This weekend has been pretty good for the console hacking/emulation scenes as two high-profile pieces of software received well-needed updates. In this article, we’ll be looking at Rebug 4.85.1 LITE and RetroArch 1.8.0 which will surely make mobile users happy!

PS3 Release: Rebug 4.85.1 LITE released – Rebug Team looking for 4.85 DEX PUP to create REX version

If you recently decided to hack your CFW-compatible PlayStation 3 and updated to FW 4.85 to do so, you might have noticed that the firmware is a bit light on CFW choices.

Due to this, many opted to enable the QA Flag and downgrade to a 4.84 CFW to get the most out of their newly-hacked console but doing so forced you into spoofing your FW version for PSN access.

Now, downgrading a FW 4.84 CFW might no longer be needed for most as FW 4.85 has finally received a version of the highly acclaimed Rebug CFW but unfortunately, there’s a little catch to it.

Apparently, the folks behind Rebug don’t have access to a DEX PUP (DEX standing for development PS3) for FW 4.85 so they weren’t able to create a REX version (hybrid between CEX [commercial models] and DEX [development models]) of their CFW for FW 4.85. As a result, only Rebug 4.85.1 LITE is available for now but it’s quite probable that a DEX PUP will eventually show up meaning that Rebug 4.85.1 REX will probably come along sometime in the future.

With the minor catch out of the way, let’s look at the change log which contains:

Cobra has been updated to version 8.2

Rebug Toolbox 02.03.03 MULTI comes bundled with the CFW for easy customisation of your experience

Improved stability which comes from the firmware update itself (4.85) 😉

To read more about Rebug 4.85.1 and download it, follow this link to its website.

Emulation Release: RetroArch 1.8.0 is out with an improved experience on iOS and Android thanks to overhauled MaterialUI

When RetroArch 1.7.9 was released, we were informed that stable release will be happening more often and less than a month later, here we are with RetroArch 1.8.0.

For those who don’t know, RetroArch is a multi-platform front-end for your retro-gaming needs as it combines tens of emulators together (using cores) while giving you an easy-to-use and highly customisable interface to configure them and load games.

Now, RetroArch 1.8.0 has been released which brings along:

An overhaul to the MaterialUI menu driver which continues the work started in RA 1.7.9 to greatly improve the experience on smartphones and tablets. This overhaul includes: A new menu scaling system that uses the screen’s DPI to provide better results The addition of various animations in order to give that native mobile app feel but these can be disabled if you don’t like them An Android-esque system bar has been added on top and the bottom navigation bar has received substantial improvements Auto-rotation, a better landscape experience and other improvements which can be found in the link below

RetroArch can now seamlessly switch between video drivers meaning that many crashing issues are now fixed This feature, which started out as a bounty, was implemented by PSVita veteran Rinnegatamante (Patreon)

The OpenGL driver is now compatible with MAME’s layouts including backdrops, bezels and overlay artwork – this started out as a bounty as well

Wi-Fi access point settings to Lakka (Linux distribution created specifically for use with RetroArch)

Numerous bug fixes and minor features which can be seen in the full changelog (below)

To read more about RetroArch 1.8.0 and what it brings along, check out its release post. To get it, go to this link and choose the download for the platform of your choice.

Conclusion

For more stuff related to emulation, Mesen-S 0.3.0 has been released and if you want to read about how N64 emulation works, this recently published blog post about rendering in LLE mode might be of interest. On a different note, checkra1n development (probable jailbreak using the checkm8 bootROM exploit) seems to be in advanced stages as a picture of iDevices on iOS 13 running Zebra and Cydia were posted on Twitter which also hint at the ability of being able to choose the package manager yourself.