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Portables (Games) Sony Games

PSVita Hacked, Native Homebrew Loader Coming Soon 50

Posted by Soulskill 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."
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PSVita Hacked, Native Homebrew Loader Coming Soon More

PSVita Hacked, Native Homebrew Loader Coming Soon

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  • Whoop-dee-doo (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Whatah1 ( 2651417 )

      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.

      • Re:Whoop-dee-doo (Score:5, Interesting)

        by spire3661 ( 1038968 ) on Friday September 07, 2012 @07:23PM (#41268589) Journal
        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.

        • Now that I've completely given up cable in favor of 100s of collected DVDs and downloads, maybe I should take another look at XBMC. Ever since .25, MythTV's been showing its cracks...

          OTOH, the xbox's hard drive is so blessed tiny

          • The hard drive is very tiny; I use shared folder on a 1TB external hard drive streamed over wireless via a win7 desktop.

            Of course these days it is better to run XBMC via other platforms but if you grab what you want in the correct resolution the original Xbox still plays it very well.

    • Re:Whoop-dee-doo (Score:4, Informative)

      by anomaly256 ( 1243020 ) on Friday September 07, 2012 @08:01PM (#41268983)
      XBMC

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

      emulators are not the only thing available, and it does open up a new world to people. How many XBOX or PSP games have you developed? Me 3 of each, and yea they were shit, but I found them fun and I learned a lot about the systems worked.

      SO quit bitching about something you will never do, get off your ass, crack a system and get writing... obviously you are desperate to be the new turd party developer, so get going and stop pissing your pants.

    • The original Xbox was a pretty nice media player with XBMC on it. Also gave it the ability to play DVDs without paying for that silly remote.

      You also could run straight Linux on the Xbox.

    • How about the Nintendo DS? Speaking from personal experience here--I've written (or ported) several DS homebrew projects.

      Sure, there's plenty of emulators, and ports of popular (and less popular) classic games. And the obligatory linux port, not that it's useful for much besides bash and ssh.

      But there's plenty of original games too. There's also ebook readers, music and movie players, utilities to backup retail game saves, drawing/coloring apps*, music creation tools, and more.

      * One of these, Colors!, la

  • I'm still waiting for my 1ghz pandora to turn up but my vita isn't doing much which is a shame, the hardware on it is quite simply amazing, now to have that running homebrew... I could see this being the best thing to happen to the Vita

  • Despite Sony's protestations they knew very well that piracy was a big mover of hardware. I think a lot of people over-estimate the draw of homebrew though. While a few certainly use it, I think it's more of a geek's wet dream that hundreds of thousands are clamouring for a PSVita simply to run homebrew. The homebrew hack however, will likely lead to piracy at some point down the road. You will probably see a large upswing in sales at that time.

  • Does anyone actually think they would sell FEWER of these devices if they opened them up to the developer community?

    I'm wondering how they can expect any return on their investment in obscurity, given how they get hacked every time. They don't seem to be very successful at keeping out the prying eyes, if anything they end up with more of their technology revealed.

    Whoever at Sony is giving the financial green light to this strategy is MESSED UP. It's costing them fortunes all around with no discernable re

    • 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

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

        There are plenty of commercial games on IOS and android

        Last I checked, open compettive markets produce BETTER quality.

        Today we have the Internet to share game ratings, we don't need the game companies to sort them out.

        Their model is DEAD

        • 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

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

            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 us

          • 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.

            Possibly because the video game designs that they have prototyped on a PC need a gamepad. Touch screens have trouble emulating a gamepad [slashdot.org], and not enough people who might be interested in a game own an Xperia Play phone or something like an iControlPad or iCade product.

            • That's very true. I guess when I think homebrew I'm thinking something primarily for my own use and I would have no problem just requiring an external gamepad. My wiimote works great on my Android tablet and phone for that purpose.

              • I guess when I think homebrew I'm thinking something primarily for my own use

                If someone is developing an original video game in an original universe with no way to recover the cost of time and materials, there's a limit to how much detail he's willing to put into the game. That's why ports of simple block puzzle games have tended to dominate the homebrew scenes. I've gathered that going beyond that level of detail requires quitting one's day job. But self-publishing isn't viable if your design is in a genre associated with gamepads, which in turn are associated with Sony and Nintend

  • What is the point? The only people who may take advantage of this hack are the pirates.

    Any serious homebrewer may want to use the Playstation Mobile SDK. Not only you will be able to publish your games and apps on the Vita(and future devices), but any other PS certified devices, including nonsony devices(ASUS and HTC are some of the partners). And of top of that you will be able to potentially make money through the PSN and your product will have far more exposure than uploading it to some obscure homebrew

  • Sony will never allow this they have already announced PS Mobile which will let Indy devs write their own apps/games, plus the games on the Vita have the ability to refuse to open until you update to the latest firmware I've had this happen a few times when a new Firmwares released. So everyone will have to update to the fixed Firmware anyway or leave their bought games useless and unplayable.

    Vitas a great system by the way and there are tons of games on PSN if you take into account the PSP and PS1 games it

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Hatta ( 162192 )

      So everyone will have to update to the fixed Firmware anyway or leave their bought games useless and unplayable.

      Sounds like a great way to discourage a lot of people from paying for a lot of games.

  • Different Scene (Score:3)

    by bobbutts ( 927504 ) <bobbutts@gmail.com> on Saturday September 08, 2012 @01:07PM (#41274289)
    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.

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