In early July and August, two bounties shook the PSVita hacking scene and attracted a great deal of interest which shot up their combined value to $2000. In this article, we’ll be looking at some recent progress updates about these two and at another bounty that we haven’t covered on this website!

GPU Acceleration in RetroArch & Native Resolution PSP Games Bounties: A look at recent updates

Native GPU accelerated Nintendo 64 emulation on the PSVita won’t come tomorrow but at least frangar is still working on a project to make it a reality one day in the future!

Starting off with the first-published of two, the GPU Acceleration in RetroArch bounty has been around since June 24 and it managed to reach $1300 as of writing this article. With frangar working on it, this bounty is split in two phases which include one for creating a GXM driver for RetroArch to allow for a better menu experience & shaders and another for creating GPU accelerated cores for systems that need them such as the PlayStation 1 and Nintendo 64. Currently, the first phase is still being worked upon and frangar managed to get runtime shader compilation working back in July allowing shader compilation on the device itself without depending on ‘psp2cgc’ which is a closed-source Vita shader compiler.

Recent Status Update: Around a week ago, frangar was asked on GitHub if there was any news and he said that he found a problem with threads while looking at CPU video filters. This means that work is still going on in relation to the bounty and we’ll hopefully see phase one being fully finished in the future!

The PSVita has been a PSP on steroids ever since HENkaku launched with dual analoague stick patches, native resolutions mods for GTA games, save states and more but if all PSP games can be played at native resolution then it would truly take the experience to a new level!

Moving on to the second bounty, we have the native resolution for PSP games bounty which as its title suggests aims to render all PSP games at 960×544 when run on the PSVita similar to what PPSSPP does. As the PSVita isn’t powerful enough to emulate the PSP solely through its native ARM hardware, a hybrid solution that leverages the PSP CPU/GPU found inside the PSVita’s hardware along with its own ARM hardware must be used and GitHub user ‘robots’ is currently working on making it a reality.

Recent Status Update: A few days ago, robots was asked on GitHub about any recent progress and he gave a fair bit of information in this regard. This information includes:

• robots has tackled:
  • Creating a patch for the sceGe module – Code from uOFW, a project that aims to provide an open-source alternative to the PSP’s kernel, helped out in making this
  • Defining the interface between the PSVita and its PSP hardware
  • Now, he’s working on porting the GPU statemachine and drawing from PPSSPP to the PSVita
• A GitHub repository will be opened when more progress is done to make it easier for other developers to help out
• Progress might be a bit slow in the immediate future as robots apparently has a ‘busy month ahead’

A quick look at a bounty for native resolution video output on the PSTV

While the PSTV didn’t do too well on launch, it attracted a decent following after HENkaku got released thanks to the PSVita’s great homebrew library and enhanced PSP emulation capabilities

Other than the aforementioned major bounties, another smaller bounty that’s PSTV-specific got published last month. This bounty was published on August 10th by ‘ScHlAuChii’ and aims to get native resolution video output from the PlayStation TV (960×544) or a 720p picture with a letterboxed 960×544 image if this isn’t possible. Need for this arose because it outputs at 480p, 720p or 1080i which leads to either upscaling or downscaling and as a result, pixel-perfect games may look odd especially if one’s playing games while sitting closer to their television/monitor.

As of right now, the bounty has raised $100 from a sole backer who is its creator and xerpi has done some research in relation to it which may help anybody willing to take it on. Like the other two bounties mentioned above, this bounty is also part of Rinnegatamante’s VitaNuova community.

Conclusion

While the PSVita homebrew scene has slowed down, the Switch scene is still seeing a good deal of releases and in the past few days, many tools including Lockpick_RCM, Goldleaf and NS-USBloader received substantial updates which may be worth checking out.

Disclaimer: Neither I or Wololo.net are affiliated with the bounty or BountySource. As a result, we bear no responsibility as to what happens to the bounty’s money.