Native PSVita homebrew exploit imminent

[Garrett]

I haven't touched my Vita for ages, but will probably dig it out now this is in the wild.
At least now it will get some use, anyone else here going to try?

http://wololo.net/

 

[Klumpen]

in the wild

Nice source...

 

[benoitb]

I compiled a hello world, waiting to run it now.
This news made my year yesterday. Native emulation on the Vita ! This is going to be an excellent emulation machine.

 

[Faust]

I compiled a hello world, waiting to run it now.
This news made my year yesterday. Native emulation on the Vita ! This is going to be an excellent emulation machine.

DC emulation would Be great on it!

 

[benoitb]

I have it running, it's brilliant. Sonic is full speed, installation is a breeze: ftp to the Vita, open the .vpk file you transfered and voilà ! A new native bubble on the home screen. Roms can be anywhere on the memory card. No more bulshit FS restrictions.

 

[Alperoot]

I knew I wouldn't regret updating. Hehehe

 

[Faust]

Great, I can upgrade the Psvita that I found in the street!

 

[iprice]

Niiiiiiice! Will give this a try at some point.

 

[Fzero]

Never picked up a Vita, someone please tell me the basics in terms of emulation on it...

What emulators are there, gb, gba, nes, snes, gg, ms, md, mame...? Speccy?
Any specific model needed, or can pick up the original phat or newer slim?

I still have my PSP Go, and would prefer the Vita if could run the old systems on it, quite like to play some Vita games, as I collected a few with my PS4 Play monthly subs, but never had the Vita to play them on... I'd only pick one up if could also play the 8bit/16bit systems too. cheers

 

[Exophase]

DC emulation would Be great on it!

It was revealed by hackers some time ago that Vita's CPUs only clock up to 444MHz. I was in total disbelief, but they were pretty convincing in their evidence. If this is true I don't think DC emulation is going to work so well at all.

 

[Alperoot]

Never picked up a Vita, someone please tell me the basics in terms of emulation on it...

What emulators are there, gb, gba, nes, snes, gg, ms, md, mame...? Speccy? i
Any specific model needed, or can pick up the original phat or newer slim?

I still have my PSP Go, and would prefer the Vita if could run the old systems on it, quite like to play some Vita games, as I collected a few with my PS4 Play monthly subs, but never had the Vita to play them on... I'd only pick one up if could also play the 8bit/16bit systems too. cheers

If you can find an older system (in terms of firmware), it isn't a bad emulating device. If you want to do the emulation in the firmware 3.60, it really is early right now. The hack is alike to the ones before, but it needs a different file type to run.

 

[levi]

It was revealed by hackers some time ago that Vita's CPUs only clock up to 444MHz. I was in total disbelief, but they were pretty convincing in their evidence. If this is true I don't think DC emulation is going to work so well at all.

That's quite the downclock from 'up to 2GHz x4'!

 

[___]

holy shit I am going to get a vita now. that sounds like lots of fun ahead. they're cheap right now aren't they?

 

[Garrett]

holy shit I am going to get a vita now. that sounds like lots of fun ahead. they're cheap right now aren't they?

There are some bargains to be had if you aren't too bothered about getting a new unit.. what I'd appreciate though is a heads up for whichever version is preferable for emulation. I know the PCH-2000's LCD is better for battery life but otherwise the PCH-1000's OLED is supposedly much better visually & I suspect the same will be true for all the retro stuff, does anyone know any different?

 

[benoitb]

Get the one you prefer.
1000:
+ usualy cheaper and easier to find 2nd hand
+ OLED screen is gorgeous
2000:
+ lighter
+ better battery life
+ microUSB instead of proprietary port

I personaly have a 1000 that I got used for 100€ with 3 games and a 16GB card. If you buy used try to get a pack with a memory card, these are expensive new. The 1000 and 2000 have the same capacities for games and homebrews, no difference.

Right now the native emulator offering is not as good as the PSP offering. The Vita is indeed limited to 444 MHz. I don't see Dreamcast or Saturn happening. Might have crappy N64 but as far as I'm concerned, I just hope for perfect 2D systems up to 16 bits/CPS/NeoGeo. And hopefully the Vita's PS1 emu will be usable as well.

Megadrive is working well but sound is a bit garbage.
SNES works quite well but not yet 60 fps. I get 50 on mario kart and DKC for example.
Neo Geo Pocket works well.

That being said you can install VHBL and use PSP homebrew. I would say that right now you're better off using native for SNES and Neo Geo Pocket and probably PSP emulators for the rest.
That will probably change soon however. Retroarch exists for Vita and needs to be recompiled to support this new exploit.

 

[Exophase]

That's quite the downclock from 'up to 2GHz x4'!

People did the same thing with 3DS.. They see a maximum clock ARM quotes for the processor and thinks that applies to anything. In reality that's heavily dependent on process and implementation, and then they may actually only provide clocking far below what it could handle in order to save battery life.

 

[Garrett]

I'd not heard of the 444MHz limitation before.. but if true & the Vita will even struggle with N64 emulation, I don't think I'll bother as I have a PSP and that copes very well with most Mame/8/16 Bit & a tablet for the N64/Dreamcast etc stuff.

 

[levi]

People did the same thing with 3DS.. They see a maximum clock ARM quotes for the processor and thinks that applies to anything. In reality that's heavily dependent on process and implementation, and then they may actually only provide clocking far below what it could handle in order to save battery life.

To be fair, that used to be a reasonable approach on ARM based stuff before the 3DS and before the iPhone. Generally available cores only ran at up to a couple hundred megahertz in general, and people didn't both scaling the clock on those, just turn them off when you don't need them (and consoles like the GBA didn't even do that - besides from the SP model and up the LCD backlight probably ate more juice than anything else in there).

Although from what you're saying, people aren't even taking stats from commercially available processors, they're taking already somewhat overblown stats from reference implementations and running with them, which hasn't been a valid thing to do, well, since they even started writing reference implementations for the chips I guess.

 

[Exophase]

To be fair, that used to be a reasonable approach on ARM based stuff before the 3DS and before the iPhone. Generally available cores only ran at up to a couple hundred megahertz in general, and people didn't both scaling the clock on those, just turn them off when you don't need them (and consoles like the GBA didn't even do that - besides from the SP model and up the LCD backlight probably ate more juice than anything else in there).

Sure, but looking at GBA and DS specifically, they incorporated ARM cores that were clocked well below what other devices clocked the same cores at. I mean devices that came out around the same time or even earlier.

For example, ARM says that the core used in DS can clock up to 441MHz (https://www.arm.com/products/processors/classic/arm9/arm946.php) but DS only clocked it at 67MHz. If you had no idea what DS's clock speed and guessed based on how high it could be you'd be wrong. Yes, older handhelds like GBA and DS had fixed clock speeds but that's still a configuration parameter, just one decided by choice of oscillators and clock controllers.

Although from what you're saying, people aren't even taking stats from commercially available processors, they're taking already somewhat overblown stats from reference implementations and running with them, which hasn't been a valid thing to do, well, since they even started writing reference implementations for the chips I guess.

ARM changed their product listings and don't have any performance specifications for Cortex-A9 now, but I thought the 2GHz number came from there. There have been real devices with 2+GHz Cortex-A9s, but I don't think anyone credible really believed PSVita wasn't around 800MHz to 1GHz. 444MHz was still pretty shocking.

 

[Wrath Of Khan]

There was some mention in a nintendo ds article about a method of having additional power via gpu's or something- apparently the vita employed this trick too-