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PSVita Hacked, Native Homebrew Loader Coming Soon

Posted by Soulskill on from the but-not-to-a-theater-near-you dept.

Busshy writes "Since the release of the PSVita, sales for the portable console have struggled, particularly in Japan. There, the PSP was selling more units until this week, with the release of Hatsune Miku Project Diva F, which has seen PSVita sales quadruple. For the rest of the world, sales are still slow thanks to a dull selection of games. This could soon change, as Yifan Lu, coder of the Kindle Hack and PSX Xperia, has revealed he is now working on a native loader for the PSVita. Basically, it's a Userland Vita Loader for loading unsigned executables on your Vita — in other words, a Homebrew Loader for the PSVita. To calm Sony fears, he claims it is physically impossible to run 'backups' with the exploit. The exploit cannot decrypt or load retail games. At this time, the exploit is unreleased; naturally, he doesnt want Sony to fix it."

12 of 50 comments (clear)

  1. Whoop-dee-doo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Well, whoop-dee-doo. I'm sooooo excited that the homebrew community will port a couple emulators to the Vita, call it a day, and we'll never hear about Vita homebrew development again. Just like every other fucking homebrew hack in the history of video gaming (beyond the founding of Activision OVER THIRTY YEARS AGO).

    No, seriously. Someone show me some major homebrew developments that aren't just crap ports from elsewhere (oh boy oh boy! I can play FreeCiv using a control scheme quite horribly ill-suited for the job!), are clever new games supposedly "held back" by draconian licensing, and are AFTER the Atari 2600, just to shut up the smartasses who will note that's how Activision and the entire concept of a third-party developer started. Maybe then I'll give a shit.

    1. Re:Whoop-dee-doo by Whatah1 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      On a modded original Xbox I use the unleashX dashboard and from it I launch XBMC as well as "a couple of emulators" and other standard stuff. XBMC as created on the original Xbox is a homebrewing accomplishment I have greatly appreciated.

    2. Re:Whoop-dee-doo by spire3661 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The great thing about XBMC is that its still going, STRONG. Im running a customized XBMC on Raspberry Pi, and its fantastic. I plan on rolling them out to my family for Christmas.

      --
      Good-bye
    3. Re:Whoop-dee-doo by anomaly256 · · Score: 3, Informative

      XBMC

    4. Re:Whoop-dee-doo by hairyfeet · · Score: 4, Insightful

      But isn't that the problem of Sony in a nutshell, great hardware with fuck all for games, which is why they don't sell? well that and them acting like its 1996 with funky cards instead of using SDHC of course.

      Personally I think Sony has burned too many bridges, fucked over too many people, for them to pull out of the nosedive unless they come out with a Halo style "ZOMFG you HAVE to play this!" supermega game. As it is now they simply release God Of War 326, Resistance 29, and then are shocked when nobody buys.

      My youngest bought a PSP, it sits in the closet, why? After he had beat the handful of games that were good he really didn't have anything he wanted to play on it and he doesn't feel like fucking with emulators because he's not big into nostalgia. If Sony doesn't come out with a real blockbuster the Vita will end up another PSP Go, not to mention they are mistreating their customers bad enough you have Internet pundits that love the system saying Sony is begging for piracy on the Vita simply because compared to the iPad "click and get game" they make buying from them a PITA.

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      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    5. Re:Whoop-dee-doo by JackieBrown · · Score: 2

      A lot of features are still being ported

      http://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/

      The latest release was July 25th, 2012

  2. Re:It couldn't have happened to a nicer company by RyuuzakiTetsuya · · Score: 4, Informative

    Sony didn't sue dark Alex. Or the guys who did the HBL. just geohotz. Because he's a grand standing prick

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    Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
  3. More profit margin from games than consoles by tepples · · Score: 2

    Conventional wisdom is that console makers make a lot more profit margin from professionally developed games than from consoles themselves. So the console makers want to shut out amateur games, on which they make no money, in favor of professional games, on which they do make money. In addition, it was hard to sort the good games from the bad on the Atari 2600, which led directly to a recession in the North American video game market in 1983-1984, and people weren't buying consoles or games because they had realized the implications of Sturgeon's Revelation: 90 percent of everything is crap.

    1. Re:More profit margin from games than consoles by oakgrove · · Score: 2

      Opening the platform up doesn't exclude professionally developed games.

      The problem here is like you said "Their model is DEAD". But that doesn't mean they won't try to hang on to it for dear life. The thing is they want a cut of every game sale and they want to keep the prices high. iOS and Android have numerous professional games but the prices are usually low. The PC has a slew of pro games but MS isn't making a dime on the purchase price for the vast majority of them. So Sony, Nintendo, et al want an iOS style cut with high AAA game on PC like prices and they think if they clamp down hard that's what they'll get. There's also the issue of the console hardware pricing being artificially low to the point of losing on each sale on the assumption that they'll make up for it in game revenues.

      Bear in mind that it's just a business model and it has produced fairly predictable and profitable results for a number of decades. I don't think Nintendo and Sony want to go the app store model since even Apple says they only make a pittance off theirs. The way I see it is if I'm going to try to make a game I'm not going to try to homebrew something on a hostile platform. I'll just fire up Eclipse and work on something for Android and be done with it as at least on there if I come up with something good it's little trouble to put it on the Play Store for sale. Obviously some people don't see it that way.

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      The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
    2. Re:More profit margin from games than consoles by tlhIngan · · Score: 2

      So Sony, Nintendo, et al want an iOS style cut with high AAA game on PC like prices

      Trust me, 30% is a pittance of a cut - while the license fee per game is around $5 or so per copy for the PS3 and Xbox360 for disc-games, the actual split for DLC or downloadables is MUCH higher. 30% is nothing - it can easily be 50% or more to the console maker.

      Heck, Sony used to (maybe they still do?) charge by the gigabyte in hosting the game and its demos.

      Anyhow, Sony's already scared of anything that could possibly be used for piracy - even unfeasible ones. After all, OtherOS was eliminated because of a purely theoretical hack to the PS3 (that wasn't even used to get the PS3 master keys). And earlier in the year, Sony removed several Vita downloadable games because they had various homebrew loader flaws. Sony's going to close this hole no matter what because it may be a vector for piracy,.

      (And really, once you can run unsigned code, you can look for flaws to get full access to the system, so while you may not be able to do it NOW, it greatly enables analysis of the system to find other flaws).

  4. Re:It couldn't have happened to a nicer company by ultrasawblade · · Score: 2

    Well what they do is take a loss on the hardware and try to make up for it with software sales. So the game companies do not want competition from homebrew developers.

    Of course I'd rather have the option to pay full price for the hardware with full ability to reflash the firmware to anything I want.

  5. Different Scene by bobbutts · · Score: 2

    The original PSP was the most capable portable device, so it was widely owned and hacking it actually meant something. With the proliferation of capable IOS and Android devices PSP's seem far less important.