PSVita Hacked, Native Homebrew Loader Coming Soon [Slashdot]

[DP ServBot]

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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."http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png (http://twitter.com/home?status=PSVita+Hacked%2C+Native+Homebrew+Loade r+Coming+Soon%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2FRl1GSj)http ://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png (http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fgames.slashdot.org%2Fsto ry%2F12%2F09%2F07%2F2144218%2Fpsvita-hacked-native-homebrew-loader-coming-soon%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebo ok)http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png (http://plus.google.com/share?url=http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/09/07/2144218/psvita-hacked-native-homebrew-loader-coming-soon?utm_source=slashdot&utm_medium=googleplus)

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[Zama]

Sony's mighty conquest into virtual nest of lawsuits V.2 in 3...2...1... Go! :popcorn:

[BetaWolf47]

Here comes a sales spike in PS Vitas followed by a sales drop of PS Vita software.

[geezuzkhrist119]

I hope a lot of good comes out of this. Im on the fence about buying a vita. the price and lack of games are what are killing my decision on buying one. If this thing gets fully hacked im going out and grabbing one.

[kupomogli]

The person who hacked it stated that he's against piracy and he'll only release a hack to allow homebrew and won't allow PS Vita games to load. Hopefully other hackers do the same. I like homebrew on my PSP, but the Vita isn't doing that great already. I'd rather not have Vita loaders kill what few releases the system is actually getting.

[Tupin]

The person who hacked it stated that he's against piracy and he'll only release a hack to allow homebrew and won't allow PS Vita games to load. Hopefully other hackers do the same. I like homebrew on my PSP, but the Vita isn't doing that great already. I'd rather not have Vita loaders kill what few releases the system is actually getting.
No, I'm sure someone will take this and loader and adapt it so you can. It's happened with every system ever, why would the Vita be any different?

[substantial_snake]

It would be nice to play the PSP/PS1 games that aren't available on PSN, but at the same time I would rather see more new Vita games and experiences then have another device to play Snes games.

I also find it incredibly... disingenuous when a hacker claims that they want nothing to do with piracy and/or their particular hack will not enable piracy. Regardless of what their specific hack does it seems that piracy always follows the initial wave of homebrew support and to deny that kills any credibility they had to me. This is especially true for a device that is already struggling to attract publisher support whose successor's homebrew community led to massive piracy and a dropping of publisher support. I guess my point really is hack whatever you feel like hacking but don't pretend that it wont quickly lead to piracy/publisher scares that in turn could kill said device.

[kedawa]

He never said any of that. All he said was that the hack runs unsigned code, but does not run retail games because it doesn't break their encryption.
You can't blame piracy for the PSP's problems.
It was far easier to pirate games on DS, where all you needed was a $10-$25 pirate cart and an SD card.. That's a hell of a lot less trouble than making a Pandora battery and soft-modding the firmware of a PSP.

[kupomogli]

He never said any of that. All he said was that the hack runs unsigned code, but does not run retail games because it doesn't break their encryption.

What he says next might surprise you.

"As a developer, I am completely against piracy," Yifanlu told Crave when queried about his intentions for the PS Vita hack. "My tools, when released, cannot be used for that purpose."

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57507041-1/a-conversation-with-the-first-playstation-vita-hacker/


]It was far easier to pirate games on DS, where all you needed was a $10-$25 pirate cart and an SD card.. That's a hell of a lot less trouble than making a Pandora battery and soft-modding the firmware of a PSP.

You're wrong. I hacked my PSP as soon as it became available and it wasn't locked down with only Pandora for awhile. In the beginning Pandora battery wasn't required. Now. Pandora battery isn't required. You had to, and now have to, nothing more than download a few files, transfer them to your PSP, and open one or two. CFW. There was a decent time in between that Pandora was required.

On the older PSPs, the only other thing you did have to make sure was if you were HEN-D or not(which you could see by looking in the UMD drive.) On all of the CFW hacks you need to be a specific firmware, so were screwed if you went too high.

[kedawa]

Ah, so he did. He's either very naive, or he's pandering to the copyright nazis.

...

Right, and on DS you dump some files to an SD card and plug in a cart.

[kupomogli]

Yet you made it sound like it was so much simpler when you needed nothing additional than what you probably already had for the PSP. With the DS, most people who own it are kids and don't look into any of this stuff. The majority of people who owned a PSP got the system for the sole purpose of hacking it and pirating. I posted one news story about how Dissidia Final Fantasy had over five million pirates in less than a year after its release, yet at the same time, sales being less than two million in all regions. Dissidia is a Final Fantasy, so most people who don't like the series probably wouldn't play it, so that means over 50% of the Final Fantasy fanbase are pirating douchebags.

Let's not forget the most overused quote to the video game pirate. "I'm only downloading it so I can try it out. If I like it I'll buy it." Such a load of horseshit.

[kedawa]

So every single person that downloaded the game was a FF fan?
I don't think you realize how piracy works.
People will download anything if it's free, even stuff they know nothing about.
I don't think it was a majority of PSP owners that got it exclusively for piracy.
A large minority, perhaps.

[theclaw]

Exactly. I'd stretch that further to say a significant portion of apparent pirates don't USE what they've downloaded. Who has time to try every rom in GoodNES alone?

[kupomogli]

Which brings me to my next point. Amount games have sold.

Grand Theft Auto Liberty City Stories. 7.41 million. Released before CFW enabled ISO loading.
Grand Theft Auto Vice City Stories. 4.73 million. Released after ISO loading and quite a substantial drop, considering that the game is much much better than Liberty City Stories.

God of War Chains of Olympus 3.09 million. PSP was already hacked.
God of War Ghost of Sparta. 0.81 million. Just released later in the PSP life. PSP Go hasn't been hacked yet.

Dissidia Final Fantasy. 2.16 million. In areas that aren't Japan it's under one million. Already hacked.
Dissidia Duodecim. 0.76 million Under 0.20 in areas that aren't Japan. This is when it was hacked wide open. Everything from the 1000 to the PSP Go has been hacked at this point.

These games were used because they're three well received series and the only ones that have had direct sequels on the PSP. Each of these three major series had huge drops in games that were later in the PSPs life, when ISO loading started, such as Vice City Stories, to when everything was hackable. It must be a huge coincidence that all these games, each in the series better than the first released one, sold much worse. Nothing is absolute, so either way it's speculation, but these numbers do show a major difference and are more factual information than "I just think people didn't want to buy the sequels to three well known and highly acclaimed series." For God of War and Dissidia, the sales to the original releases were 300% more atleast.

And again, like I said. The Nintendo DS is easy to play pirated games, but being that most people who play the systems are kids whos parents just take them to the store and purchase a game for them, they don't know about R4 cards, etc. It's not Gamestop goes out of their way advertising how to pirate games. Most parents don't go out and buy their kids PSPs because Nintendo has always had a family friendly look to their company.

Say what you want that PSP not being abandoned by most developers because of sales, because there's data that proves a significant drop in sales once the system became hackable and people were able to rip games and load ISOs. But you're more than likely wrong and it's just your word with no valid proof, over proof that may or may not be slightly exagerrated to what it would have been if it wasn't hacked.

Oh, and this isn't the PSP, but just a little information to throw out there. You guys remember when Modern Warfare 3 was released last year right? Late. Yeah. Pirates are going to just go and download Modern Warfare 3 for the PC in the first two months of release(slightly less in fact) 3.65 million times just to have it sitting on their computer. Bullshit if you ask me.

I don't suppose you guys remember this since you seem to be defending pirates. "Microsoft bans 1 million Xbox Live players" The release of Modern Warfare 2 and every account that was playing Modern Warfare 2 on a hacked 360 had their accounts banned. I'm sure all those million players wanted to just use the cheats(which isn't as bad as pirating, but ruins gameplay for everyone else.) As you're all aware though, these one million people were banned "one day" after the release of Modern Warfare 2.

[The 1 2 P]

Death to hackers and pirates!!! Actually I don't care if people want to hack their systems. My only beef is when they want to hack a system and use it for cheating in online multiplayer.



Let's not forget the most overused quote to the video game pirate. "I'm only downloading it so I can try it out. If I like it I'll buy it." Such a load of horseshit.

They say the samething about game modding. "I'm only modding my game so I can mess around with the code. I'm not going to use it to cheat online". Yeah, sure you won't:roll:

[G-Boobie]

So every single person that downloaded the game was a FF fan?
I don't think you realize how piracy works.
People will download anything if it's free, even stuff they know nothing about.
I don't think it was a majority of PSP owners that got it exclusively for piracy.
A large minority, perhaps.

I don't know, man. Sony's sold something like 50 million PSP units: there hasn't been a PSP title outside of Monster Hunter that's sold anything like enough copies to be profitable. That doesn't mean that all PSP users are pirates, but when the only hard pieces of data that Sony has are 1) we've sold a lot of hardware, and 2) the attach rate for non-pack in software is actually less than one per unit, you start to draw what conclusions you can. Software developers have drawn the same conclusions: Vita software isn't exactly plentiful.

Regardless of whether or not the correlations are true, the perception will have a (even more extreme) chilling effect on developers and publishers willing to take a risk on Vita development. Which sucks: its nifty hardware and I wish there were more games for it.

[dairugger]

I hope it never gets hacked to plays backups. after seeing what happend with the psp after it was pirated all to hell id rather have new games for the system than play nes/snes games on it. i find it weird that people say they would buy one if it was hacked to play emulators that you can play on your pc or psp.

[kedawa]

I can't stand load times and logo overload that modern games force on me, so personally I'd prefer to use the Vita for playing emulators.
If that can happen without throwing the door wide open for easy piracy, then great.
I have a feeling that Sony's habit of releasing a new PS3 system update every time someone sneezes will mean that any hack, no matter how harmless, will get patched right quick.
That in itself wouldn't be ideal, since I don't want to see the Vita get hammered with updates like the PS3 does, but it's better than the platform going down the tubes.

[JSoup]

Most parents don't go out and buy their kids PSPs because Nintendo has always had a family friendly look to their company.

I thought it had more to do with parents not knowing about them thar electronical games. And that the Nintendo DS + games was cheater than the Sony PSP + games.

[kupomogli]

Most PSP games were $30 with certain games being $40. But the same thing happened to the DS, most games being $30, others were $35, some were $40. The PSP after price drop was only a $30 difference, so I really don't see $30 being a huge deal breaker for any of the more informed people.

Nintendo is also the most widely known, what with most older people who don't play video games remembering the NES as one of the consoles and sometimes replace the word Nintendo for video games. Although I've heard both Nintendo and Playstation being replaced in exchange for video games.

[Gameguy]

Exactly. I'd stretch that further to say a significant portion of apparent pirates don't USE what they've downloaded. Who has time to try every rom in GoodNES alone?
I've heard of this with DVDs or torrents of TV shows. So many times I've heard of people burning copies of DVDs that they just stick on a shelf and never watch, or just download entire TV shows to their hard drive and never watch them. It's more to say "look at what I have" than anything of use.

[JSoup]

I've heard of this with DVDs or torrents of TV shows. So many times I've heard of people burning copies of DVDs that they just stick on a shelf and never watch, or just download entire TV shows to their hard drive and never watch them. It's more to say "look at what I have" than anything of use.

I do that sometimes too, despite my best efforts not to. I've got a few complete anime series on my harddirve that I had the time to watch when I started the torrent, but don't currently.

[G-Boobie]

I can't stand load times and logo overload that modern games force on me, so personally I'd prefer to use the Vita for playing emulators.

Theoretical question: how many devices in your home at this moment are perfectly capable of playing SNES ROMs already? And, if that's all you want a Vita for, why not just get a PSP?

[kupomogli]

Also, if you want emulation. Get Monster Hunter Freedom Unite right now before Sony takes it down. Next few days they're going to release the HBL save data for it so you can play HBL enabled games on your Vita. ISOs won't be able to play, but you can play emulated games from 16bit consoles or arcade systems.

If you have digital versions of Super Collapse 3, Motorstorm Arctic Edge, or Everybody's Tennis prepatched versions and your Vita is below a certain firmware, you can also use Halfbyte Loader.

[GizzyGames]

Nice. Is the Vita any good? Personally have never played one =(

[G-Boobie]

Nice. Is the Vita any good? Personally have never played one =(

It's great hardware. Someday I hope there are some original games for it.

[Dr. BaconStein]

Theoretical question: how many devices in your home at this moment are perfectly capable of playing SNES ROMs already? And, if that's all you want a Vita for, why not just get a PSP?Or a JXD/Yinlips... or a clone console... There are so many cheaper/more efficient ways to play old games on the go now, it doesn't seem worth it to spend $250 just to play a bunch of roms and a few new games. And Sony really doesn't deserve money for what is essentially considered a big security flaw. But whatever.

Don't really see how anything good can come out of this, I miss the days when games sold systems, not stuff like this.

[kupomogli]

There are some really good games on the system, but it just comes down to preference.

Wipeout 2048 is one of the best racing games ever made. It has no racebox, so you can't just pick and choose a track to race and set up anything. But once you finish the game, you can play any track in any soeed ranking on any mode, essentially racebox without having to choose. There's online and adhoc play which allow you to choose whatever setup you want. There's also DLC that will get you Wipeout HD/Fury tracks and modes on the game. If you purchase this DLC or the PS3 versions of HD and Fury, then you get whichever you didn't purchase free. Whenever you choose a race, it shows your friends times in that specific event and what your ranking is compared to theirs(as well as overall leaderboard rankings.)

Unit 13 is pretty difficult, but a good game(I'd say one of the beset on the system.) It's got 40 or 50 missions, daily challenges, plus unique target missions. Some missions are longer, but the missions themselves are all fairly short. It's designed with being a portable game in mind. Something that you can pick up, play a mission or two fairly quickly, and then put down. Sortof like Wipeout 2048, when choosing your mission, it'll show your friends scores, so you can keep things competitive by going for a high score. You probably won't ever do as good as some of the people on the leaderboards though. There's daily challenges which you have a chance to play through to completion one time during a 24 hour period to see who gets the best score out of those. The game also has co op play through online or adhoc.

Uncharted Golden Abyss. It's Uncharted. There's a slight deadzone to the aiming, but once you get used to it, it's a good Uncharted game. Something I didn't think I would like, but is actually utilized pretty well is painting a line for Drake to go across or jump from and to. It really speeds it up and doesn't force you to continue hitting X to jump from area to area. However, all the other touch screen features are an annoyance but not game breaking.

Mortal Kombat. It's Mortal Kombat, but with worse graphics and better netcode. If you've played Mortal Kombat on the PS360, you'd know that those tend to be laggy more often than not. The Vita version happens to fare well in 90% of the matches.

Those are the ones that I have that I like. Little Deviants is terrible, and the demo to Hot Shots Golf is good. Also I've heard Gravity Rush is another good game, but I haven't played it.

So the system has got some really good games making it already worth the purchase, but it doesn't have too many games coming out for it. Games I'm interested that are coming out for it are Ragnarok Odyssey, Playstation All Stars, Dragon's Crown, Ys Celceta: Sea of Trees, and Assassin's Creed Liberation(which I'll get if I like Assassin's Creed 3 first.)

[Nature Boy]

Nice. Is the Vita any good? Personally have never played one =(

I like it, but I haven't touched it in awhile. Partly because I bought an Android Tablet, partly because there hasn't been anything new out for it pretty much since I got it to get me back interested in it.

I loved and beat Uncharted on it. Loved Rayman Origins but never finished it. Loved MLB 13 The Show and have played through 1.5 seasons as "J.J. Slater" (but got traded from Blue Jays to Padres so that hurt my enjoyment ROFL . Enjoyed Gravity Rush but by then I was just struggling to find something new to play, and it felt like a forced purchase.

Since then I've pretty much put it down (although I will get back into MLB again soon I think). I need more games to buy (not hacks).

(Not that I won't install an emulator on the VITA if they become available, because I will. Mostly I just like getting them up and running - I barely play them. I've got a room in the basement with my NES, SNES, 7800, etc. connected and ready to go - I'd rather play the games on the hardware than emulate them)

[duffmanth]

It's great hardware. Someday I hope there are some original games for it.

I agree as I was playing around with a demo unit at Best Buy a few months back. It's a solid unit, doesn't feel cheap, the screen is beautiful to. It just needs some original games, Uncharted: Golden Abyss was a good start, but more needs to come sooner than later.

[Rickstilwell1]

Theoretical question: how many devices in your home at this moment are perfectly capable of playing SNES ROMs already? And, if that's all you want a Vita for, why not just get a PSP?

More powerful hardware opens the door for more accurate/better emulation. Many games run at unplayably low speeds on modded consoles/handhelds for the crowd who refuses to use a computer to emulate.

[kedawa]

The big bright OLED screen doesn't hurt, either.
I've looked into the cheap chinese handhelds and tablet hybrids, and there doesn't seem to be a single one that doesn't have some sort of glaring fault or quality issue.
They aren't exactly cheap, either. Even the Dingoo A320 is still nearly $100.