60w ago - This weekend PlayStation Vita developer wololo has made available a guide to porting VHBL (PS Vita Half-Byte Loader) to individual game exploits for those interested.

This news comes proceeding the recent Motorstorm Arctic Edge and Everybody's Tennis PSP / PS Vita game exploits.

Below is the guide, to quote from his blog (linked above): This guide assumes that you found a user mode exploit in a game, and that you were able to write a binary loader.

So now what’s next? Well, as you probably know if you’ve gone that far, the PSP scene doesn’t really like “hello worlds”. A hello world is nice, but it accomplishes nothing, it just draws Sony’s attention to your exploit, and you know the vulnerability will be patched soon, while nobody really used the exploit.

Well, the next step is, ideally, a HEN or a custom firmware. Of course, this requires a kernel exploit, and...

64w ago - Following up on his previous update, today PS Vita homebrew developer wololo has announced that the PS Vita Half Byte Loader (VHBL) will arrive shortly after March 1, 2012 with details below.

To quote: "This has been a tough week for lots of you, coming to my blog everyday to see that no new information was available about the release of VHBL. Trust me, it's been a much tougher week for me, making sure things go according to my humble plan, coping with a few more issues than expected, and overall, taking all the insults about "being a faker" or "trying to boost my ego" without being able to say anything else than "please trust me".

Ok, let's reveal a few essential things here, starting with the bad news: The game used by Teck4′s exploit is not available on the US vita store. Blame Sony and their "275 out of 900 PSP games available for your vita" scheme for this, not us. Part of the waiting time was to see if Sony would add this game to the US store at some point. It is obviously compatible since it is available in other continents, so my guess is that this is a marketing or a legal decision.

Long story short, people in the US who want...

68w ago - Today the Rebug Team have made available a LV2 Loader PKG PS3 homebrew application for PlayStation 3 developers.

Download: LV2 Loader PS3 Homebrew Application

To quote: LV2 Loader is a tool for devs to allow the quick testing of modified lv2_kernel.self by launching it from the root of dev_flash without the risk of bricking the PS3 or need for a flasher if the new kernel does not work.

The app will run on any 3.15, 3.41, 3.55 CEX or DEX firmware that has lv1 mmap and lv2 peek and poke patches. It also has udp_printf support which will return the offset of the lv2 boot path in lv1 and a little bit of info about what it is doing.

It works by searching lv1 memory for the lv2_kernel.self boot path then modifying it to point to the root of dev_flash instead. After it finishes searching and patching the path LV2 Loader will reboot lv2 gameos without rebooting lv1.

If the app has already been ran once and the user attempts to run it again before rebooting lv1 or the current lv2 kernel does not have peek and poke it will return you to the XMB.

PREPARATION:

Using FTP or multiMAN/file manager place your modified lv2_kernel.self into the root of dev_flash on your PS3.

HOW TO USE:

1:...

71w ago - Today PS Vita hacker wololo has made available a Half Byte Loader (HBL) development FAQ for those interested in progress thus far on Sony's PlayStation Vita handheld console.

Also below he states that he has ported HBL for Teck4's exploit successfully and updated to EU/US versions.

To quote: I managed to port HBL to the US version of Teck4′s exploit in exactly 45 minutes (including writing the savedata exploit and the binary loader), which is a new personal record, thanks to the scripts included in HBL's repository, and also to the fact that the different versions of the game are internally fairly similar (which is to be expected because technically the game is supposed to be the same, just translated, but I seem to recall it wasn't that easy for the Hotshots golf exploit)

I also updated the EU/US versions of this HBL port to get the tweaks I worked on for the past weeks in order to get a fair amount of homebrews to work.

The next step for me is to write a bit of documentation on how to use all this, and then patiently wait. As far as a release is concerned... well check the FAQ I wrote yesterday.

I could spend time polishing...

72w ago - Today PlayStation Vita hacker wololo has shared a video (below) demonstrating several PSP homebrew applications and emulators running on PS Vita using their Half-Byte Loader (HBL).

To quote: In the past days I stabilized HBL for Teck4's exploit and got some major homebrews to work.

In the video below I'm showing a few homebrews running on the PS Vita. I also included Picodrive again to show that fixing the sound issue is relatively easy as it is just a setting in the emulator. Check the video below.

You can see in this video snes9xTYL (super nes emulator), Bookr (pdf reader), CSPSP, T.O.M.E. (text mode rpg), EmuMaster (game boy emulator), Zombie Crisis (FPS), Wagic (which loads about 10 times faster than on a real PSP, this talks for the improved access speed of this new memory stick format), cavestory (platform/adventure), Picodrive (sega genesis emulator), Spider solitaire, ScummVM (point-and-click adventure), Daedalus (N64 emulator, this is not DaedalusX64), FCEU-PSP (Nes emulator). Those are more or less the homebrews I recommended to HBL users back when HBL was big.

Missing from this video is (unfortunately) gpsp which I couldn't get to run on the Vita, while it ran fine...