The PSVita’s stock music player does the job although it won’t win any awards so Joel16 went ahead and created ElevenMPV. Over the last couple of weeks, this homebrew music player has been receiving a fair amount of updates and now, it’s at version 2.0 which brings about support for music seeking! Other than that, we’ll also be looking at the Dolphin progress report for May 2019 in this article.

PSVita Homebrew Release: ElevenMPV 2.0 with touchscreen seeking support, support for opening media stored on uma0/ur0 and various fixes

Now, you can seek music in ElevenMPV so you can skip to your favourite parts in songs/podcasts!

As part of Sony’s theme with the PSVita to lock down every system component as much as possible, even importing music to the console requires you to use QCMA/CMA. Without a doubt, this can be a significant nuisance if you have a large library but until ElevenMPV dropped this April, the stock music player was the only way to play audio in a dedicated music player on the Vita (VitaShell can play audio files but it’s a file manager at heart).

ElevenMPV, by Joel16, is a dedicated music player for hacked PlayStation Vita consoles that’s modeled after Eleven, which is the CyanogenMod/LineageOS music player, following the general CyanogenMod theme found in the developer’s work with homebrew like 3DShell. This music player allows you to play music files in various formats, such as MP3/FLAC/WAV/OGG and others, and it also has a large amount of features like metadata support and a shuffle function.

Now, it’s been updated to version 2.0 and this update brought along:

• 

  Other than seek support, ElevenMPV 2.0 also brings about the ability to open music from ur0/uma0 which may be useful if you have a huge music library

  The ability to seek (change the time) music by using the touch screen for all supported except OPUS

  • Seeking in FLAC/MP3 files may be a bit slow; OGG seeking might crash if you do a lot seeking in a short period of time but should be fine under normal use.
• Support for opening media from ur0 and uma0 rather than only ux0
  • This could be very useful if you have a microSD full of music you’d like to use on your PSVita.
• The ID3v2 character limit has been bumped to 64 characters allowing longer metadata (album title, artist, genre) to be displayed on screen
• Sony’s dynamic normaliser can now be turned on from the main menu
• The version of mpg123 being used has been updated to version 1.25.10 and a couple of bug fixes relating to MP3/FLAC playback

To grab ElevenMPV 2.0 and give your PSVita a good music player, check out this link or grab it via VHBB. Issues should be reported to the Issues Tab on GitHub link provided as always.

Emulation News: Dolphin May 2019 Progress Report Published with Taiko no Tatsujin Drumset & Drawsome Tablet support, stereoscopic 3D support and better USB device support among other stuff!

While the Dolphin emulator has been around for over a decade, improvements are still being made and interest is still pretty high.

As a result, the folks behind it publish numerous nicely-written progress reports and this time, the May one just got published. Obviously, you can read the full report but checking out the link below but here, a concise summary of the most important will be given:

• 

  Apparently, drawing tablets for the Wii were a thing and now, Dolphin supports Drawsome which is Ubisoft’s variant along with the 2  games ever made for it

  Proper support for the Taiko no Tatsujin drumset has been implemented allowing you to fully utilise a Wii/PS4/Switch drumset.

  • This means that you can now navigate the game’s menus with the drumset itself rather than with a separate controller
• Support for the Drawsome drawing tablet and its huge selection of titles of which there are only 3, one of which is a compilation disk of the other 2!
• Passive stereoscopic 3D has now been implemented allowing you to play games in 3D or at least try to
  • Obviously, you need a monitor that supports 3D, such as Nvidia’s 3D Vision, and a pair of 3D glasses
• You can now test new controller settings without closing the controller configuration window thanks to an improvement in window structuring thus fixing an odd behaviour introduced during the switchover to Qt
• 

  If you’re a fan of drum games, then Dolphin’s latest update will surely put a smile on your face as the Tatacon is now fully supported!

  Some Wii games make use of USB peripherals like a keyboard or skateboard (Tony Hawk Ride) and Dolphin supports these through Passthrough. In May, this feature received a couple of important updates making it much more stable on Windows/Linux/macOS thanks to libusb updates and now, USB webcams can be used on Dolphin when it’s running on Windows!

  • Performance improvements for some games that use Passthrough, like American Idol Encore, are also present in the latest development builds thanks to improved USB device polling support
• Star Fox: Assault’s (GameCube) random crashes have been fixed (there’s a lengthy explanation about this) and Cubeb is now the default audio backend on Windows

As demonstrated above, last month brought about a lot of cool features to Dolphin so to read more, check out the full progress report by clicking here.

Conclusion

As usual, the homebrew/emulation communities are always releasing interesting stuff and covering everything is pretty difficult. As a result, you might be interested in checking out this recent video about Orbital’s (PS4 emulator) recent progress which includes DualShock support and DobieStation’s (PS2 emulator) performance improvements thanks to GS JIT.

You may also support Joel16 by following the links below; no links are provided for Dolphin as they don’t accept donations.

Joel16’s PayPal link can be found in ElevenMPV’s release page above.

Joel16’s Patreon (mostly inactive): https://www.patreon.com/joel_16