PS Vita Hacked To Allow Running Homebrew Apps, Games, Emulators
It was anticipated for a long time, and it has now finally happened. Sony’s PS Vita handheld has finally been hacked!
A group known as Team Molecule have hacked the Sony’s PS Vita through the console’s web browser, which gives homebrew users full access to the Vita hardware. You can now reinvent it as a console emulator.
The relatively simple jailbreak is known as Dubbed HENkaku and it works with the latest 3.60 Vita firmware. All Vita owners with the latest 3.6 version can simply browse to the HENkaku website and tap install. However, remember that the jailbreak isn’t permanent, which means that you will have to reinstall it every time you turn your Vita on and off. The method of repeated switching power off and on in the Vita is the only drawback to this experience.
“HENkaku simply lets you install homebrew as bubbles in LiveArea. It is a native hack that disables the filesystem sandbox. It installs molecularShell, a fork of VitaShell that lets you access the memory card over FTP and install homebrew packages (which we create as VPK files). ”
After the exploit is successfully installed, users will be able to use FTP software in order to transfer unofficial ROMs onto the PS Vita’s memory card. Please note for this, the Vita should at least have 10MB of free space in order to successfully install the exploit and have it run with no problems.
“With vita-toolchain, developers have access to the same system features licensed developers have access to as well as undocumented features that licensed developers cannot use including overclocking the processors” Yifan Lu, one of the developers, stated in an announcement.
The apps and games transferred will become available on the home screen and you will be able to play/access them. Since, the exploit is very new there are not many games available that are compatible with the Vita as yet.
The exploit’s developers agree that HENkaku could make it easier for other Vita hackers to play pirated games on the device, but that’s not why they developed the exploit.
“We are all developers by trade and we understand the problem of piracy that usually arises from breaking the security features of a device. The usual response from hackers is “not our problem” but we believe we can do better. We carefully designed HENkaku to be as permissive as possible for developers to write homebrew supporting private APIs and the option to bypass sandboxes. However, we also made sure to make it as difficult as possible to repurpose our tools to enable piracy. While piracy is always inevitable, we will not make it easy,” HENkaku’s website reads.
Team Molecule also has a programme that enables Game Boy Advance ROMs to be played on the device, as well as a version of Doom for PSP. There are also emulators that enable some SNES and Mega Drive (Genesis) games.
