PSVTools released – Easily manipulate PSV files with Python!
Earlier this month, developer motoharu, the guy that did SD2Vita software patches, released Virtual Game Card which is a tool that lets you properly dump your Vita games. The files produced have, a somewhat fitting, “.psv” file extension and can be likened to ISO files of a CD/DVD as they’re NOT compressed out of the box. Thanks to some scene developers, the “.psv” format is becoming much better.
What’s PSVTools?
PSVTools is a python utility that combines three important PSV file utilities. These 3 utilities are:
- PSVTrim, a utility to trim PSV files which doesn’t seem to share code with PSVTrimmer so that means that it could be used as an alternative. PSVTrimmer requires .NET framework so it can only run reliably on Windows while PSVTrim can run on Linux/MacOS or any other system that has a port of python 2.7/3.4+
- PSVExpand, a utility to expand trimmed PSV files to their original size.
- PSVerify, a utility that validates checksums of PSV files.
Virtual Game Card – A dumper/mounter for Vita card dumps in PSV format
These 3 tools are quite important if you wish to have proper 1:1 backups of your games. This is a good idea since no data is altered in the process which means that the dumps could be used reliably thus totally negating the need of needing to carry about your Vita game carts. With SD2Vita, it’s not recommended you take it out of the slot too much so the PSV file format is probably the best way to go when archiving your game so you could install it at a later date whenever you wish.
Conclusion
If you use Linux/MacOS and want to dump your game carts, this is the best tool there’s available for these platforms. Obviously, you need Python 2.7 or 3.4+ for this to work so make sure it’s installed. Installation instructions and the source code can be checked out by following the link below. If you have any issues, report them to ‘kageurufu’ on GitHub.
Installation instructions + initial release notes: https://github.com/kageurufu/psvtools/releases/tag/0.1.0
Reddit link: https://www.reddit.com/r/vitahacks/comments/72gtbw/release_psvtools_python_psv_format_manipulator/
First
second lol
Third
And you can see just before me, The Three Stooges have commented using brain at their max level… XD
On Topic:
The Vita scene is becoming a great source for knowledge and games of course (no, not the official ***, but the emulated one’s from old glories). Hope this gives the brand owners an idea of what the community wants and they put their feet on the ground and their brains on the table.
yes
third!! ***??!!!!
Actually, the 1:1 backups of my games are the .pkg files right off Sony’s website plus the .rifs I create with NoNpDRM. I understand why people buy game cards, I’m just not one of them. The last physical portable game I bought was Peace Walker, and then I realized I didn’t want to carry physical games around with me. So I returned it, bought it off PSN, and I’m all-PSN ever since.
Yeah, but whenever your account is banned by Sony, you can say bye to all your games.
Happend to me….. Twice! 😉
Now we need a tool to compress trimmed psv and a loader for compressed games
The files on the gamecards are encrypted so compression is effectively useless.
All compression is is a way to summarise the contents of a file, e.g. ‘a number 1, repeated a million times’ is shorter than actually typing out a million 1s. If there are no or few compressible patterns, you don’t save much space.
Encrypting that string of a million 1s changes each 1 in a different way, so your encrypted file could end up as something with no patterns in it like ‘653957108…’, and thus there’s no compression to be had.
Well, the compression tool should decrypt it before doing the actual compression then (and re-encrypt it after doing the decompression).
If we can decrypt PKGs on a PC, what’s stopping us from decrypting cart dumps? I’m not sure about the re-encryption though, and specifically whether it’s possible for the theoretically re-encrypted PSV to match the original encrypted PSV 1:1.
And I’m not even touching the subject of the compressibility of the decrypted files of a game, since games tend to store them already compressed, and compressing already compressed data is a waste of time.
So it is sth like proper 1:1 dump for example the Gamecard? I am not tested it yet. So what is this extra space at the dump it is unique to all of the gamecards? Aurora please have you got info about vitas gpu support for homebrew? I wondering if it ever be possibility to have working n64 emulator?
Sorry dump of Gamecube – stupid ipad :\
Ford
Thanks for all the work you do on your articles.
Changing the topic…
4 month has passed since psv was released, are there any news or updates??