs.
The value of the blackfin will mostly lie in its network of servers hosting the games, which might or might not be enough to gather interest from gamers and pirates.
The screenshots from emuonpsp show that the blackfin uses an Actel A3P250-VQG100 (FPGA) as its main CPU and an FTDI FT2232HL for USB communication. Emuonpsp note that another slot is available for a microcontroller, but that one appears empty on the screenshots.
Source: emuonpsp
Completly unuseful right now
Can’t see myself using this, too big of a device. I’d love to see a chip made for the game slot itself or a FREE software exploit that can give us some iso backup running capabilities. I don’t want my vita relying on some giant dock, even if it is in minimal use. Anybody remember the psp?
I don’t remember having to pay as much as the system costs for a native hack. A better example would be the 3ds but you get my point.
They should make something similar to sky3ds at least. Altough the psvita cards leave no room for that kind of stuff.
room?? seriously?
a micro sd card is much smaller than that and could easily fit in the vita cartridge.
but hold your horses sonny!
its never about the construction of the cartridges….its the mechanism and the software implemented in that cartridge to make it work!
he meant actual space on the card you ***
Do you want some unicorns and rainbows with your order, ma’am?
I want 2 unicorns ( AngryFolk is responsible for paying ) , thanks
It has a great chip on it. The Actel chip is the same family the DSM4 used back in the PS2 times. I still have mine installed “soldered” on my PS2
Same yo amazing modchip too
I don’t think you’re oversimplifying it but you have to think there may have (should have?) been some kind of security chip on the game cards that they’d have to emulate they couldn’t just pass the ISO in as an “ODE” type of situation or at least I’d assume that.
Regardless it’s an interesting idea… I’d love to see what comes of the scene reversing these things and if they are doing any special emulation and not just having the ability to directly pass an ISO into the proprietary card port.
It’s the size of a f**king kinect.
Looking foward to buying one in iran
May not be the best solution for playing ones own backups, but it’s better than nothing I guess. If I could go to the past, I would prevent myself from buying a Vita and just buy a GDP unit.
I mean GPD. That name always gets me mixed up.
Gpd XD to be exact.
But with the GPD Win coming out soon, idk what to get.
I hope for reverse engineering, a program to dump our games locked to our console/mem card, some rtm or cwcheat program and finally I’ll be playing all those Vita jrpgs.
well, vita scene is dead, wii u scene is unexisting, seems like the only console alive is the 3ds, heck, arm9h, cfw and recently some guy in gbt is porting a ds emulator for 3ds, guys like yifan lu just gave up cause the lack of interesting of another people to code something for this console, this cobra fin is already dead.
Yeah and only the idiots partaking in the Vita scene have themselves to blame. Their self-righteousness. Oh we don’t want to have piracy. Yeah, well, look at that, the Vita STILL died and faster than ever.
So now we have a useless system with wonderful hardware being underutilized on all fronts. YAY!
Only entitled idiots spout such stuff. Homebrew won’t save the PS Vita, and it’s not dead to start with. Piracy would actually kill it.
It’s still getting games, so I’ll be over here playing them, thanks.
Data release go?
Purchase 2nd hand vita: check
Strip said vita: check
See how to solder parts of device to debug or bus pirate #AdamOutler
Configure Alcatel Chipset to run cloning software to set server address.
Not unique to me unfortunately.
PlaGeRaN,thanks!!
Your welcome?¿ Not sure how though
Worthless. PS Vita is dead. Even Sony terminated Vita TV.
I hope that the cobra blackfin device arrived to latinamerica
could you put sd2vita adapters in every slot and use it as a massive storage device?