In its 3rd Christmas of having a widely-used native hack, the PSVita’s homebrew scene is still kicking and we just got Hyper Princess Pitch, a top-down shooter themed after the Christmas season! In this article, we’ll also be looking at the release of Volume_Profile 2.0 (now renamed to JAV) and Cathery’s feat of squeezing a FTP sysmodule into just 1MB RAM!

PSVita Game Release: Hyper Princess Pitch ported by JeffRuLz345

JeffRuLZ345 strikes again with yet another Game Maker Studio game port and this time, it’s Hyper Princess Pitch which the introduction has already revealed.

While short, Hyper Princess Pitch is pretty fun and has gameplay reminiscent to Super Smash TV (Screenshot taken during testing session)

This game, which is an Indie Title by Daniel Remar, is a Christmas-themed top-down shooter that has you playing as Princess Pitch trying to stop Mecha Santa from spreading happiness and cheer all over the world simply because you think these plans are ridiculous. Hyper Princess Pitch is a remake of ‘Operation:Carnage‘, a DOS title that has you playing as a guy trying to cause trouble in a fictional Earth controlled by aliens.

It’s noteworthy to state that the game is pretty short but levels have multiple paths and 5 difficulty levels exist so it’ll keep you entertained during any boring moments you might encounter during the Christmas season! When it comes to the PlayStation Vita port, a brief testing session conducted by myself went pretty well with the game performing very well, audio working just fine and the controls being mapped in a way that makes sense.

To grab Hyper Princess Pitch, you may find the link from its Reddit Release Thread or download it directly on your PSVita through VHBB as it’s available on Rinnegatamante’s VitaDB.

PSVita & Switch Module/Plugin Release: Volume_Profile/JAV 2.0 for the Vita & FTPd in 1MB RAM for the Switch

Moving on to non-holidays themed releases, Marburg (cuevavirus) of Team CBPS has released an update to Volume_Profile bumping its version to 2.0 and changing its name to  JAV.

If you’re ditching 3.5mm jack audio peripherals, JAV has your back 😉 (Image Source)

This quality-of-life plugin makes your PSVita remember the volume level you set for its speakers, headphones connected through the 3.5mm jack and Bluetooth audio devices thus removing the potential for annoying volume hikes when you plug in headphones after using the speakers. According to its changelog on Team CBPS’ forums, this update brings along:

• Support for saving volume levels (profiles) for Bluetooth audio devices
  • It can save volume information for up to 32 paired devices which should be enough for the vast majority of people
• The configuration path has been changed to ‘ux0:/data/jav’
• Visual (?) and Performance improvements
• On GitHub, its name has been changed to 自動オーディオボリューム (Automatic Audio Volume) for some unknown reason. JAV might be an abbreviation for its Japanese Reading

You may grab JAV 2.0 from its GitHub Release Page and it’s to be installed in *main section of your taiHEN config.txt.

You can now copy files to/from your Switch in background while being able to run other sysmodules!

Switching focus to the another scene, Cathery has released an optimised FTPd sysmodule for hacked Switch consoles coming after her popular sys-con sysmodule which lets you use DualShock 3, DualShock 4, XBOX ONE and XBOX 360 controllers on your Switch console. Compared to the original sys-ftpd sysmodle by ‘jakibaki’, which also lets you run an FTP server in background, Cathery’s sys-ftp-light only uses 1MB of RAM rather than 6MB which lets you run many more system modules at the same time on your console while also working on FW 9.1.0.

Other changes compared to sys-ftpd include:

• Sound was removed completely
• On Joy-cons updated to FW 9.0.0, the LED light turns off automatically after 10 seconds to prevent battery drain – this prevents the LED staying on forever when the sysmodule gets interrupted
• The ‘titles’ folder was renamed to ‘contents’ in order to conform to the new rules set by Atmosphere 0.10.0 and newer.
  • You’ll need to rename it back if you’re using Atmosphere 0.9.x or older

You may grab sys-ftpd-light and read more about it by following this link to its GitHub Release Page. Cathery may be donated to on Ko-fi.

Conclusion

Other than the above, SkyMM-NX (Skyrim mod manager) 1.1.1 has been released and if you’re a bit out of the loop, Microsoft has announced their upcoming XBOX console called the XBOX Series X (yes, that’s really what it’s called; link leads to a ‘The Verge’ article – Wololo isn’t affiliated with website) which might be worth reading about even though it’s pretty much a glorified gaming PC.