The Cobra blackfin so far: OK, but not so great
Reviews of the PS Vita piracy dongle Cobra black fin are extremely sparse, despite the device having been on the market for about 2 months now.
As a matter of fact, a quick search (in English) only returns the recent review from PixelButts on /talk (and the same review by him that he brought to other forums as well).
His review brings concerns mostly about the build quality of the hardware in the Black Fin: he says normal usage of the device has broken the emuCard, a component that is critical to for the Black Fin to operate. And that adds to apparently bad wireless connections making the whole thing pretty unstable. From a software and usage perspective however, the device seems to deliver on its promise: the possibility to emulate cartridges on the PS Vita.
As far as the “piracy” component is concerned, nobody yet has stepped up to confirm if the Cobra p2p servers actually contain enough games, if any at all. At the end of the day and as sad as it may sound, the amount of content they can pirate is what people will care about with that kind of device. So with no information on that, poor hardware quality, and the fact that the device is not compatible with the latest 3.60 firmware, this doesn’t leave much in favor of the Blackfin. Proponents of the device might be hoping for some hardware improvements as well as support for the 3.60 Firmware, for the device to not turn into a failed experiment.
As far as I’m concerned, I’m still waiting for the review unit I was promised months ago by the Cobra team, and apparently so are other scene sites out there. Production issues on the Cobra side?
*sigh* The more I think about the Cobra Blackfin, the more I get to the conclusion that as far as the Vita Hacking scene is concerned, we are not making progress at all. You see, the only who managed to come up with something new tries to play sony, meaning he’s pushing more “proprietary” devices, so to speak. If that’s the only way to go, fine, so be it. But next time please give us something WORTHY. How about an adapter that converts microSD cards into something the Vita can make use of? How about another version of the Vita card that fits the slot but features class-4, class-8 or class-10 Read/Write speed? We’re sick of using the OVEREXPENSIVE-and-yet-class-2 Vita card and wait for more than 50 seconds every time an Unity-based game is going to load? (Yeah, Counterspy, I’m talking about you). That has nothing to do with the piracy, true, but would hit sony where it hurts and all the Vita audience could benefit.
Absolutely I would be interested in a microsd-to-Vita memslot converter, even if it sticks out a bit.
Also, such an adapter would be perfect on the PSTV, considering the PSTV isn’t a handheld, it wouldn’t bother the user at all.
if they was be able to simulate authentication , this device become great but know …..
Havent you recived a test device yet ? so you can review it your self ?
i wonder if it ever set foot on iran
You didn’t finish reading the article..
“As far as I’m concerned, I’m still waiting for the review unit I was promised months ago by the Cobra team, and apparently so are other scene sites out there. Production issues on the Cobra side?”
Just like the PSVita itself, this thing is faded to failure.
dont say that
*says it* lols. srsly, he is right, it is doomed to fail
Too many caveats here combined with the price. A lot of the vita games releasing now are under 20 dollars, so paying 100+ for a device that may or may not even have the game available seems silly.
good point
At least it’s hacking news. Was this dongle going to help with hacking the Vita? I can see that it’s used primarily for pirating Vita games, but people really just want emulators more than anything else.
No, unlike all of the other DRM devices on the market this one is 100% only for piracy. No homebrew support, no nothing. Only running backups. And it can’t even do that very well.
Don’t be daft. If the Vita scene would have gotten over itself and embraced piracy (because not doing it sure didn’t stop Sony from caring after year 2) the scene would be far more open. The idiotic need to “stop piracy” pretty much made the Vita entirely useless and largely unhacked.
If you have piracy it’s a lot easier to gain more system control and thus, homebrew. Piracy is a necessary “evil” to gain proper homebrew control because even if you don’t start with piracy, proper homebrew inevitably enables it one way or another.
The vita scene was full of morons, basically.
Finally someone said it! Thank you.
I’ve been thinking the same thing for a couple years now tbh. It’s not like piracy would’ve hurt the vita any more than Sony’s stupid decisions did.
Never once did I say that was a bad thing. Just that, unlike the Gateway, ODDE’s for PS3 and many others which can do both piracy and homebrew, this will not benefit the community at all besides running game backups. No homebrew support, no support to further the modding community, no nothing. Interesting idea, but a dead end that will never amount to anything.
That’s what I meant, never said piracy was bad. Piracy can be helpful, but only situationally. Most of you guys like free games, play it, never support the devs. This is not how to pirate. Download a game, and if you enjoy it support the f#cking devs. Nuff said. If you do that, I don’t see anything wrong with piracy.
do you really believe in humanity this much , come on dude this is real world , nothing work like that
Unfortunately it’s just too expensive. 13,000 yen here in Japan, which is an obscene price. More than the Vita itself.
plz some one give us some good news :((
I don’t exactly share the same opinions as others here when it comes to DRM devices. I don’t have a huge issue with piracy if you use it correctly. I like piracy simply because I can try a game before commuting to it. But this thing is a piece of s#!t. It’s quality is horrible and is 10000000% dependent on others also buying it. If it doesn’t take off (and it’s looking like this thing will flop) it will be nothing more than a fancy paper weight. Sure you could use it for your own games, but it can hardly play anything correctly as is. And since 3.60 is unsupported pretty soon new games will also be unsupported as well.
thanks great news :((
If I was given one, I probably wouldn’t it. Look at that thing, you really want to have to deal with that mess?
A useless device for a useless device. Neat. So like the Vita, this thing died even before it could try to win people over. To Sony and Cobra team, please try harder.
A guy on GBATemp chimed into the PS Vita hacking section last week and told us how many games were on the servers plus a mini-review, I’ll see if i can find the thread. His english wasn’t the best though, but it’s somewhat legible.
Vita has a very secure card authentication mechanism, which to date has not been penetrated and is based on secure cryptography. It is unlikely that a direct authentication method which avoids having to use a peer to peer system will appear any time soon. As a result Cobra has designed a unique and cutting edge peer to peer sharing device which allows users to share their favourite games with friends over an internet network. Initial batch is sure to sell out fast, so be sure to reserve your stocks in advance to avoid disappointment.