Without a doubt, the thing that makes it worthwhile to hack consoles is the slew of mods/tools/homebrew available for them and almost every day, something interesting is released. In this article, we’ll be looking at the second public beta of Chovy Sign (a hack letting you play PSP backups on Vita FW 3.71), more 60FPS mods for the Switch and BStone Vita 0.3!
PSVita: Chovy Sign Public Beta 2 & BStone Vita 0.3 Released
A few days ago, CBPS Team released Chovy Sign which is a hacking tool that allows you to run any PSP backup of your choice on PSVita FW 3.71.
If you’re an unlucky soul with a PSVita on FW 3.71, you’ll be pleased to know that you can play any PSP game you want on it with Chovy Sign!
This release, which is part of Project Chovy, was pretty significant as this firmware has no native hacks available for it (i.e HENkaku) since it fully patched TheFlow’s Trinity Exploit chain. Using it isn’t too difficult provided you follow a guide (such as this one) but it requires you to have a functional Windows PC with QCMA installed so make sure you get stuff ready before loading on a bunch of PSP games on your FW 3.71 PSVita or PSTV!
Now, it has been updated to Pubic Beta 2 and this comes with the following changes:
- The binaries now work on 32-bit installations of Windows so if your only Windows PC is pretty ancient, you’re in luck!
- ISOs for Minis now show the Minis bootscreen
- Improved exception handling (i.e less crashes and a more robust application overall)
To grab Chovy Sign Public Beta 2, check out this link and grab the latest ZIP file.
On other news, the PSVita’s port of the Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold engine (BStone Vita) has received a pretty beefy update which fixes a long list of minor yet noticeable issues. If you don’t know what Blake Stone is, it’s a FPS game released in 1993 based on Wolfenstein 3D’s engine with some enhancements like interactive map elements and textured floors/ceilings.
If you’re a fan of Wolfenstein 3D then Blake Stone: Aliens Of Gold is a title you should probably check out even more so that the Vita port received an update full of fixes and extra polish!
In it, you play as a British intelligence agent that’s trying to stop Dr. Pyrus Goldfire from taking over the world using genetically-engineered aliens, humans and mutants.
The aforementioned beefy update, with version number 0.3, brings about the following:
- Functionality to choose between previous/next weapon was added and could be triggered by touching the touchscreen’s top area and hitting ‘O’ (circle button)
- Joystick sensitivity can now be adjusted in-game
- The X/O buttons now function as expected in menus and the sound volume menu got a cosmetic fix
- Some crashes and out of memory errors were fixed
- Fadein tearing no longer occurs and the game’s engine was updated to version 1.1.13 (the upstream version of BStone)
- The save format changed so previous saves aren’t compatible!
To download BStone 0.3, follow this link to download the VPK or wait till it’s uploaded to VitaDB. You need to supply your own game files to “ux0:/data/bstone” as instructed by the README
Switch News: Masagrator releases 4 more 60FPS mods for commercial Switch games
As discussed in this article, some games on the Nintendo Switch are locked to render at a framerate lower than that which the Switch can achieve either due to thermals/battery life reasons or because overclocking the Switch’s CPU is needed to achieve a constant 60FPS.
Thanks to Masagrator’s work, you can play the just-released demo of Dragon Quest XI S at 60FPS if you don’t mind overclocking your Switch to the max 
(Source)
Due to this, Masagrator decided to create a bunch of 60FPS mods so that people who don’t care much about thermals/battery life can enjoy games looking as best they can on their Switch. Now, he and his colleague ‘Kirby567fan‘ released 4 more mods for retail Switch games which include:
- Lost Sphear – Compatible with version 1.3.1
- I am Setsuna – Compatible with version 1.1.0
- Fe – Compatible with base game (i.e won’t work if you install any updates)
- American Fugitive – Compatible with version 1.0.5
- The demo of Dragon Quest XI S (it’s a guide on how to patch it yourself as its config files haven’t been unpacked as of now)
- For best results, make sure you follow the overclocking profiles described in the links above as all 5 games require a slight/moderate overclock to maintain a constant 60FPS
Other than the above releases, there’s also some good news for these 60FPS mods as it’s been discovered how to get 60FPS in Unity games (American Fugitive is one of them) which took masagrator a few weeks to figure out. If the games you want to play aren’t in that list, there’s still hope as masagrator promised that he’ll release more patches next Friday (30th August)!
Conclusion
The last few days also saw the release of a port of Pingo (by Grzybojad) for Windows, Linux, macOS and Android thanks to Nikita Krapivin’s GMS2 port of the game so make sure to check that out if you like cool puzzle games to kill a bit of time!
The post News: Chovy Sign (PSP backups on Vita FW 3.71) Public Beta 2 Released With 32-Bit Windows Support + Bug Fixes, 4 new 60FPS patches for the Switch and BStone Vita updated to version 0.3 with numerous fixes! appeared first on Wololo.net.