Cobra Black Fin announce price discount, lite version, and upcoming updates
The Cobra team just announced a few updates for their P2P piracy dongle, the Black Fin. A Lite version at a lower price, a discount on the full bundle, Android compatibility to make the system more portable (use on your phone instead of your PC). Furthermore, they hinted at things they might be doing now that HENkaku has been released.
Team Cobra’s piracy dongle just took a serious hit with the release of HENkaku: HENkaku brings homebrew support to the latest PS Vita firmware 3.60, while the Cobra BlackFin is only compatible up to firmwares 3.5x. The release of HENkaku motivated more Vita users to jump to firmware 3.60, lowering even further the potential user base of Cobra black fin.
It’s in that context that their update comes, and is probably what explains a price drop, and the introduction of a “lite” version of the Cobra black fin. The lite version will be priced at $69.99, while the “full” one is now dropped at $89.99. (it was more than $100 before). The lite version doesn’t include a card reader or a usb cable, things that you can get for very cheap pretty much everywhere, and that most of us already own, so I guess that’s good news for those who were interested in the device.
Nevertheless, with the shrinking potential userbase, this gives a feeling of “too little, too late”.
Team Cobra is also promising software updates, the most promising of which is support of Android bluetooth, meaning the Cobra Black Fin could now work “on the go”, through their (upcoming?) Android app. That honestly sounds like a cool feature, but they have not provided a date for that.
The press release also mentions improvements in the cartridge dumping stability, support for Chinese/Japanese character encoding, and a better user interface.
To motivate people to get the device, The Cobra team also delivered an impressive list of games that can already be played (read: “pirated”) on their asian servers. The list contains approximately 80 high profile PS Vita games, and the team promises 20 more games will be added in the next two weeks.
Last but not least, the Cobra team mentions they are following the HENkaku release and intend to leverage it:
Cobra Team will continue to innovate and support BlackFin with many new enhancements.
The Vita scene has only truly just begun, and with the dawn of homebew [sic] loaders on Vita many new possibilities can be explored! We will be at the forefront of scene development and bring great features to our users, as you would expect from Team Cobra.
(You can find the full press release on the Cobra Black fin site here.)
What does HENkaku bring to the table for Cobra Black Fin?
That statement from Cobra team about HENkaku sounds a lot like wishful thinking, with no concrete promise to actually deliver anything or no specific schedule. Nevertheless here’s a few things I think Team Cobra could be doing with HENkaku and the Black Fin:
Port HENkaku to firmwares 3.xx, use it to bring homebrew to Black Fin users. The Black Fin system could become an all-in-one CFW solution for these users, providing emulators with roms available from their P2P servers, in addition to Vita piracy. These people have no concerns about copyright infringement so it wouldn’t be a problem for them to condone hosting and sharing of thousands of games from multiple platforms. I can see how a good software solution here could actually be very enticing for their users.
Make Black Fin compatible with firmware 3.60. It is likely that HENkaku is opening doors to hacking groups such as Team Cobra, which these teams could leverage to find new ways to make their system compatible with the latest firmware. I am actually not sure what the blocker has been for them so far on firmware 3.60, but it is possible HENkaku has given them the keys to the latest vita firmware.
Find new hacks or piracy enabling mechanisms to make Cobra black Fin a more user friendly solution for pirates. Kind of an extension of the paragraph above, maybe Cobra will be one of the teams looking into making piracy easier for their users. Right now Sony is protected from Black Fin because it is not available on the latest firmware, but also because its process to pirate is complicated. If Cobra manage to find new information in the latest firmware, they might be able to crack open the doors to piracy, which would be bad news for Sony and the PS Vita.
It goes without saying, we do not condone piracy here at wololo.net, and I’m personally not a big fan of DRM-protected dongles. Piracy in itself is a matter of personal conscience, but to me, paying people to pirate is like combining 2 sins. with that being said, feel free to comment, but comments promoting piracy or sharing copyright infringing files will be moderated, as they always are.
Note: we still haven’t received the Black Fin bundle we were promised by team Cobra for a review. Early independent reviews of the device however are slightly negative due to the price and overall instability of the device. At least this announcement is trying to fix those issues.
I really hope they never find a way to get it working on 3.60… we really do not need support to be dropped from the devs that still make great games for the vita, if they knew the system they make games for was been pirated they would move on to the ps4 or something else and not bother anymore.
If that’s the case why do developers continue making games for the 3ds despite the fact that it’s completely broken into at this point? Exactly. And let’s be honest here, any game that’s due to come out for vita will still come out regardless because it’s not as if they’re expecting huge sales anyway since the console is barely selling as is.
You Tony are hypocrite and uninformed.
No one cares about this ***. This thing failed before the launch day.
I say pirate away. The length of time it took for a piracy “solution” was so long that the piracy haters have no “piracy killed the Vita” slogan to run around saying like they did with the DC and PSP (which sold loads anyway). It isn’t like the Vita is getting a ton of attention from most developers. I’m kind of irritated by Sony’s lack of support and marketing of this great “legacy” system.
Who knows what it could have been had we had some really decent AAA titles, like a GTA V spinoff. The PSP alone had 3 great GTA games. This console is missing so many franchises it hurts. To me the console is already fairly dead and it will suffer the same fate it had without piracy (maybe even better with piracy). I think very few Vita owners even notice these hacking developments anyway.
I hope this motivates people on the scene right now to open the Vita up even more. It’s just going to be the 3DS with Gateway like solutions all over again. People, the good people of course, just want to bring homebrew to the masses, but attempting to keep piracy from becoming a thing is rather pointless and unfortunately just encourages greedy people to step forward and again, do what Gateway did. I don’t support piracy, but I do support opening up a device you paid money for. Consoles these days are like restricted computers you’re paying a large premium for.
Since there’s no substantial proof that piracy affects sales, I personally think it’s a pointless battle to fight unless it’s just the principle of a software dev to prevent piracy since they wouldn’t want their hardwork stolen either or, because GeoHot and several other Xbone scene people have shown how unkind the legal teams these corporations have can be.
I can’t think of any vita games I would play(if I could pirate) but do not already own. It would be nifty if I didn’t need to have my vita cartridges with me, but Blackfin isn’t really a solution for that.
Same for me. The nice point of piracy would be to play translated japanese games for me.
For games available on cartridges in Europe, I’d rather buy them. After a while or used they cost 20 to 25€. If you count the price of memory on Vita (about 5€ for the 2-4 GB it would require to store the pirated game), it means what 15-20 € for the game itself ?
Whats the difference to you between buying a used game, or pirating? The devs still arent getting anything.I am not taking a stance on piracy, but the biggest moral issue for most people (myself included) is that the developers aren’t getting paid. So with that in mind, whats the difference to you personally? I am just looking for another perspective on this.
I haven’t even seen any place shipping these things, how can you come out with a new version when there isn’t an old one out in the public?
Did my comment get deleted?
The article says “They hinted at things they might be doing now that HENkaku has been released”
Just wondering if one of those things include sh@tting their pants because theier dongle will be useless soon.
If anyone believes the release of HENkaku was not atleast in part to counter the black fin, please message me. I would like some of what your smoking.
Agreed, I think the release of HENkaku really caught them with their pants down, and like the article states “Too little, Too late” for blackfin.
In my country, we call it: “te los vas a comer con patatas” cobra.
They better push this out the door quick if they want to sell any units.
i wana get it fr my vita.