Some news for the many people out here who still follow the scene on Sony’s best handheld device:

Pspdecrypt

Pspdecrypt is a command line tool by John-K (with contributions from artart78) to decrypt PSP binaries and firmware updates, without the need for a PSP.

Historically, decrypting such binaries was done with PSARDumper, a tool that required to run on a hacked PSP in order to grab the necessary decryption keys to do the job. Hackers have extracted many of these keys over the years, so a tool such as PSPDecrypter allows tinkerers to extract and decrypt those files directly on their PC.

As far as I can tell, there is no groundbreaking reveal in pspdecrypt itself, it reuses past knowledge and code from emulator ppsspp and libkirk, but does it in a way that provides people with a useful tool.

And yes, we completely missed this, and had to have Zecoxao wake us up to talk about it (Thanks sir!).

Download pspdecrypt

You can download the source code for pspdecrypt on the project’s github here. No binary release, you’ll have to compile it yourself.

Iplloader “Jump Slide” PoC Release

Hacker Mathieulh published a proof of concept for a 14 year old Lib PSP exploit iplloader. According to the hacker, this exploit was used to dump an unencrypted version of the IPL block, allowing hackers to get access to some of the PSP’s encryptions keys  the 3.5.0 devkit pre-ipl xor key before it was cleared from memory.

Lib-PSP iplloader will not control the location at which it will load/copy the block, it will happily attempt to perform a memcpy (at a rate of 1 dword per cycle) to whatever load address is specified in the IPL header, assuming the header passes the checks (kirk1 hashes, HMAC-SHA1 (on 03g+)…) this allows to potentially write a payload at arbitrary locations.

Download Lib-PSP-iplloader-Jump-Slide-POC

You can get Mathieulh’s recently released files on his github here.

Source: Mathieulh

The post PSP Hacks: pspdecrypt (PSARDumper for PC) released, And Mathieulh discloses iplloader exploit appeared first on Wololo.net.

Following the recent progress on PSP (yes, you read correctly) hacking, which led to a pandora unbricker for patched models, as well as dumping more keys, pspdecrypt and psardecrypt have been updated to support “any Firmware PSP PBP and/or PRX that you throw at it”, and in particular supports 03g IPLs and beyond.

What is pspdecrypt?

Pspdecrypt is a command line tool by John-K (with contributions from artart78, zecoxao, and krystalgamer) to decrypt PSP binaries and firmware updates, without the need for a PSP.

Historically, decrypting such binaries was done with PSARDumper, a tool that required to run on a hacked PSP in order to grab the necessary decryption keys to do the job. Hackers have extracted many of these keys over the years, so a tool such as PSPDecrypter allows tinkerers to extract and decrypt those files directly on their PC.

For this release and its updates, Proxima, Hedge, and Davee are also credited.

Download pspdecrypt 0.8

You can download the source code for pspdecrypt on the project’s github here. No binary release, you’ll have to compile it yourself. Version 0.8 has binaries for windows, MacOS, and linux here.

Source: Zecoxao

The post PSP: pspdecrypt and psardecrypt updated, support pretty much all PSP firmwares appeared first on Wololo.net.

Sometimes, there’s just nothing better than playing around on a console. Sure, a PC can do everything your whole collection can do and more, but there’s something about the experience that can’t be replicated with a PC: You can hook a powerful computer up to a TV and get it working with just about any controller with a little work, but without the acts of blowing in a cartridge, waiting for a disc to load, or even just the lack of that charming little opening jingle that all the best consoles have, it can’t equal the experience. You just can’t play Goldeneye 007 in a room with friends if it’s not on real hardware.

However, consoles do have one major weakness, and that’s their flexibility – some have more than others out of the box, but you can’t just check your email on a Switch, or pull up a movie to watch on your Super Nintendo. As such, a big part of the fun of revisiting console gaming when you’re old enough comes in one thing:

Cracking it!

There’s just something about the satisfaction you get from getting access to features you couldn’t use before that also can’t be replicated on PC… Sure, you could get a video playing or open up an emulator without any hassle on that fancy laptop, but where’s the love? A computer is MADE to be flexible. That’s why developers seem to have so much trouble making games that run well on them; the more potential configurations hardware can have, the harder it is to program for it. But hacking a console is the opposite situation. It captures a touch of the good old “Resident Evil 2 packed into 64 megabytes” spirit – making the standardized hardware work for you.

All that being said, when it comes to hacking, not all consoles are created equally, and the average user won’t necessarily have the chops – or indeed, the desire – to mechanically re-engineer a piece of specialized, antiquated hardware; to put it simply, some consoles are a lot easier to open up than others, and some get much better benefits from being hacked than others do. If you’ve been looking for a brief overview to decide which of your consoles best needs a tuneup, or if you’ve been trying to decide which console you should buy to build your own little hacked arcade device, this is the article for you. We’re going to cover, from beginning to end, which consoles got it… And which consoles ain’t!

(Note: Yes, every console is capable of an awful lot if you happen to be a skilled engineer; if you can reprogram something, then you can make almost anything do something impressive. This list is explicitly intended for the average hack consumer that these amazingly skilled developers do all their hard work for… Thanks, guys!)

THE BOTTOM OF THE BARREL: Atari 2600/5200, Intellivision, NES, Master System, SNES, Genesis/CD/32X, N64, Saturn, Playstation 1, Game Boy (+Color), Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS (OG/Lite), Game Gear, Neo Geo, Neo Geo Pocket, Atari Jaguar, Virtual Boy, 3DO

I love ya to bits, guys, but hacking you amounts to bupkis.

Don’t get me wrong: not only do I personally own many of these consoles, but I also love them to death. They’ve each got a fantastic suite of games that really earned them their fame, and they all deserve it in spades.

Unfortunately, from a hacking perspective, these consoles have almost nothing going for them. Sure, there’s a couple things you can do – you could file off the plastic pins inside your Super Nintendo so it can read Super Famicom cartridges, mod it with an HDMI output for optimal color and resolution on a modern screen, and even get a Super Everdrive or similar “Flash Cart” to play a wider variety of games. A Game Boy, you could modify with a quarter-inch ProSound output, a backlit biverted screen, and all new buttons, as well as a flash cart of its own… But, at the end of the day, you can’t make these consoles be anything more than what they are. A Super Nintendo, outfitted with all the bells and whistles listed above, is still only a Super Nintendo; a Super SUPER Nintendo, to be sure, but it will never play a video or do anything other than what Nintendo explicitly programmed it to do: Play SNES games. Every one of these consoles can be improved, but none of their functions can be changed. A Game Boy Advance cannot play vide- okay, there was Game Boy Video, but that looked terrible and is really best forgotten. Let’s move on.

NOPE. NOT GETTING OUT OF THIS CHAIR… THE UNHACKABLE: Xbox One

There’s no way in. We’ve been trying, and trying, and trying, but it’s locked tight, solid as a rock… Not budging a single, solitary, inch. That’s the theme of the indestructible Xbox One. Say what you will about the console’s overall quality, but I’ll tell you one thing; hacking this thing hasn’t been done yet. Partially due to limited interest, of course – the Xbox One’s limited market share compared to the PS4 and Switch didn’t earn it many fans within the hacking community either – but a major part of that is also because they made the thing an iron wall. Sure, it could be done with the right team behind it, but that’s true of almost anything. Hacking teams tend to be very altruistic when it comes to their communities, to be sure, but who out there is clamoring for a hacked Xbox One? I’m sure there’s ONE person out there, maybe even two (both of whom may gather in the comments here: organize, fellas, get heard!), but even if the thing gets hacked open, what’s the advantage of a hacked Xbox One over a PC? Style? I don’t think even style can earn it some points, here. This category isn’t the be-all, end-all, but I’d wager you’ll have to sit and wait for a long, LONG time for your Xbox One to get hacked open, and I wouldn’t recommend holding my breath over it, either. That being said, this category does get one step over the previous one because, despite all those limitations, if the Xbox One ever DID get hacked, it could potentially do an awful lot.

IT CAN BE HACKED… KIND OF… SORT OF: Xbox 360

The 360 does get some decent options if you manage to crack it, like loading backups and bypassing region locks. However, the console’s lot is an unfortunate one on two fronts. The first is that these added functions aren’t much compared to some competing systems; you can beat out the 360 pretty easily in that regard, so going out of your way to hack the 360 instead of its direct competitors is a bit of an oddball effort. The second, and biggest, misfortune is just how much you stand to lose. A 360 can only be hardmodded; there are various ways of going about it depending on which hardware revision you own, some cheaper than others, but you can’t just put a file on a USB or go to a website and crack the 360 like you can some other systems. So, this adds an immediate higher risk of sc*** up your console fatally – a software crack doesn’t tend to do this kind of thing often, but when you break open a console literally, that ups the risk of an issue coming up tenfold.

Not to mention that you’ll be throwing away one functionality for another… You can play online, or you can play backups, but you can’t do both, especially not at the same time. Say goodbye to playing a quick round of Black Ops 2 online with your buddies, because it’s all local play for you from now on! You can still hack a 360, of course, and if you don’t play online anyway, then it won’t really hurt you much to give it a go. But I definitely don’t recommend it.

THIS IS WHERE I’D PUT MY HACKED CONSOLE… IF I HAD ONE!: Playstation 4, Nintendo Switch

Hacking unpatched Switch consoles is dead simple for the end user… Key word, “Unpatched”

These consoles have a nice set of mods you can use to your advantage; Retroarch forks, loading backups, customized themes… It really is a lovely world at your fingertips. Unfortunately, right now, your options to get there are extremely limited. Hacking a PS4 requires software that is several months out of date. Hacking a Switch both requires old software, AND a version of the console that was manufactured before 2018… AND, you’ll need to purchase a physical modchip, which… Well, good luck finding one now (read the article preceding this one for more on that)! You can go out of your way to find these older-version consoles on sites like eBay, but that’s a new game entirely to play – between bidding wars and finding out for sure that the console you’re looking at will be “hack-friendly”, you stand to have more than your share of issues… Especially since these third-party sellers tend to know about hacks these days and will jack up their prices to match.

Don’t worry, though. It may seem hopeless, but this is an area that tends to change very quickly. Not so long ago, the Playstation Vita was in here: for years, it simply COULD NOT BE HACKED, unless you had a software version installed that was over a year out of date, or tracked down an elusive PSP game that was generally removed from the digital store the exact day you went to look for it, and even then that only hacked the PSP portion so it was no better than its immediate predecessor… But this phase doesn’t last forever; that is to say, this category is not a death sentence. You can rest assured that someday, an easy set of PS4 and Switch hacks will surface… Of course, by that point, we’ll be waiting on the PS5 and Super Switch in this category as well. The point is, every console had a period in here. And every console escapes it. I look forward to that day, but until then, the systems that are sitting in here deserve their spot.

IT’S HARD TIME, BUT IT’S GOOD TIME: Playstation 2, Xbox (OG), SEGA Dreamcast, Nintendo Gamecube

This hardware generation offered a lot of firsts for the gaming community at large. Online play, previously a PC-exclusive, had been translated quite nicely to the console experience (yes, it was previously added to the Saturn as well, but it only really became feasible for more than just one or two games with this generation). In addition, the consoles tended to have some neat bonus quirks – the Gamecube could play everything a Game Boy Advance could with a neat little undermounted accessory, while the Dreamcast could play audio CDs (which Sony decided not to bring over as an option with the new generation) and had a special memory card with a screen called the VMU, which could even play some simple games on the go. The PS2 and Xbox went the extra mile themselves by including an option to add an internal hard drive; a stunning reveal in the era where 32 megabytes was enough to hold your saves for your entire collection. The purported purpose of these additions was to reduce load times by copying some data off of the game disk before play…

Of course, the modding community took to this like moths to a flame. Nowadays, thanks to the efforts of those brave few, we can easily play backups, use emulators, try out fancy homebrew games, and even get access to netplay long after the servers have shut down: Long live Timesplitters: Future Perfect!

There is a weakness to this, and that is that each of these consoles needs a hardware mod of some sort. The PS2 requires a special “SwapMagic” disk to properly install an exploit on one of its memory cards. The Gamecube needs a specially customized modchip to allow it to read custom DVDs, unless you happen to have a burner/presser for, and supply of, teeny tiny little buddy disks (you don’t, nobody does).

The Dreamcast, while it can run some mods without changes (like loading CD backups of games without any kind of hack), could really use an internal drive mod to make the most of its cracked potential.

And the Xbox, while it doesn’t need a custom chip or anything to be cracked, does require a burner game to get the magic working (someday 007: Agent Under Fire is going to be very valuable because of all the modders buying it up… Actually, no, it’s still going to be worthless then). Thankfully, none of these mods are too hard to do (I’d say the easiest are the PS2 and Dreamcast, the hardest is the Gamecube, and the Xbox is somewhere in between), and you get a nice set of functions for your trouble.

Some of my favorite stuff that you get out of hacking these consoles: The PS2’s Graphics Synthesizer Mode Selector, or GSM, lets you manually choose between several scaling modes to make games look their best on whatever TV you happen to be using – since the scalers in TVs tend to vary in quality, this is invaluable to preserving your games’ graphical quality without going out of your way to buy an expensive rescaler box or a better TV.

The original Xbox, amazingly, is so powerful that, just by upgrading the RAM to 128 megabytes, it can decently emulate the Playstation One! You could do this on a PS2 as well without the issues (thanks to hardware compatibility), of course, but there’s something to be said for a console’s quality when it, without any native hardware, can play the last-gen games of its direct competitor!

The Dreamcast’s CD drive, while amazing in that it allows you to load burned games without any kind of hack to the console itself, does have a limitation in that the CDs made specially for the console were bigger than the 700 megabyte standard your average CD-R uses. The solution? A simple soldering mod lets you load games right off of a standard IDE hard drive, which comes with faster loading times, less wear and tear on the Dreamcast’s (sadly fragile) laser, and bragging rights. Theoretically, if you got a big enough drive, you could store the entire library of the console inside of it! How’s that for a Dreamcast Mini?

I’m making all of this sound easier than it actually is, of course, but very little of this requires real expertise in modding, and you do get some nice benefits out of the deal. I’d recommend the PS2 as the best of this bunch to mod, thanks to it being the easiest to hack, having lots of continuing support, and also having hardware backwards compatibility, but any of the consoles in this spot would be a decent choice for a mod. However, I wouldn’t recommend modding the Gamecube, because…

SAME AS THE LAST CATEGORY, BUT EASY: Nintendo Wii

The original Wii was much like the previous generation; both literally in that it used nearly the exact same GPU as the Gamecube, and figuratively for us in that it gains very similar benefits from hacking. However, it soundly crushes its older brother as far as modding goes, due to it offering the exact same thing, but in a substantially better package. Not only can you easily hack it without any kind of hardware mod at all, but once you do, you instantly get not only every single feature that a Gamecube can use, like playing its entire library with the original controllers, but you also gain the entirety of the Wii’s library, plus extremely convenient features like loading games off of a USB, modding games like Super Smash Brothers Brawl with The Homebrew Channel and GeckoOS, and even some emulators that, while they have some imperfections (bsnes/Higan this ain’t), can play games pretty darned well. You can even make the thing play DVD movies (though this isn’t recommended as it strains the disk reader’s laser pretty bad, as it wasn’t meant for it)!

However, this console isn’t in the next rank for two reasons. The first is because it’s still locked in the era of standard definition; even with special cables, the best you can natively render is 480p. The second is because the next sets of consoles are even better as far as functionality goes!

A Wii is still an excellent console to grab for modding purposes, and a very attractive one for one big reason – it’s dirt cheap! You can grab a Wii for sixty bucks off of eBay, and there’s always some summer garage sale or flea market that’s got one for even less. Even its controllers are cheap – while used Gamecube controllers are climbing a bit in price thanks to love from the Smash community, Wiimotes can be snagged for ten to fifteen bucks each anywhere, anytime.

MOBILE GOLD: Nintendo DSi, Nintendo 3DS (Original and New), Sony PSP, Playstation Vita

Nothing like a quick head-to-head in Street Fighter X Tekken… On a 5-inch screen?! It can happen.

You might be amazed just what you can take on the go these days. Before I start here, I’d like to break these down into two separate categories: The old, and the new.

The old is the Nintendo DSi and the Sony PSP. These consoles still have tons of potential! The DSi can be hacked to take advantage of the hardware inside of it that Nintendo hid away – there’s still a functional Game Boy Advance in there, and by extension, a Game Boy and Game Boy Color as well. Since this is hardware compatibility we’re talking about here, games are practically guaranteed to run 100% perfectly! You can also get the thing to load DS and DSi backups, and it can even do a touch of emulating thanks to RocketRobz’ TWiLight Menu. The PSP can also load its share of emulators, and does them much better than the DSi, so you can feasibly play some Genesis and even SNES on it. The built-in PSP backup stuff is pretty sweet too, and it even has a great PSX emulator made by Sony themselves! The PSP also shines quite nicely as a little media hub, being capable of playing back simple video, music and picture files easily natively, and doing it even better with Cooley’s PMPlayer Advance. With a simple SD card outlet for the DSi and Mini USB (a standard that needs to come back, it just feels so much more secure a connection than Micro) for the PSP, it’s easy to connect and hack, and you get a lot for your efforts.

The new category includes the Nintendo 3DS and the Playstation Vita. Yes, they are new(er), but why do they get a special category? Because they can do absolutely everything that their equivalent in the old category can do, plus their own set of features. The 3DS is far, FAR superior as far as emulating goes: not only does it still have all the hardware compatibility of the DSi, but the big boost in power (especially on the New model) means it can play a lot more; Asdolo94’s New Super Ultimate Injector officially supports NES, SNES, Game Boy, GameBoy Color, Game Boy Advance, Genesis, Game Gear and even TurboGrafx-16. Just picture it: on one console, you can natively play nearly all of the Pokemon games (bar the console titles of course), or maybe put in your cart of Dragon Quest IX: Sentinel of the Starry Skies and back up (or restore) your save with BernardoGiordano’s “Checkpoint”, and all within the native 3DS user interface that just happens to have a custom theme based on your favorite band installed… On ONE console.

This, here, folks, is where hacking really begins to pay off.

The Vita is in just the same boat, and which you prefer will come down to taste; on the one hand, you give up the libraries of the DS, DSi and 3DS, but then, you gain the libraries of the PSX, PSP, and Vita. However, the Vita truly shines in the “console optimization” department which the 3DS has very little competition against – just by installing a few simple plugins, you can improve the quality of the Vita’s analog sticks by customizing their deadzones and sensitivity, enable the playback of music files anywhere on the Vita even when a game doesn’t support allowing it, boost a supporting game’s resolution from the Vita native (likely below it, few games maxed out the Vita’s resolution) to 720p (a huge fidelity boost from ~540p), and to make up for the performance hitches of high res rendering, overclock the system using a very simple menu (either VSH or Lolicon; VSH lets you clock up to the console’s max, while Lolicon lets you go just a bit further) to keep things running nice and smooth. I tend to be a bigger fan of the hacked 3DS as far as library goes, but there’s just no beating how great a Vita can look and play when you get something like Soul Sacrifice Delta going at 720p max clocks. The Vita’s one real weakness, its proprietary storage, even has a direct counter – SD2Vita, a hardware mod available for ridiculously cheap ($6 is a STEAL, let me tell you, and it’s so widely available that you can get it off of Amazon), lets you use the Vita’s game slot as an Micro SD card slot instead, supporting obscene memory upgrades that dwarf the 3DS’ potential storage (while 3DS games tend to be smaller, the fact is that cards above 32 gigabytes in size are a little picky about working right. The Vita with SD2Vita can octuple that number without even blinking).

Both are relatively easy to crack as well. The 3DS is stupidly simple, just needing some net-based toggles in place before a few files can be loaded off the SD card; going from zero to a hundred takes about an hour. The Vita is a little trickier, as it requires some fiddling with drivers on a PC and downgrading to get it to work just right, but it’s still not too difficult, and the payoff is absolutely incredible. The only reason the consoles in this category aren’t at the top? The next ones are still even better. Yep. Brace yourself, because now, it’s time for…

THE UNSTOPPABLE GODS: Playstation 3, Nintendo Wii U

I’ve had a handful of friends laugh at me for keeping these things. When the new generation came about, all my buddies jumped onto PS4 and just couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to upgrade. And you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who won’t chuckle a bit when you pull out the Wii U. “Oh, what are we going to play, Nintendo Land, the one game that hasn’t been ported to Switch? Ha ha ha!”

How little they know.

First of all, you have to remember just how great the Playstation 3 is before it has any kind of modification done to it. Out of the box, it can play PS3 and PSX games right off the disks (and PS2 games, if you had an older model), but you could also throw in a DVD or Blu Ray movie and watch it. You can even play an Audio CD; no, not just play, but RIP the tracks onto your system storage to enjoy any time. Common video formats, like most x264 and base codec MP4s, can also be copied and played back at any time. Pictures? Yep, they work too, and you can get a slideshow going, with music played off the hard drive. These are features that people usually need to hack to do.

The Wii U, while seeming less impressive on the surface, still has a couple nice things going for it out of the box as well. For example, everyone knows that it had all the Wii hardware inside of it, and can easily play Wii games. And, while it does need the gamepad to do many things, it also readily supports and actively uses Wiimotes as controllers for multiplayer and the like: which, as we established in the Wii category, are just about the cheapest controllers around.

Both of these consoles had difficult hacking periods where unlocking extra features wasn’t too feasible or worthwhile. The PS3 required a modchip for the longest time, unless you wanted to play NES games through a javascript emulator embedded in a video player exploit, which worked for about a month until Sony found and patched this vulnerability away. The Wii U required access to a specific website which tended to crash two out of three times you would try to load it, and that meant if you wanted to load Smash 4 mods for a tournament, you better have had a reliable internet connection somehow prepared, or it wouldn’t work.

But those days are past.

The Wii U has become a monstrous emulating machine, supporting every generation that came before it with frightening power: it’s not always perfect, but it easily handles Gamecube and Wii natively, and can do PSX with software without too much trouble. Working off of official Nintendo ports has enabled pretty great Nintendo 64 and DS support as well: yes, DS. I firmly believe that the Wii U is the only emulating device that can do the DS justice; do it on PC and you have to do some weird screen split gimmick that doesn’t work right, and even if it does, never FEELS right. The Wii U’s gamepad working as the touch screen while the TV works as the top is nothing short of perfect, and it even supports rendering games in a higher resolution, massively boosting the visual quality of 3D games like Dragon Quest IX and Super Mario 64 DS. Also, if you’ve got a bit of a vendetta against Nintendo as a company (they killed Mother 4, guys, let the hate fester), all the games that have been ported to Switch run just as well on the Wii U, and you can track those versions down for cheaper than the Switch’s $60 iron wall standard; and buying them used doesn’t put a penny in their pockets. Overall, for Nintendo fans, the Wii U represents a cavalcade of delights both modern and vintage – and it’s also cheap, because people who would never dream of hacking a console see no value in the poor little guy. It’s not as dirt cheap as the original Wii, of course, but a complete bundle for under $150, considering the longevity issues if a gamepad isn’t treated right, definitely falls under the “very reasonable” category.

The Playstation 3 when hacked is, without exaggeration, the pinnacle of human achievement (okay, maybe a little exaggeration). PSX, PS2, PS3 and PSP (yeah, PSP, go figure) with native or half-native (compatibility overall is good, and in earlier models is perfect) support, and all the 2D stuff, as usual, but where the PS3 really shines is in its incredible status as a master-class fightcade. Using a modded MadCatz TES+ fightstick (a stick I wholeheartedly recommend – modding sticks is fun, too!), I’ve punched, kicked, and otherwise blasted my way through hundreds of losses (hey, I didn’t say I was GOOD at fighting games) in everything from Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure (as well as All-Star Battle), The King of Fighters XIII, Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2, Soul Calibur IV… Look, I have Shrek Super Slam on there. It really is that flexible a fightcade. With a PS3, you’re only missing out on a handful of popular fighting games, like Dragon Ball FighterZ and Blazblue Cross Tag Battle, but you’ve got access to way, WAY more classics than just the ones I listed: including my favorite fighter of all time, Marvel VS CAPCOM 2. Or, if fighting isn’t your thing, there are still some great ports of other arcade classics available, like X-Men, The Simpsons Arcade Game and Crazy Taxi… And, amazingly enough, as of the writing of this article, the PS3 digital store is still up, so you can acquire tons of this stuff legitimately; though not doing so can possess precious little risk, thanks to apps like KW’s PSN Patch (though neither KW nor I can guarantee that you won’t still get in trouble depending on what you do, what I can say is that I personally have yet to have any kind of trouble, with both a cracked Vita and PS3). Plus, you can play a good version of Demon’s Souls; if the remake just didn’t do it for you, everything that made the original great is still there, and fans have brought back the online aspect as well with a custom server (that, unlike the official server back when, doesn’t lag your game). All this, plus its monstrous support for video and music playback, make the PS3 a giant…

Plus, you can install Linux on these. I know somebody would get upset if I didn’t mention that, so… There you go.

The best thing about these consoles is that getting all of these features unlocked is ridiculously easy; while neither system is as braindead-simple to hack as the 3DS or Wii, they are nonetheless simple enough to do on a day off from work.

CONCLUSIONS, AKA TL/DR

There’s a lot to like about everything listed here, but just what console(s) you choose to crack depends on you. If you love the idea of playing old school games on the couch with your buddies, then look no further than a PS3 or Wii U: or both, for the best of both worlds. If you love your games on the go and want to show off your hacking chops without bringing people home with you, give a glance to the 3DS or PS Vita. If you want to get the most bang for your buck if you’re on a budget, the Wii is a great choice to get an awful lot for very little. If you thrill in the sheer challenge of a hack and want bragging rights, the original Xbox can be quite the conversation piece (and until SEGA finally ports them, you can be one of the lucky few who can play Jet Set Radio Future and Toejam & Earl III: Mission to Earth). As for hacking or modding the hardware you already own, just about everything can get some kind of upgrade from a custom job… Just don’t try anything with the Xbox One.

The post Hardware Hacking: The Best (and Worst) Options appeared first on Wololo.net.

Last Friday, we got treated to a little news from the friendly folks over at Nintendo and Game Freak. Their oh-so-special reveal was this: their 2006 classics, Pokémon Diamond and Pearl Version, are getting a remake!
You may notice that I don’t sound very enthused… Er, that is to say, type very enthused. Well, there’s a reason for that… I don’t consider myself a Pokémon fan. I hear little bits and bobs about it from friends who are interested in the series, but I don’t go out of my way to play the games, collect the cards, or watch the anime…
Anymore.
But, fact is, I should be more excited for this game than anyone. The original Diamond Version was the first game I ever pre-ordered (from Target, I even still have the little reservation card and big stylus with Dialga on top that they gave you), and there’s still a poster on the wall of my old bedroom at my parents’ house with all the Generation 4 Pokémon on it, listed in alphabetical order. It’s one of precious few games that I both owned in my youth and still have the case for; I just couldn’t bring myself to recycle it like I could so many other clunky boxes back then… And, most importantly, I played it to death. I went through the extra effort to find every Pokémon, even the hard-to-find legendaries, and I even restarted it immediately once I finished it just so I could pick another starter and go through it again. I’d been a massive fan of the series ever since I first played Blue Version when I was just a lad… The Game Boy Advance was out by that point, and I had a few of the console’s latest and greatest, like Game & Watch Gallery Advance and Golden Sun… And yet, I couldn’t tear myself away from Pokémon. To this day, I don’t know what was so addictive about it, but young me was beyond hooked… A more appropriate word would be mystified. And when Pokémon Ruby came out that next year, it became my new addiction right away… And, four years later, Diamond was just the same.
But this so-called Brilliant Diamond, fifteen years later, is not the same.

What is it, exactly, that feels off about this picture?

I won’t attack anybody who chooses to buy and play the game, or any of the ones I’m about to list… I recently spent money on a copy of Shrek 2: Team Action for the PC, so I don’t have the credibility to tell anybody how they should spend their hard-earned dough. But, I do feel that it’s important to address some of the issues with this remake… No, remakes and ports in general, that I’d prefer not become an industry standard; if nothing else, I can at least make some people consider their decisions more carefully, and that’s good enough for me.

The first real problem that comes with these rereleases is…

#1: Straight Ports; the Laziest Possible Option

These have been coming out non-stop since Pac-Man on the Atari 2600, so I should address exactly what I mean by ports, here; straight copies, with absolutely nothing, or very little, changed from the content of the source game.

Before I start criticizing these, I should first make it clear that home ports from Arcade are almost always okay. This should go without saying, but just in case it doesn’t, yes, bringing a game from a multi-thousand dollar arcade machine onto a console that costs a couple hundred is nothing but a good move. Some versions of a port will be better than others, of course – just don’t play Mortal Kombat on the Game Boy – but overall, arcade ports, at least as a concept, are a good thing; imagine if Marvel VS CAPCOM 2 had never made it onto consoles! I don’t even want to think about it…

This goes for a good chunk of collections as well. Though some give more value than others (CAPCOM’s Mega Man Zero/ZX Collection is a markedly better deal than the split collections of the Classic and X series), a collection is usually a great way to experience some old favorites compiled together on the cheap for fans of the series, developer… Whatever’s being compiled. A collection can manage to be poor, of course, depending on just what it brings together; Square Enix’s Collection of Mana only has three games, and no bonus features apart from a music player, so it ends up feeling a bit barebones. A collection can also be poor if it performs abnormally badly, and there’s no more famous example of this than a vanilla Playstation Classic… Mmm, that sweet jumpy frame rate in Tekken 3 (caused by Sony choosing to include the PAL version of the game, which is locked to 50 FPS instead of NTSC’s 60, along with turning frameskipping on) flows just right. However, the most important thing that determines a collection’s value is its pricepoint – Super Mario 3D All-Stars may have set a little better at a forty-dollar cost, but setting it to $60 didn’t do the collection any favors, and with the controversy Nintendo got for choosing to time-limit access to the game, it really could have used that extra push.

All this being said, collections and ports have less and less value every year, and no game shows this off better than CAPCOM Arcade Stadium, which is both a collection and an arcade port; it loses a lot of credibility purely from how it makes itself available. Separating the different games into DLC packs? Not a particularly nice move, especially in an era where even the weakest available hardware can emulate every single one of the games in the collection. Back in the PS2 days, when emulators were still in very infantile stages (comparatively) and PCs cost a lot of money for very little power, it made sense to come out with collections like Taito Legends – “Wow, a big pack of arcade games, most of which were either never released in my country, or if they were, there’s precious little chance of finding an intact machine nearby? Sign me up!” But nowadays, every single game that comes in the CAPCOM Arcade Stadium, along with hundreds upon hundreds of others, can easily be ran – with all the same features – on a piece of *** laptop (my early Vista-era HP Elitebook does the job), Playstation 3, Wii U, or a cheap model in the Raspberry Pi line; oh, and completely for free! So, while it may be a nice option for those that don’t know any better or strongly value the convenience of a pre-packaged collection (and that’s a legitimate stance to take, of course), everyone else should give it a pass.

One particular port is a little hard to rate, and that’s the Scott Pilgrim VS the World: The Game – Complete Edition. On the one hand, it changes absolutely nothing from the base game, so those of us who kept it on their PS3 or Xbox 360 (or emulate it with RPCS3) get next to no benefit from the rerelease. On the other hand, being able to actually buy it again is a big plus, and it getting a physical release from Limited Run Games (which is running out soon – get it while you can, the aftermarket price will skyrocket before long!) alone clinches the deal… Though a more streamlined physical release would have been nicer (were it just a digital port, it’d be hard not to worry about a repeat delisting rearing its head), what we got is still a great option for a game that never had it before. So far, Scott Pilgrim’s situation as a delisted, then relisted game is very unique, though you can expect to see more of it come as time goes on. If we get more like this, then my general opinion for titles like it is that they really need a physical release of some kind as an option with their relaunch to be good; otherwise, the risk of losing it again is still always there.

All criticism aside, it is great to see one of my top-twenty favorite games come back into the spotlight.

Straight, singular ports are perhaps the worst kind of all, though they tend to be pretty rare – most will at least go for the remaster route just by increasing the resolution a little. Sadly, some don’t, meaning the one and only reason to buy something like the Switch digital port of ACA NEOGEO Fatal Fury Special is to show support for SNK as a company; purchases like these can potentially fuel future games (I was tempted to buy the Mega Man Zero/ZX Legacy Collection even though I own all six games – seven if you count the DS Zero Collection separately – for just this reason), but without that kind of motivation, you might as well be throwing your money into a sinkhole; at least then, you get to see it spin around a bit as it goes.

#2: Remasters; Like a Port, But Slightly Cleaner

What classifies a game as a remaster is it having the same – or mostly the same – gameplay (for example, games that receive revised control schemes and rebalanced mechanics are still remasters) and story (if there was one to begin with), but cleaned up visuals of some manner; it could just be an upscaled resolution and nothing more, or it could completely overhaul everything from models to the engine itself. There’s more of a clear line in this category when it comes to just which remasters are worthwhile and which aren’t, but it doesn’t just come purely from how much work went into the remaster – it comes from just how much the remaster improved the source game. Take a comparison within the same series as a shining example of just what I mean, here – 2015’s Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin, and 2018’s Dark Souls Remastered.

Scholar of the First Sin (or SOTFS, for short) is such a great remaster that it elevates the original game – which many consider to be the worst of the series – to a level where it can not only compete, but may actually eclipse its brothers; I ended up liking SOTFS better than either of the other Dark Souls games. Not only did it completely overhaul the visuals with cleaner textures, better colors and massively improved lighting (turning areas that were criticized for not matching the darker lighting in the pre-release trailers into much closer approximations), but they also rebalanced many of the enemy placements, added new weapons, threw in a new NPC to better explain the story, added a new ending, and as icing on the cake, the remaster also runs at a buttery smooth 60 FPS (on newer consoles and PC), a much-needed boon over the original’s slightly stuttery 30 FPS.

Between better lighting, improved water rendering, and nicer textures, SOTFS looks practically brand new – and that wasn’t the only benefit!

Dark Souls Remastered (or DSR), on the other hand, changes nothing when it comes to the mechanics or story… All it managed to do was boost the resolution and framerate. This still makes it a superior version to play over the original – try playing Blighttown on the PS3 cut, with its single-digit framerate, and you’ll be very thankful indeed for the remaster – but it’s especially disappointing considering what they could have done. After the great changes to SOTFS, many people expected DSR to make changes to infamously bad endgame areas, like the Bed of Chaos and the Duke’s Archives, but the only balance change that ended up being made was the addition of a bonfire near the difficult-to-reach skeleton blacksmith… The lack of extra additions is especially irritating because of the reason the endgame areas were considered poorly made – the developers ran out of time and money, and had to rush those last areas a bit. This was, of course, forgivable in the original release, but why upon a revisit to the game did they not even try to bring back some of the content that was cut? So few were the gameplay changes that the original level scaling is still in place, so players who want to abuse newbies in early areas by running ahead without leveling up to grab high level armor and weapons can still easily do so; a problem that was fixed in one way or another in both sequels… Overall, DSR didn’t make anything worse and is still the best choice for newcomers to the game, but neither did it bring about any renovations to a foundation that really could have used them; that makes its $40 price tag a bit hard to swallow for fans of the original. This same point sits for all “standard” remasters – I may massively prefer the Hyper Drive Edition of Mighty Switch Force! to the original, but I do have to acknowledge that it’s ultimately the same thing, and players of the original game don’t really need it.

…And then there’s the type of remaster that just makes the original game worse; perhaps the most infamous example being Konami’s Silent Hill HD Collection. There are a lot of articles and videos that will go into much further detail than I can (I recommend this one in particular, if you’re interested), but as a brief summary: the remaster majorly messed up the all-important fog rendering (not only making it less thick, so you see things you aren’t supposed to, but having tons of very obvious pop-in to boot), practically went out of its way to bring in the worst possible assets from other versions (like the original Xbox version’s worse cutscene videos and lower quality music), replacing a sign from the original Silent Hill 2 with one using Comic Sans (which was unintentionally a brilliant decision, as that font invokes just as much horror as Silent Hill), and included a new, significantly worse dub for both games; and while you can at least go back to the original voices for Silent Hill 2, you inexplicably didn’t get any such option for Silent Hill 3. Obviously, this kind of remaster should be sealed in a lead-lined drum and buried deep underneath a landfill somewhere, with a bunch of Engelbert Humperdinck albums and copies of E.T. for the Atari 2600.

#3: Remakes; A Mixed Bag Through and Through

Remakes practically have to be ranked by individual games rather than lumped into categories, because of just how much may – or may not – change… There is criteria that they can be ranked on, but that mostly comes to observing the changed content and determining whether it has improved or not, then building a final criticism based on the overall quality of all the changes.

A remake that could be called “fantastic” would be something like Square Enix’s 2017 remake of Romancing SaGa 2; it strikes a perfect balance between improving upon the original (with high-res backgrounds, beautifully animated boss sprites, a brand new high quality English translation – which is especially important because there surprisingly isn’t a fan translation available for the original SNES version – and a couple of extra character classes and dungeons) and maintaining what made the original so good (much of the original spritework is retained, as well as the fantastic SNES music, and the gameplay mechanics are just as tight and innovative as ever); and the $25 pricepoint (and the fact that Squenix hasn’t been afraid to put it on sale from time to time) is the cherry on top.

This is my favorite style of remake – the retro plus. I freely admit that I’m a bit gaga over it.

A remake from the same company that didn’t set quite as high a standard was the 2014 mobile port of Final Fantasy V; Final Fantasy VI was also ported to those systems the same year, and shares in all of the problems. The gameplay was more or less intact, and the music was too – VI’s port used the PSX audio, which was worse, but it was far from an offensive choice. Where did they go wrong? In two key areas… The first problem was the graphics. Between using weird, pseudo-3D chibi designs for all of the characters, backgrounds that look like they took the original sprites and put them through Adobe Illustrator’s “Image Trace” function to quickly vectorize them (for those not in the know, converting directly from pixels to vectors allows a picture to be scaled up in resolution infinitely without losing detail, but you lose so much detail in the initial process of conversion that it’s almost never worth it), and a big, ugly UI that uses a stock font with no personality, the remake ends up looking horribly unpolished; especially since none of its visual assets mesh properly together. The second problem? Both games were subject to issues with save corruption: yes, you could potentially lose all of your save data to a glitch that you had no control over… But maybe both of those things could be forgiven, because the remakes did include some extra content, like new character jobs in Final Fantasy V, a and a music player, a new translation and bonus endgame dungeons in both games. Why, then, is this version considered to be so poor?

Because all of that extra content came in with the 2006 Game Boy Advance remakes, which don’t have any of the 2014 version’s garbage graphics or save corruptions. What’s more, there exist (free) enhancement patches for the GBA versions that fix what few bugs remain and add back in the proper SNES music… And, you can buy a cartridge of these versions for the same price. This gives us a clear picture of what really quantifies a remake’s value – whether it can compete with another version… This brings us back, full circle, to Pokémon.

A Pokémon remake that’s gotten a lot of praise was the Generation 4 – the same generation as the original Diamond and Pearl – release of Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver Version. Not only did this release scale up the original Game Boy games into new, higher quality sprites, but it didn’t even reuse sprites from the same generation for many Pokémon, instead opting to create new ones for all of the original game’s 251 creatures. The remade music was catchy and sounded great, and they added some great new features, like letting your leader Pokémon follow behind you, a big customizable Safari Zone, the (included) PokéWalker accessory acting as a little bonus game as well as a pedometer, the Berry Pots item letting you grow berries in a convenient and portable spot rather than having to use up limited soil and constantly return to an area… There was a lot to like, and for a game that let you go between two different regions (a feat that hasn’t been attempted by Game Freak or their cooperators since), it felt very feature-dense.

Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl… There’s not a lot to look at just yet. All we really have to go on is the one trailer that we were shown; and yet, there’s a lot that we can discern from it. Starting with a graphical critique will be the most damning evidence I can provide, so I might as well start with that…

What do these two games have in common?

The latest Pokémon remake and the Final Fantasy III remake share a similar graphical style, though Final Fantasy III does look a little bit nicer overall… If only a little. Both games use a chibi-sylized look for their characters, with more realistic (though still smoothly stylized) scenery to contrast. But why would I choose to compare these two games specifically? I’ll tell you – the Final Fantasy III remake first came out in 2006… On the Nintendo DS… The same year that the original Pokémon Diamond and Pearl Versions were released. There’s nothing wrong with choosing a chibi style, at least in theory – not every game has to look like Cyberpunk 2077, and some chibi games look really good, like Keroro RPG: Kishi to Musha to Densetsu no Kaizoku – but if your remake, which is being released fifteen years after the original game, doesn’t even look as good as a game that released at the exact same time, why did you even bother? You could argue that they wanted to keep a bit closer to the graphics of the original game, but even for that, it’s quite poor – especially since the last remakes, Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire Version, turned a 2D game into a 3D one without looking (as) bad. However, this only applies to the overworld portions of the game – a major portion, as it compromises all of the non-battle gameplay, but the battles do look quite a bit different… Though that ends up hurting the game more than it helps it.

I know the picture on the right is from a pre-rendered cutscene, but bear with me a moment…

On the one hand, the 3D in the battles looks much better, and if they’d kept the same look for their overworld (the way it looked in Sword and Shield), there would be a lot less criticism levied towards the early impression’s graphics… But it still deserves some criticism, because it’s yet another case of Game Freak reusing assets – ever since X and Y, when the series first ventured into 3D, all games that followed used the exact same models and animations, and this remake will make Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl the sixth set of games (X and Y, ORAS, Sun and Moon, Let’s Go, SWSH, and now this) to use those assets. Say what you will about the gameplay of series like Call of Duty getting stagnant, but at least that series doesn’t use the same exact guns, characters and sounds over and over again. Again, yes, it’s more about style than raw graphical finesse, but when games like Final Fantasy XV (a game which looks as good in action as the pre-rendered cutscenes of Final Fantasy III) can go through the effort of making new models for old monsters like Cactuar and Tonberry, why can’t Game Freak?

(Before people chime in to remind me of Game Freak’s lower budget, SNK managed to create stunning new lighting, sounds, physics and textures for the upcoming King of Fighters XV, and they’re not exactly rolling in money right now either)

And the one other thing we can really discern from what we have so far is the pricepoint – there’s no doubt in my mind that this game is going to launch for $60. With the price hike of mainline games Pokémon Sword and Shield, along with not only the Let’s Go spinoff, but also Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX (itself a remake) and New Pokémon Snap all being set at $60, I would be very surprised if this remake didn’t go exactly the same route… That’s only a handful of things that we know, but what we have doesn’t exactly paint a pretty picture, and it’s doubtful that any of this is going to be substantially changed when the game comes out.

All this for a game that was just fine without it? Diamond and Pearl certainly had some flaws upon release, but Platinum cleaned many of them up quite nicely, so this remake wasn’t really necessary. There are a lot of people who are really excited about this game and have been expecting it for a few years now, but I don’t know how they can look at it as a good thing – it’s like they weren’t looking forward to a remake really touching up some things up about the original, so much as they were just waiting for it to eventually be remade; as if there were a timer on these things, and if the games don’t get remade, then we’ll never get to enjoy them again… Fact is, everything that made the originals great is still great, and everything that made them flawed is still going to be there in the remake. The one and only argument you could make in the game’s favor is that the remake is the only way that younger, newer audiences will be able to experience it, which is kind of like arguing that there’s no point in watching any of Toho’s older Godzilla films because TriStar’s 1998 Godzilla brought it stateside for us: no, it is not acceptable, the originals are worth tracking down and experiencing in one way or another, and the newer releases deserve to fade into obscurity. The right people will find the originals, and only those unwilling to experience classic media will miss out… And who needs them?

THE RESULT

When all you can make is rehashes of the same thing, what have you made?

This applies to entertainment of all sorts, not just games – when you dip so hard back into pre-existing media with things like Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga + Bowser’s Minions, the latest Star Wars (episodes VII-IX), or The Murder of Twelve (the 51st book in the Murder, She Wrote series… Yes, 51st), you’re limiting how innovative you could have been otherwise… You could argue that completely new works would struggle to reach the public, but risk is an element of business – if your idea is good, it’ll survive by natural selection; remember, Mario didn’t exist until 1981’s Donkey Kong arcade game… No matter how successful, everything has to start somewhere. Remakes and reimaginings (and, to a lesser extent, sequels) are thusly somewhat unnatural; like life support, they can prop up media that never would have earned its chance without that licensing seal stamped onto their covers. They can be a wonderful chance to revisit something with deep flaws as well, but the potential for abuse is always there, and these days, reboots have never been more popular… The only way we can discourage the bad ones from repeating themselves is by labeling them as such, resisting their pull, and encouraging others to do the same.

This article isn’t intended as some rallying call to end all pre-existing franchises – I’d surely be very upset if Dragon Quest reached an ultimate end – but as a personal critique of certain traits in ports, remasters and remakes that I find praiseworthy or irritating. What are some of your favorite – and least favorite – rereleases, and why? Let me know in the comments below!

The post A Fresh Coat of (Lead) Paint: The Ups and Downs of Remakes appeared first on Wololo.net.

Emulators and Homebrew might be the only way for the PS Vita in the future

News site TheGamer reports that Sony will be closing the PS Vita, PS3, and PSP stores this summer, citing anonymous but verified sources close to the subject. They say:

PSP’s and PS3’s stores are to be closed on July 2, while the PS Vita store will stay open until August 27. After those dates, you will no longer be able to purchase digital copies of games or DLC for any of the Sony consoles mentioned above.

The PS3 and Vita store can only be accessed from the devices themselves, currently, as Sony had removed them from general web access a while ago. It seems the next step is coming sooner than anybody wanted.

Although the article specifically mentions the stores, and the possibility to purchase games, it is unclear what will happen to digital games you already own, or, maybe even more concerning, games that are part of the Playstation Plus program. We can only hope that Sony won’t want to alienate their most loyal customers, and that those downloads will remain available to people who have previously purchased content, or to people who have been Playstation plus subscribers for a while.

It’s also possible, (but unlikely?) that Sony will only give users a few months to download the games they want to keep, and then remove the download functionality as well.

For the PS vita, in particular, this brings questions as a lot of games where only ever published in digital version, and might become inaccessible except through Vita Custom Firmwares and piracy. This also raises eyebrows regarding the future of the PS5, for all gamers who chose to go with the “digital” (disc-less) edition. Will their console see the same kind of fate and become unusable in less than a decade?

Gaming website Polygon state that Sony haven’t replied to attempts to reach out for further comments. We probably won’t see any official statement until the actual announcement, which is planned for this week or the next, according to TheGamer’s sources.

Source: TheGamer

The post Rumor: PS3, Vita, and PSP Stores to be permanently closed this year appeared first on Wololo.net.

By now, everyone who owns a PSN account has received the official email from Sony confirming the rumor: the PS3, PS Vita, and PSP stores are closing. (Full notification below).

There’s a bit of a silver lining: even after the closure of the stores, you’ll still be able to download the content you purchased as well as your PlayStation Plus content (as long as you’re a PS+ member).

Nonetheless, this is mostly bad news for those of us who still play on these consoles. It turns out even some developers who were still officially working on upcoming Vita titles didn’t learn about this until today.

You are finding out at the same time we are, I was working on vita specific tasks this morning.

— Lillymo Games (@LillymoGames) March 29, 2021

Meanwhile on the hacking/emulation scene, folks are scrambling to find ways to grab copies of as much content as possible before the stores closure.

Sites such as NoPayStation and PSNDL are apparently still working for the time being. These sites allow to download official game install files directly from Sony’s servers. So, technically their links might go down at the same time Sony shut down their PS3/PSV/PSP servers (although that’s unclear since we’ll still be able to download purchased content?). The question remains whether some people will manage to download all of that content in time. Even if someone does, these crawlers don’t have a full index of Sony’s PlayStation games, so it seems reasonable to expect that some games could be lost forever with this closure.

Sony’s PS3 / PSP / PS Vita Store closure announcement

We are closing PlayStationStore on PlayStation®3 on July 2nd, 2021 and on PlayStation®Vita devices on August 27th 2021. Additionally, the remaining purchase functionality for PSP (PlayStation®Portable) will also retire on July 2nd, 2021. After thoughtful consideration, we decided to make these changes in an effort to focus our resources for PlayStation Store on PlayStation®4 and PlayStation®5, which will enable us to enhance the customer experience even further. We thank you for your support on these platforms throughout the years.

What does this mean for you?
You will no longer be able to purchase PS3, PS Vita and PSP digital content, including games and video content.

You will also no longer be able to make in-game purchases through games on PS3, PS Vita and PSP.

While the PSP storefront was previously closed in 2016, the remaining PSP purchase functionality (e.g. in-game purchases) will now be fully retired.

What about content you already own?
• You will still be able to download your owned PS3, PS Vita, and PSP content, including games and video content.
• You can download your owned content onto your PS3, PS Vita, or PSP by accessing the Download List on the respective device.
• If you have purchased a PS3/PS Vita cross-buy bundle and have only downloaded either the PS3 or PS Vita version, you will need to download the other version prior to the closure of PlayStationStore on the relevant device.
• Video content that you own can be streamed on PS3, PS4 or PS5 through the My Videos app, or on mobile devices through the PlayStationVideo app.
• You will still be able to re-download and play game titles you have claimed through PlayStation®Plus as long as you remain a member of the service.

What about vouchers, wallet funds, and cross-buy content?
• You will still be able to redeem game and PlayStation®Plus vouchers on PS3, PS Vita, and PSP devices once PlayStationStore and purchase functionality for these devices close.
• You will no longer be able to redeem PSN wallet fund vouchers (e.g. gift cards) on PS3, PS Vita, and PSP devices once PlayStationStore and purchase functionality for these devices close.
• Your PSN wallet funds will remain in your PSN account, but you will only be able to use your wallet funds to purchase PS4 and PS5 products on PlayStationStore on the web, PlayStation®App, or on PS4 and PS5 consoles.
• You will still be able to purchase cross-buy content through PlayStationStore on the web, PlayStation®App, or on PS4 and PS5 consoles and access both the PS4 version and the PS3/PS Vita/PSP versions.

Where can you find out more?
Read our FAQ for more information: https://www.playstation.com/support/important-notice/

The post Confirmed: Sony to close PS3, PS Vita, and PSP online stores this summer appeared first on Wololo.net.

(pictures shamelessly taken from PSP scene veteran Freakler)

Developer balika011 has released an update to Despertar Del Cementerio, the popular PSP unbricking tool. This new version, based on DDC7 source code and some heavy reverse engineering of DDC8, brings compatibility to the infamous TA88v3 motherboards, as well as the first generation of PSP 3000 (03g). This follows impressive releases of a new kind of Pandora battery (Baryon Sweeper) that supports the PSP models historically known as tough nuts to crack.

It’s exciting to see breakthroughs like this for a console that stopped production years ago, thanks to the dedication of a handful of hackers.

What is Despertar Del Cementerio 9 for PSP

Despertar Del Cementerio (DDC) is basically an unbricking tool and utility to install either an official firmware or custom firmware on your PSP. Used in conjunction with a Pandora battery or Baryon sweeper, it lets you bring a bricked PSP back from the dead, and/or install a permanent custom firmware on it. From the Readme of DDC9:

This project is a continuation of the M33 Team’s work with using modern technics and exploits. The main advatage over their version is this version supports 03g and the infamous TA-088v3. In theory the bootrom exploit used should work on any PSP hardware ever released, however 5.00 firmware only supports 01g, 02g, 03g.

The source code in this repositry is based on Despertar del Cementerio 7, 3.90 M33 published by Mathieulh and a lot of reverse engineering of DC8 and 5.00 M33. The psptools folder is used to encrypt and sign the built modules, a modified version of Infinity psptools.

Thanks to:

• M33 Team Developers (Dark_Alex, adrahil, Mathieulh)
• Mathieulh for answering my questions and rubberducking
• Davee for 03g bootrom dump and psptools.

Download and run DDC9 for PSP

You can download DDC9 on the Developer’s github here.

This will be in particular useful if you are stuck with an “unbrickable” PSP 3000 or 2000 model. Those can also pretty much easily be found on eBay for cheap, as the general population still hasn’t realized these tools are available. But for those recent models, the original Pandora Battery will not do, you’ll need Baryon Sweeper.

From the Readme:

This is the first release of Despertar del Cementerio under my development.

It supports all of the PSP-100x, PSP-200x and the first generation (03g) of PSP-300x PSPs.
To use it you have to extract the TM folder from the release zip to the root of your memory stick then inject the msipl.bin to your memory stick.
To do that injection you can use multiple software. There are the tested and working ones:

• msipl_installer by draanPSP
• PSP Tool 1.00 by raing3

To boot it up from the memory stick you need to boot your PSP to service mode.
You can achieve that by:

• Using a “Pandora battery” PSP-100x and PSP-200x
• Using BaryonSTM on PSP-100x, PSP-200x and 03g PSP-300x
• Using Baryon Sweeper on PSP-100x, PSP-200x and 03g PSP-300x

rainsipl.exe known to NOT work with some memory sticks.
It states that the injection was successful, but the IPL isn’t written and if you check the logs you see an “not enough memory space” error.

source: balika011

The post PSP Release: Despertar Del Cementerio 9.00, with PSP 3000 03g and TA-088v3 compatibility. Bring your PSP back from the dead. appeared first on Wololo.net.

PSP Emulator PPSSPP 1.12 has been released, and brings in particular support for Android 12 and the new Android storage model, “Scoped Storage”. The new release also brings multiple bug fixes and improvements.

What is PPSSPP

As its name suggests, PPSSPP is an emulator for the PlayStation Portable and the go-to emulator at that. This emulator, whose original author is Henrik Rydgård, does not only emulate games pretty accurately with good performance but is also available on a wide variety of platforms including iOS, Android, Windows, Linux, macOS and the Switch among others.

PPSSPP is a very capable PSP emulator that’s able to make games look much better thanks to shaders like FXAA and resolution upscaling to resolution like 1080p and 4K!

Furthermore, it also boasts an impressive arsenal of features including save state support, a homebrew downloader, translations in tens of languages and the ability to render games at higher resolutions among others.

PPSSPP 1.12. What’s new for the PSP Emulator

Now, PPSSPP 1.12 has been released which comes with:

• Support for Android 12 Scoped Storage
• Lots of updated UI, like a new joystick calibration system and many new touch control options, new backgrounds
• Built-in CRC calculator, to be able to check with others that your ISO is valid
• Many, many multiplayer fixes
• Numerous game fixes
• Savestate Undo for both load and save
• Many graphical glitches fixed, and new texture filtering option Auto Max Quality for smooth texturing
• New audio options, like choose whether to switch to newly plugged in devices, reverb volume, etc
• And much more!

Download PPSSPP 1.12

Head over to the download section of the PPSSPP emulator to grab the version that matches your device of choice.

The post Release: PPSSPP updated to 1.12 (PSP Emulator) appeared first on Wololo.net.

Now this is a project crafted with love if I’ve ever seen one! Developer Freakler has release CheatDevice Remastered, a trainer and cheat engine for GTA Vice City and GTA Liberty City Stories on the PSP/PS Vita, which is an entire remake of the original CheatDevice, initially released more than 15 years ago for the PSP.

And while Rockstar would love you to shell 60 bucks for their remaster of a 15 year old game while they sue fans of the game, it’s fanmade mods like this one that have kept the game alive for so long. Don’t fall prey for the cashgrab, and instead play your old games

From Freakler:

As a child I loved playing with the CheatDevice and seeing this menu loaded via a simple savefile was like dark magic to me.. So I swore myself to understand and learn how to achieve this myself someday. Over the last years I worked on this little project whenever I had some freetime on & off. I am surely no expert in C or reverse engineering but this project helped and I learned a lot. I never intended to release this initially but why keep it for myself. I bet one or two nostalgic oldtimers might have some fun with this just like me.

This certainly brings back memories. GTA LCS has a strong history on the PSP, also being one of the first games used to exploit the console back in the days. (unrelated to this release but it holds a special place in my heart).

What is CheatDevice Remastered for the PSP/ PS Vita?

CheatDevice Remastered is a Trainer/Cheat tool for GTA Liberty City Stories and GTA Vice City on the PSP and PS Vita. While in game, press L+UP to display the menu.

CheatDevice allows the following things, among other:

• Infinite health and armor
• Edit wanted level
• Edit time
• Edit weather + Snow
• Spawn anything
• Display coordinates and speed
• Teleport
• Step through walls
• Power jump
• Activate spawn cheats with one button
• Edit car colors
• Never fall off your motorcycle
• Your car is indestructible, always steaming, smoking, or on fire
• Heavy bike
• Turn while power jumping
• Added “Really High” to teleport list for Dodo gliding
• Flyable Dodo with thrust
• Added step up/down, use -1.5m to submerge a flatbed to ramp level
• Step through walls works while driving
• Bikes can drive on walls
• Gravity
• Freeze everything
• Gameplay speed
• Walking speed
• Flip over
• Unlimited heli flying height
• Cheat Maker
• Select ped outfit, press TRIANGLE to activate
• Rocket Boost!
• Teleport to player target (the player-set red marker on the map)
• Construction Mode
• Hover cars
• Gather spell
• Drivable RC toys
• Your car is indestructible also prevents visible damage
• Gangs no longer attack you
• Water level
• Heavy cars
• Automatically flip over
• Drive on walls works for cars too

Improvements to the original:

• now works with all game versions (except JP)
• now works with High Memory Layout & other plugins
• navigating the menu will not affect game controls
• now utilizing the games fonts & blocking UI elements
• getting names & texts directly from memory
• expanded & enhanced HexEditor
• no more menu flickering!!
• lots of fixes & improvements
• …

New Features:

• skipable Intro Movies
• Character Model swapping
• completely disable traffic and pedestrians
• FreeCamera
• Map & MiniMap options
• Speed’O’meter
• makes German version uncut again
• Pickup & Vehicle spawner
• real random loadscreens!
• advanced Editors for stats, settings etc
• lots of customization via config
• …

Known Bugs

• resetting water level in VCS keeps areas flooded
• saving config in LCS with value might load wrong value in VCS and vice versa
• after sleep LCS menu text might not return to fullscreen
• custom LCS loadscreen sometimes crash the game
• huge health bar for missions with protect vehicle
• cheat: kill peds aiming at you not working with meele or fists

Download and install CheatDevice Remastered

You can download CheatDevice Remastered from the official page here.

Although CheatDevice Remastered should work on all PSP/Vita models, Freakler recommends the following configuration: Vita OLED model + Adrenaline eCFW + GTA Remastered prx + GTANativeRes prx + High Memory Layout + 333mhz Game clock + 60 FPS Cheat

Installation

1. Copy the “cheatdevice_remastered.prx” file inside “ms0:/seplugins” folder on your PSP
2. Edit “ms0:/seplugins/GAME.TXT” file (create it if not already there) and add the line “ms0:/seplugins/cheatdevice_remastered.prx 1”
   If you are using the native resolution patch by TheFloW make sure to load the CheatDevice first by placeing “gta_native.prx” line AFTER this one!
3. In the VSH-menu enable 333Mhz in Game-mode for a smoother experience.
4. Optional: If you want object/ped names etc translations for editors copy both “cheatdevice_names_lcs.ini” & “cheatdevice_names_vcs.ini” next to the prx.

Source: Freakler

The post PSP/PS Vita Release: CheatDevice Remastered (GTA LCS and VC Trainer) by Freakler appeared first on Wololo.net.

Developer Khubik has shared a video guide on how to use Baryon Sweeper, in conjunction with a “new style” Pandora battery, to unbrick a PSP 3000. Please note that the tool does not work on ALL PSP 3000 yet, although it is being improved regularly. Check the disclaimer at the beginning of the video to see if your model is supported

What is Baryon Sweeper

The Pandora battery was probably the most important release of the PS hack scene: a simple hack of the PSP battery, allowing the console to enter service mode. And from there tinker with the device, in particular to install and run custom firmwares, or flash a clean firmware on a bricked PSP.

But Sony updated the PSP’s service mode process with new hardware revisions, making the Pandora battery useless on newer PSP Slim (PSP 2000) and all PSP Brite (PSP 3000) models. .

Baryon Sweeper is a tool that finally makes a Pandora-like process possible on most PSPs. It’s a bit more heavy handed than the Pandora process however, so it’s useful to have a video Guide.

PSP 3000 Unbrick with Baryon Sweeper

Check the video below for the full tutorial.

0. Prerequisites:

• Arduino or USB-TTL
• Diode 1N4148
• reusable wire Cables *5
• Memory Stick (original or MicroSD Adapter) at least 32 MB
• a Working PSP Charger
• Card Reader, or Another PSP + USB cable
• Breadboard

1. Creating the Magic Memory Stick

• Download Jigkick Media Creator from Khubik’s github here (get the small archive) and extract it to your PC
• Connect a working PSP (or your card reader) to your PC via USB
• Execute “Jig Replicator.exe” with admin rights, and select “Jigkick Media Creator”
• Select “Despertar Del Cementerio”
• Once the program displays “done”, it means your Magic Memory Stick is created!

2. Preparing to Run Baryon Sweeper

• Install Python. You’ll then need to install a few python packages. In command line:
  • pip install pycryptodome
  • pip install tk
  • pip install pyserial
  • pip install requests
• Download Baryon Sweeper
  • Open and extract the archive
• launch pysweeper.py to confirm everything’s operational

3. Building the emulator Hardware

Not as hard as it looks like! Follow the video instructions either for Arduino at 3:18 or for a USB-TTL at 5:51. The schematics are below but the video does a great job at explaining it very simply:

4. Actual Unbricking/Recovery

• Insert the Magic Memory stick into the bricked PSP
• Connect your Arduino or USB-TTL to your PC via USB
• Run Baryon Sweeper on your PC, select “Service Mode”, the COM port of your Arduino/USB-TTL, and press “start service”
• connect the charger to your PSP.
• You’ll now want to connect your Arduino/USB-TTL to the PSP Power lines. GND Line to Left pin, RX Line to middle pin, 5V Line to right pin simultaneously. Hold until the Green light on PSP turns on.
• You should start seeing logs on Baryon Sweeper, and the CFW tool (Despertar Del Cementerio) will start on the PSP. Congrats!

source: khubik

The post How to Unbrick a PSP 3000 (Video Guide by Khubik) appeared first on Wololo.net.

Developer Balika011 has released an update to Despertar Del Cementerio. This staple tool of the PSP community is getting fresh updates thanks to new discoveries about PSP models 2000 and 3000.

Note that if you’re stuck with a bricked PSP 2000 or PSP 3000, we have a full guide, including video thanks to khubik, here.

What is Despertar Del Cementerio 9.01 for PSP

Despertar Del Cementerio (DDC) is basically an unbricking tool and utility to install either an official firmware or custom firmware on your PSP. Used in conjunction with a Pandora battery or Baryon sweeper, it lets you bring a bricked PSP back from the dead, and/or install a permanent custom firmware on it. From the Readme of DDC9:

This project is a continuation of the M33 Team’s work with using modern technics and exploits. The main advantage over their version is this version supports 03g and the infamous TA-088v3. In theory the bootrom exploit used should work on any PSP hardware ever released, however 5.00 firmware only supports 01g, 02g, 03g.

The source code in this repository is based on Despertar del Cementerio 7, 3.90 M33 published by Mathieulh and a lot of reverse engineering of DC8 and 5.00 M33. The psptools folder is used to encrypt and sign the built modules, a modified version of Infinity psptools.

Thanks to:

• M33 Team Developers (Dark_Alex, adrahil, Mathieulh)
• Mathieulh for answering my questions and rubberducking
• Davee for 03g bootrom dump and psptools.

What’s new in DDC 9.01

From the changelog:

This is the second release of Despertar del Cementerio under my development.

This version now based on 5.02 instead of 5.00 and also has a new feature:
TestingTool M33
This means you can boot and flash 5.02 TestingTool based firmware on your 01g, 02g and 03g PSP.
Installation is the same as last version.

Download and use Despertar Del Cementerio 9.01

You can Download DDC 9.01 from the project’s github here.

Usage, from the readme:

It supports all of the PSP-100x, PSP-200x and the first generation (03g) of PSP-300x PSPs.
To use it you have to extract the TM folder from the release zip to the root of your memory stick then inject the msipl.bin to your memory stick.
To do that injection you can use multiple software. There are the tested and working ones:

• msipl_installer by draanPSP
• PSP Tool 1.00 by raing3

To boot it up from the memory stick you need to boot your PSP to service mode.
You can achieve that by:

• Using a “Pandora battery” PSP-100x and PSP-200x
• Using BaryonSTM on PSP-100x, PSP-200x and 03g PSP-300x
• Using Baryon Sweeper on PSP-100x, PSP-200x and 03g PSP-300x

rainsipl.exe known to NOT work with some memory sticks.
It states that the injection was successful, but the IPL isn’t written and if you check the logs you see an “not enough memory space” error.

Source: balika011

The post PSP Release: Despertar Del Cementerio 9.01 (PSP unbricker) appeared first on Wololo.net.

As initially spotted by scene member @HowlingWolf8, popular anime Platinum End features a scene in which Neur0n’s PSP CFW Installer is visibly shown on the screen.

The sequence in the anime itself has nothing to do with PSP Custom firmwares. It instead showcases a phone being hijacked remotely, which quickly flashes “hacking” code on the screen. But to the trained eye of some scene members, this immediately jumped as some PSP specific memories from almost a decade ago, complete with Neur0n’s nickname.

Screenshot by HowlingWolf8

“LCFW 6.60 installer by neur0n”. Nice.

@sethreign8103 has the full scene captured in a short clip:

I had to see it for myself pic.twitter.com/1U4Xx7UPu8

— Seth Reign (@sethreign8103) December 5, 2021

We had showcased Neu0n’s installer in this article from TheZett back in 2014, in which the sameness can easily be seen (our video is from the 6.20 era, while it seems the artists over at Signal.MD are more up to date with a 6.60 version :P). See the screenshot below from TheZett’s video:

Source: HowlingWolf8

The post This popular 2021 anime features an actual PSP CFW Installer from ages ago appeared first on Wololo.net.

We haven’t talked about ARK, the Custom Firmware for PSP (compatible with both PSP/Vita) in several years. But the project has been back in activity (thanks to Acid_Snake) for about a year now, so it’s high time we fixed this mistake: ARK is back, it’s been improved, so it’s high time we talked about this new release.

What’s ARK for PSP/PS Vita

The PSP is one of the best homebrew devices. It had a striving community, and a lot of developers pushed it to its limit, in particular with emulators that achieved incredible performance for those days (ok, I won’t pretend it’s the best way to play emulators nowadays though, but it still works great for older generation consoles such as the NES, SNES, GBA…).

Running a Custom firmware on the PSP turned a decent console into an insane beast. And the same remains true on the PS Vita: As the Vita has a full fledged PSP emulator embedded, it is possible (and recommended!) to install a PSP Custom Firmware on the PS Vita.

That’s where ARK comes into play, being a custom firmware that works for both the PSP and the PS Vita. It comes with impressive features (from the readme):

Features:

• Core system for unsigned code execution on every PSP device based on 6.60 kernel.

• Inferno driver for ISO, CSO and ZSO games.

• Popcorn controller for PSX games.

• Stargate No-DRM engine.

• Plugin support for PSP games, PSX games and VSH (XMB), including per-game plugins.

• Compatible with all PSP models on firmwares 6.60 and 6.61.

• Compatible with all PS Vita models on firmware 2.10 and up.

• Minimalistic: only 5 files installed on PSP flash, CFW extensions are installed on memory stick.

What’s new in ARK 9.7r2

To be fair to ARK, we should list everything that’s been added in 2021/2022 since we haven’t talked of the project in a while, but… well that’s a lot. In the past year, among other things, ARK has added the following improvements (from the changelog):

• PSP Go support
• Infinity Support
• Possibility to replace XMB with a custom launcher
• Plugins now work “per game” instead of “all games”
• A ton of bug fixes and quality of life improvements

Download and install ARK for PSP/PS Vita

Head over to the release section of the developer’s github to get the latest release.

Installation instructions in the readme.

The post PS Vita/PSP: ARK (PSP/ePSP Custom Firmware) 9.7r2 released appeared first on Wololo.net.

Not the actual HEN Loading the TIFF exploit on 5.03 would occasionally corrupt the video buffer for a few seconds

A piece of PSP Hacking history was recently uploaded to github: PSP/Vita Developer Davee (of Infinity and Team molecule fame) has uploaded some “Work in progress” files from ChickHEN R3, the third release of then popular PSP Homebrew Enabler/CFW. Now, this appears to have been uploaded for historical reasons, and Davee has not stated he plans to work more on ChickHEN (also, there probably wouldn’t be any practical reason to).

What is ChickHEN for the PSP

ChickHEN was a Homebrew ENabler (a non-permanent Custom Firmware) for the PSP Firmware 5.03, released by Team Typhoon (Bubbletune and Davee). ChickHEN relied on the TIFF Kernel exploit “Eggsploit” released in April 2009. That was so long ago that at the time Wololo barely talked about console exploits unless they meant more people could play Wagic.

Chickhen was first released on May 6, 2009 but had a bug preventing Homebrew from working properly. A second release, R2, followed shortly the next days to fix the bug. An R3 release was touted, which would bring the following features:

• XMB / Game Version Spoofing
• Photo menu redirections
• Patch Playstation Network
• Hide pic1 (already present on CF)
• NandGuard
• System Settings / MAC Address Spoof Version
• VSH Menu
• Plugins
• High Memory for PSP 2000/3000

But R3 never came. Later on, more Custom Firmwares such as PSP Pro CFW, TN-HEN, ME, Then Davee’s own Infinity, made the need for an old 5.03 Custom Firmware pretty moot.

As such, this code is probably just here for historical reasons, but those of us interested in it can download it below.

Download ChickHEN R3 Source code

You can check the code on Davee’s github here. This was “Work in progress” back in 2009, and I don’t think there’s any guarantee it actually compiles.

old davee was dumb davee who didn’t use source control. the wip is the last remnants of the original chickhen source code

— Davee (@DaveeFTW) February 9, 2022

Source: Thanks to Krystalgamer for the tip!

The post PSP: ChickHEN R3 “Work in progress” code added to github appeared first on Wololo.net.

Howdy! I’m Derf, one of the owners of ConsoleMods.org. You may recognize me as a moderator of one of many game console sub-reddits or from the Xbox Homebrew, PlayStation Homebrew, or SegaNet Discord. I’ve been around various console modding communities and am most known for making some large wikis on reddit over the last 7 years.

What is ConsoleMods.org?

ConsoleMods.org launched at the start of this year and is focused on guides and informational pages for console modding, repair, and restoration. It’s a wiki that is open for anyone to edit and is aimed at all consoles that aren’t current gen (due to Nintendo being litigious and XSX/PS5 lacking content). Lots of information has been lost to time with forum sites — like Xbox-Scene, AssemblerGames, psx-scene, or MaxConsole — dying off and Archive.org only capturing a fraction of their information. ConsoleMods will stand the test of time as it is backed by me, CrunchBite (who has maintained XLink Kai and their site for ~15 years), and Bob from RetroRGB.

We’re hoping to spread the word and foster a positive, collaborative community to preserve information before it is lost and work on new ideas with each other for new mods or repairs on both the site and our Discord.

MrMario2011 covered ConsoleMods.org in his recent ModChat podcast with a great summary/walkthrough:

Why make a wiki? Why not use forums?

Forums are a great place for discussion, both in the long-term and short-term. The wiki is not meant to replace forums, but rather be a place to universally collect the amazing information and guides that come out of places like forums, reddit, or Discords into one place that isn’t cluttered by a million other forum posts. The wiki is laid out in a way that you can find the information you’re looking for visually so that you don’t have to spend a ton of time digging through forums to find useful information. The site also includes a search tool plus features like dark mode and the ability to check off steps in a tutorial as you go.

What happened to the old reddit wikis?

You may have been familiar with the /r/ps3homebrew, /r/360Hacks, or /r/OriginalXbox wikis. ConsoleMods is the evolution of these wikis, as they are now open for everyone to contribute and out on full display instead of tucked behind a sub-reddit. The reddit wiki system was not ideal as the wiki tools were lacking and the experience was not consistent across different devices or apps.

How can I help?

• Make some edits! Editing the wiki is very simple, and I have created a short crash course on how to edit the wiki. You may notice a lot of crossed out links on the site – these are placeholders for guides to be created by someone like yourself. If you see any that interest you, take some time to do some research on it and verify steps or information and make a page. All edits go into a moderation queue to be checked over by our moderation team before they go live, so no need to worry about perfection as we can polish up the formatting or wording.
• Join our Discord and chat with others! You can always lend or receive help and come up with new ideas to put on the site to make a lasting impact on the scenes.
• Spread the word! A handful of dedicated people are currently contributing to the site, and the more people we have to help out the better the site will become.

Where can I report issues with the site?

If you see something that is incorrect on the site, feel free to edit it. If you see an issue with the site itself, such as dark mode issues or broken features, feel free to message me on Discord (@Derf#9561 or on the site discord ), Twitter, or leave a comment here.

In Conclusion

If you or anyone else you know has knowledge to share, please do. This is a great way to give back to the community — for free! Even the smallest edits to fix things like typos are greatly appreciated.

Feel free to ask me questions here, I’ll try my best to respond to them all.

The post ConsoleMods.org – The Heart of the Modding Community appeared first on Wololo.net.

ARK, the Custom Firmware for PSP (compatible with both PSP/Vita) has been back in activity (thanks to Acid_Snake) for about a year now, and is regularly getting new updates. Today, Ark v10 was released.

What’s ARK for PSP/PS Vita

The PSP is one of the best homebrew devices. It had a striving community, and a lot of developers pushed it to its limit, in particular with emulators that achieved incredible performance for those days (ok, I won’t pretend it’s the best way to play emulators nowadays though, but it still works great for older generation consoles such as the NES, SNES, GBA…).

Running a Custom firmware on the PSP turned a decent console into an insane beast. And the same remains true on the PS Vita: As the Vita has a full fledged PSP emulator embedded, it is possible (and recommended!) to install a PSP Custom Firmware on the PS Vita.

That’s where ARK comes into play, being a custom firmware that works for both the PSP and the PS Vita. It comes with impressive features (from the readme):

Features:

• Core system for unsigned code execution on every PSP device based on 6.60 kernel.
• Inferno driver Version 2 compatible with ISO, CSO, ZSO, JSO and DAX format.
• Popcorn controller for custom PS1 games.
• Stargate No-DRM engine.
• Plugin support for PSP games, PSX games and VSH (XMB), including per-game plugins.
• Compatible with all PSP models on firmwares 6.60 and 6.61.
• Compatible with all PS Vita models on firmware 2.10 and up.
• Minimalistic: only 6 files installed on PSP flash, CFW extensions are installed on memory stick.
• Custom game launcher with built-in game categories file browser, FTP server and client, modernized look and more.

What’s new in ARK 10

Here’s what’s new in Ark since 9.7r2, which was the last time we talked about it:

Release 10

• Heavily improved SystemControl and Inferno Driver.

Download and install ARK for PSP/PS Vita

To get Ark V10 stable, go to this specific release.

alternatively, if you want the latest and greatest (automated builds with each commit), head over to the release section of the developer’s github to get the latest release.

Installation instructions in the readme.

The post PS Vita/PSP: ARK (PSP/ePSP Custom Firmware) 10 released appeared first on Wololo.net.

ARK, the Custom Firmware for PSP (compatible with both PSP/Vita) has been back in activity (thanks to Acid_Snake) for about a year now, and is regularly getting new updates. This week, Ark v15 was released. Since the last time we talked about it, memory usage was improved, leda compatibility was fixed, and Pro Online should now work.

What’s ARK for PSP/PS Vita

The PSP is one of the best homebrew devices. It had a striving community, and a lot of developers pushed it to its limit, in particular with emulators that achieved incredible performance for those days (ok, I won’t pretend it’s the best way to play emulators nowadays though, but it still works great for older generation consoles such as the NES, SNES, GBA…).

Running a Custom firmware on the PSP turned a decent console into an insane beast. And the same remains true on the PS Vita: As the Vita has a full fledged PSP emulator embedded, it is possible (and recommended!) to install a PSP Custom Firmware on the PS Vita.

That’s where ARK comes into play, being a custom firmware that works for both the PSP and the PS Vita. It comes with impressive features (from the readme):

Features:

• Core system for unsigned code execution on every PSP device based on 6.60 kernel.

• Inferno driver Version 2 compatible with ISO, CSO, ZSO, JSO, CSOv2 and DAX formats.

• Popcorn controller for custom PS1 games. Compatible with PopsLoader V3 and V4i.

• Stargate No-DRM engine.

• Plugin support for PSP games, PSX games and VSH (XMB), including the ability to enable and disable plugins per-game.

• Compatible with all PSP models on firmwares 6.60 and 6.61.

• Compatible with all PS Vita models on firmware 2.10 and up.

• Minimalistic: only 6 files installed on PSP flash, CFW extensions are installed on memory stick.

• Custom game launcher with built-in game categories, file browser, FTP server and client, modernized look and more.

• Compatible with PRO Online.

• Compatible with Legacy Homebrew via eLoader and Leda.

What’s new in ARK 15

Here’s what’s new in Ark since 10, which was the last time we talked about it:

Release 15

• Fixed compatibility with leda plugin.

Download and install ARK for PSP/PS Vita

To get Ark V15 stable, go to this specific release.

Alternatively, if you want the latest and greatest (automated builds with each commit), head over to the release section of the developer’s github to get the latest release.

Installation instructions in the readme.

The post PS Vita/PSP: ARK (PSP/ePSP Custom Firmware) v15 released appeared first on Wololo.net.

Although they haven’t announced it on their blog yet, the libretro team have released Retroarch 1.10.3. The popular multi-emulator is available for a lot of platforms, including of course Windows, Mac OS, and Linux, but also on the PS Vita/PSTV and Nintendo Switch, as well as Android and iOS (and many other consoles as well, including the 3DS).

Interestingly, this release also might improve performance of the emulator on the PSP,  by removing some GUI translations to free some RAM.

What’s new in Retroarch 1.10.3 ?

Although the team has not detailed yet on their blog, what changes this new release brings, this is what their changelog currently says:

• ANDROID: Decouple Play Core dependency to bring app into compliance for F-Droid
• AI/SERVICE: Disable AI Service setting by default
• BLUETOOTH/LAKKA: bluetoothctl: add / modify pairing steps
• CHEEVOS: Disallow manual frame delay setting in Hardcore Mode
• DATABASE: Serial scanning for Wii now includes WBFS
• INPUT/MAPPING: Fix offset + crash when clearing input port binds
• INPUT/MAPPING: Fix saving of ‘Analog to Digital Type’ when configuration overrides are used
• INPUT/MAPPING: Fix saving of ‘Analog to Digital Type’ when configuration overrides are used
• LOCALIZATION: Add Valencian language option
• LOCALIZATION: Updates
• MENU/SETTINGS: Move ‘Show Menu Bar’ under ‘Windowed Mode’ settings
• MENU/SETTINGS: Add sublabels for ‘Subsystems’ and ‘Input Deadzone/Sensitivity’
• MENU/SETTINGS: Move ‘On-Screen Notifications’ to top
• MENU/XMB: Unified the shadow alpha value to a slightly darker one for better readability
• MENU/XMB: Corrected the option label and sublabel for actual behavior
• MIYOO: Enable ALSA audio driver and default to it
• PSP: Take out extra languages/localization, adds about 4/5MB to the binary, and RAM is limited on PSP (32MB and 64MB RAM models)
• STATIC PLATFORMS: Populate all history list metadata when launching content from playlists
• STEAM: Introduce Steam Rich Presence
• VIDEO: Fast-Forward Frameskip improvement
• VIDEO/THREADED: Stability fixes
• WINDOWS/WINRAW: Fix multiple light guns
• WIIU: Fix USB get_device_name(), don’t truncate to three chars

To be honest, there does not appear to be “massive” changes, in particular compared to 1.10.2 released 2 weeks ago, in which the team described they’ve been ramping up for Steam Deck compatibility. Still, it’s always nice to get some new Retroarch update.

Retroarch 1.10.2 brought some nice GUI improvements last month

Download Retroarch 1.10.3

Head over to the nightly builds section of the retroarch downloads, and download the most recent build, for your platform of choice. As a reminder, you will need a hacked PS Vita or a hacked Switch in order to run Retroarch (and other homebrew) on these platforms.

The post PS Vita/Switch/PSP/3DS: Retroarch 1.10.3 release (nightly build) appeared first on Wololo.net.

ARK, the Custom Firmware for PSP (compatible with both PSP/Vita) has been back in activity (thanks to Acid_Snake) for about a year now, and is regularly getting new updates. This week, Ark v17 was released. Since the last time we talked about it, Acid_Snake brought memory usage and speed improvements. This new version also support Testkit PSPs.

What’s ARK for PSP/PS Vita

The PSP is one of the best homebrew devices. It had a striving community, and a lot of developers pushed it to its limit, in particular with emulators that achieved incredible performance for those days (ok, I won’t pretend it’s the best way to play emulators nowadays though, but it still works great for older generation consoles such as the NES, SNES, GBA…).

Running a Custom firmware on the PSP turned a decent console into an insane beast. And the same remains true on the PS Vita: As the Vita has a full fledged PSP emulator embedded, it is possible (and recommended!) to install a PSP Custom Firmware on the PS Vita.

That’s where ARK comes into play, being a custom firmware that works for both the PSP and the PS Vita. It comes with impressive features (from the readme):

Features:

• Core system for unsigned code execution on every PSP device based on 6.60 kernel.

• Inferno driver Version 2 compatible with ISO, CSO, ZSO, JSO, CSOv2 and DAX formats.

• Popcorn controller for custom PS1 games. Compatible with PopsLoader V3 and V4i.

• Stargate No-DRM engine.

• Plugin support for PSP games, PSX games and VSH (XMB), including the ability to enable and disable plugins per-game.

• Compatible with all PSP models on firmwares 6.60 and 6.61.

• Compatible with all PS Vita models on firmware 2.10 up to 3.60, either original or Henkaku.

• Minimalistic: only 6 files installed on PSP flash, CFW extensions are installed on memory stick.

• Custom game launcher with built-in game categories, file browser, FTP server and client, modernized look and more.

• Compatible with PRO Online.

• Compatible with Legacy Homebrew via eLoader and Leda.

What’s new in ARK 17

Here’s what’s new in Ark since 15, which was the last time we talked about it:

Release 17

• Added support for 6.60 Testing Tool firmware.
• Memory usage has been reduced.
• Several other improvements.

Download and install ARK for PSP/PS Vita

To get Ark V17 stable, go to this specific release.

Alternatively, if you want the latest and greatest (automated builds with each commit), head over to the release section of the developer’s github to get the latest release.

Installation instructions in the readme.

The post PS Vita/PSP: ARK (PSP/ePSP Custom Firmware) v17 released. Improves speed/memory usage, adds testkit support appeared first on Wololo.net.

So, my kids were playing Astro’s Playroom the other day, and when they unlocked the PSP Go, I told them “We have this thing at home, let me fetch it”.

Disclaimer: this is a copy of a Twitter thread I published back in March 2022. I’m hoping publishing it here will get it some visibility for those of you who don’t follow me on Twitter.

I haven’t turned my PSP Go on in years, possibly a decade. Let’s have a look!

Here it is! (I’m cheating, it was very dirty, I had to clean it up with alcohol before taking this picture. I almost threw up when I saw the color of the buttons)

Of course, after a decade in a closet, the PSP won’t turn on. It took me a while to find the charger… I think that’s the right one?

It looks like it’s charging! That’s a miracle in itself. Let it sit for a few hours then come back. Fingers crossed!

And the PSP Go still works after a decade of inactivity, ladies and gentlemen! I haven’t touched it in so long, I am excited to discover what’s on it, as I don’t remember at all.

It’s running on firmware 6.60…

Some psp games related to usermode exploit research in there. Uno, Patapon, Hot Shots Golf in particular were used as entry points for PSP/Vita hacks:

• Happy new year! PSP Game UNO vulnerability revealed by Frostegater, port of CEF To Vita 2.02 incoming. (2012)
• Way to keep a secret malloxis (2010)
• HBL Released for 6.30/6.31 (2010)

Afraid to click the PRO CIPL Flasher as I don’t clearly remember what it does. I decide to leave it for now

Some homebrew on the console: rrootage, Touhou Imitation Style, Adventure Game Studio,… most releases seem to be around 2011 (as I said, haven’t touched it in a decade)

• AGS Port by JJS: play hundreds of indie games on your PSP! (2011)

• rRootage for PSP Download page

The list wouldn’t be complete without some emulation. The console has Snes9xTyl (SNES Emulator) installed.

• Snes9xTyl Download page

And of course, my very own homebrew game, Wagic ( https://wololo.net/download/ ), which at this point was pretty much burned in on the internal flash…

Did you notice Killzone Liberation in my photo above? This game was given to PSP owners for free as a commercial gesture by PlayStation, after a very long downtime of the PSN back in 2011. Remember what caused that downtime?

Before I try to run homebrew, I’m having a quick look at what else is on the console. I have a bit of music in there… the PSP was a great MP3 player! In an era where dedicated MP3 players were a thing, having a multi-purpose portable device was kind of new when the PS Launched

Remember these? You could watch TV (with the dedicated accessory) and subscribe to some comic ebook service on the PSP…at least in Japan

I enter the image folder, and… crash! Some tiff image in there that the console doesn’t like…  Image lib vulnerabilities were a popular usermode entry point on the PSP. We didn’t have Webkit

Let’s go back to homebrews. I haven’t run the 6.60 PRO exploit yet, so most homebrews refuse to start:

Rrootage is the exception. The homebrew was signed, meaning it behaves as a “legit” game and can run on an unhacked console. This signing technique was developed by hackers in 2011, following the discovery of critical PSP keys on the PS3.

Now running PSP Pro Custom Firmware. This will install the hack in RAM, deactivate the console’s security, & allow me to run unsigned software. PSP Pro was one of the most popular CFWs for the PSP, because it defeated almost all games anti-piracy measures.

My unsigned homebrews now run! As to why some homebrews were unsigned even though we knew how to sign them and run them without a hack: unsigned homebrews had benefits, for example they could use more RAM

That’s all! I hope you enjoyed. It was a nice trip down memory lane for me

What do you remember from the PSP days? Share in the comments below!

The post Revisiting the PSP Go, more than 10 years later… appeared first on Wololo.net.