Today’s one of those days in which exciting news stretches far and wide as there’s something in store having to do with Sony & Nintendo’s latest consoles and iOS devices. In this article, we’ll be looking at Yuzu’s Vulkan Renderer becoming available in public builds, GPCS4 running a commercial game with some success and checkra1n finally being ported to Linux!

Emulation News: Yuzu’s Vulkan Renderer no longer Early Access-exclusive & ‘We Are Doomed’ gets in-game in GPCS4

In the beginning of December, the folks behind Yuzu delivered one of the most-requested features for the emulator which was Vulkan rendering but kept it exclusive to Early Access (Patreon) builds to iron out larger issues and incentivise more people into donating. Now, the Vulkan graphics renderer has been merged into Yuzu’s main branch meaning that public builds of the emulator now include it; this primarily results in notable performance boosts for AMD GPU users and moderate ones for Intel GPU users since Vulkan support on these platforms is better than that of OpenGL. As usual, it must be noted that you still need a relatively powerful computer to be able to play even simpler Switch titles and Vulkan rendering won’t do any miracles if you’re using a PC that’s not up to scratch!

You may read more about Vulkan rendering in Yuzu by checking out this blog post on the matter. Mainline (public) builds containing the Vulkan rendering backend can be found here. You may donate to Yuzu via Patreon.

Moving onto Sony’s current home console, efforts to emulate it have been going on for quite a while and in June of last year, a closed-source emulator called Spine managed to load and run ‘Megaman Legacy’ and ‘We Are Doomed’ pretty well.

However, its development seems to have slowed down and no more builds have been released since mid-2019 meaning that we might not be hearing much about it since nobody else can pick up the work since its source code isn’t available.

Now, another PlayStation 4 emulator is in the spotlight and this time, it’s Inori’s GPCS4 which has been in development for quite a while. Thanks to recent developments, its developer Inori updated its README to inform us that ‘We Are Doomed‘, a commercial title also runnable in Spine, is now in-game, can display graphics and is able to be played. However, it’s important to note that the frame rate is too low for the game to be considered playable as there are no graphical optimisations present but there are plans to implement these together with improved controller input handling.

You may read more about developments relating to GPCS4’s by checking out its README. A Discord Server is also available.

iOS Jailbreak News: Checkra1n 0.9.8 released with Linux port, iOS 13.3.1 support, a new CLI and more!

Ever since checkra1n’s release in November, iOS devices with an A11 or older SoC became hackable on the latest firmware since the checkm8 exploit it uses is hardware-based and unpatchable. However, the community has had one major gripe with checkra1n which was its exclusivity to macOS but that has just changed since its long-awaited Linux port is finally here!

Earlier today, checkra1n 0.9.8 was released and this includes:

• Support for Linux on 32/64-bit x86 and ARM platforms meaning that it can even run on your Raspberry Pi!
  • Instructions on how to use it can be found here
• Support for iOS 13.3.1 which is the current version of iOS
• An option has been added which lets you jailbreak iOS versions that checkra1n isn’t officially compatible with
  • This option is usually needed when Apple releases a new version of iOS and checkra1n isn’t updated yet. It’s also useful for those on beta versions of iOS
• A new CLI has been introduced with support for fast DFU, the ability to set custom boot-args and a –version flag
• Low-Level patching is now done by pongoOS
  • PongoOS is a low-level OS that’s able to directly interface with the hardware and even boot other OSes like Linux
• Many bug fixes & webra1n (web-based GUI for headless solutions)

You can grab checkra1n from its official website by selecting the platform of your choice.

Conclusion

Staying on the topic of iOS jailbreaking, Brandon Azad of Project Zero plans to release a kernel exploit which provides R/W access to kernel. This exploit, which can be used to make a jailbreak according to pwn20wnd, supports all iOS devices including the iPhone 11 and is compatible with iOS 13.3 and below. The PSVita received Noboru, a manga reader by Creckeryop.