A couple days ago as I wrote about developer cpajuste‘s latest update to ScummVM for the PS Vita, I was wondering what he was up to since he seemed pretty passionate about bringing as much homebrew as possible to the PS Vita, rivalling probably even Rinnegatamante’s number of releases in short amounts of time. Well, my question seems to have been answered since he has just released a new entry into the GekiHEN contest: PSP2Shell. This release differs a bit from the usual as it is mostly aimed at developers rather than us, the end-users. However if you are on the fence about jumping on the Vita homebrew development bandwagon, this may be the one thing that helps you make up your mind.

What is PSP2Shell

PSP2Shell is a Windows/Linux utility that aims to help developers who are working on creating homebrew for the PS Vita. Here is a more accurate description that I could ever make from the developer himself after I inquired him about the purpose of this tool:

Yes, the purpose of psp2shell is to ease the development/deployment process. It’s not really a “debbuger” as we can’t use advanced debug functions like a real debugger, but it will really improve development with the main functions which is to “printf” (print debug messages) over wifi to the client, and for the most part it can send a newly compiled executable to the device via wifi without the need to go trough the “current” steps which was: exit application, launch vitashell, launch ftp, send the new app (eboot), exit vitashell then launch the updated app. You can now just use “reload path/to/new-eboot” and it will reload your new eboot via wifi and restart the application.
There’s also a few more functions added to browse/delete/move… files over wifi via the client too.

Currently using the Linux version is recommended since the Windows version is still a work-in-progress, however don’t let that stop you. You may just run into a few issues that Linux users most likely won’t. Still, it is good that cpajuste gives you a choice of what OS you would rather use for development – though my assumption is that almost everyone who works with homebrew prefers Linux over Windows.

Instructions for PSP2Shell

INSTALL

– add libpsp2shell.a and psp2shell.h to your app..

– add psp2shell needed library flags to your app :
-lpsp2shell -lSceSysmodule_stub -lSceNet_stub \
-lSceNetCtl_stub -lSceKernel_stub -lScePower_stub -lSceAppMgr_stub

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– DO NOT use secure flag (vita-make-fself -s), this is needed for reloading,
you should then add the flag back when releasing your application.

– Please note that when using psp2shell library, you’re application
will never enter “deep sleep” (“power lock”), so the network connexion will not be lost.

USAGE

– init psp2shell in your app : psp2shell_init(3333, 0)

– to print to the shell from your app use : psp2shell_print(..) / psp2shell_print_color(..)

– connect to your app with psp2shell_cli : ./psp2shell_cli 192.168.x.x 3333

– update/reload your app from the shell : reload “path/to/eboot.bin”

– type help (or ?) for more commands
(cd, ls, pwd, rm, rmdir, mv, put, reset, reload, launch, umount, thlist, modlist)

Download PSP2Shell

To download and start using PSP2Shell just click this link to go to the GekiHEN website and download the needed files. Hopefully this tool will help you with your PS Vita programming endeavours so you can finally release an entry into this contest too!

Good luck with programming!