Even though the PSVita has been hacked for over 8 years and a superior hacked portable is out on the market (i.e. the Nintendo Switch), interest in developing homebrew, plugins and mods for it is still there. In this article, we’re going to look at DejaVu, a plugin which brings a beloved feature found in many emulators to the PSVita!

TheFlow releases DejaVu: A kernel plugin allowing you to do save states!

A little over a month ago, TheFlow tweeted out that he was working on a save state plugin for the PlayStation Vita and started asking for names although no ETA was given. Now, the time has come and déjàvu has been released adopting the name that the community chose for it through a poll.

TheFlow has given numerous contributions to the PSVita scene including VitaShell, Adrenaline, h-encore, h-encore2 and now DejaVu together with many other software!

Like save state functionality in emulators, this plugin works by taking a snapshot of the contents in RAM and then loading them back whenever you wish thus allowing you to save at a point in a game where saving isn’t normally allowed and load back from that point. As a result, it could make games more enjoyable since you won’t have to restart levels in some games if you miss a jump or get yourself killed. Furthermore, this plugin may also be useful for developers as it may allow one to temporarily update/downgrade their firmware to test homebrew/plugin compatibility.

When it comes to numbers, save states take around 400-500MB each so make sure you have a large enough microSD/memory card if you plan to do many states and loading them takes 40 seconds while generating them takes 60 seconds. Using the plugin is pretty simple as it only has you:

• Pressing the Left Trigger to load or Right Trigger to save
• Selecting SELECT, START, TRIANGLE, CIRCLE, CROSS or SQUARE to select the slot you wish to use (there are 6 obviously)
• Pressing the PS Button while still holding the two buttons in the previous steps
  • Save states are saved in ux0:/savestate

What are the caveats? Where do I get it from?

The current version of DejaVu may corrupt the contents of your memory card or microSD card so use it at your own risk till it gets updated with a fix for this issue

While DejaVu sounds like a plugin that you should get right now provided you have enough storage, it’s important to mention that it’s still in experimental stages and it has some caveats that should be kept in mind! These caveats include:

• Your Memory Card and/or microSD Card (SD2Vita or PSVSD) may become corrupted because in the current implementation (version 0.1), the code that takes care of refreshing the file system after loading a save state has some problems that aren’t properly solved yet
• Loading states isn’t fully stable yet and the system may crash while using the plugin’s functionality
• While not exactly a caveat, the plugin has only been tested on a PSVita Slim running FW 3.65

If these caveats don’t scare you or you have a secondary PSVita for testing stuff out, then you can download DejaVu 0.1 from the link below and install it as you would a regular kernel plugin by putting in the *KERNEL section of taiHEN’s config.txt. TheFlow encourages those who find any issues to report them to the Issues Tab of the GitHub repository.

Conclusion

You may support TheFlow on Patreon through the link below and perhaps early access to newer builds of the plugin if they’re made available through there first as was done in the past with some other releases. On the Switch front, AXChip8 has been released and so has Appstore Workbench 3.0/3.1.

DejaVu 0.1 GitHub Release Page (make sure you read the caveats list before using it): https://github.com/TheOfficialFloW/dejavu/releases

TheFlow’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TheOfficialFloW

TheFlow’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/theflow0