Saturday, July 30, 2016

Re-Vita-lized

And the battle between hackers and Sony continues! There's a new exploit for the Playstation Vita and PSTV called HENKaku which not only wedges open a backdoor for homebrew apps, but makes the process incredibly easy. You go to the HENKaku web site on your system, click the orange install button, and wait a little while for the exploit to install. It may take a few tries, but it's far easier than all the hoop jumping that was necessary to hack the Vita in the past. Bravo to Yifan Lu and his team for making this happen.

So hey, July is almost over, and now that the vicious summer heat is behind me I probably ought to start updating this blog more frequently. I told the guy from VGJunk that I was going to write a guide to the multitude of weird power-ups in Capcom games (like the tiny robots, strawberries, and that pinwheel thing that's worth a kajillion points), but I never got around to it. Maybe that'll actually happen in August... provided I don't get a lot of Brainy Smurf types running in to tell me everything I missed. (It's going to be an abridged guide, for the sake of my sanity. Deal with it.)

3 comments:

  1. Wait, so what does this actually do? I may have to try it, if it's easy and appealing...

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    1. Also, yes, write up the damn Capcom post. It sounds interesting!

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    2. Phew, I've got a lot of catch up to do, don't I? All right, here's the scoop. If you still have your Vita on firmware 3.60 (and it's got to be exactly that; if you're on 3.61 you're out of luck) you can visit a web site called http://go.henkaku.xyz/ in the Vita browser. If you get an error once try again; if you keep getting errors shut off your system and restart it.

      Eventually you'll get a "Welcome to Henkaku" message. Hit the OK box and your system should run through a few commands. When it's done (it'll say so), peel off the window. You should have a new icon called Molecular Shell. This lets you transfer files directly from your PC to your Vita, but you need to use an FTP client to do it.

      It's a little hands-on, and you've been hesitant to do that sort of thing in the past. Also, you have to revisit the Henkaku web site if you ever power down your system. (Sleep mode is okay; I'm talking a full system shutdown here.) But for me, personally, it's been worth the effort. I've got a jillion emulators running on both my Vita and PSTV, which has gone from "neat looking paperweight" to "versatile gaming-focused set top box" overnight.

      As for the Capcom thing, maybe! I just have to spend a lot of time with the games and get some images of all the items. Only problem is that no matter how many you find, you can't possibly cover them all...

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