The last few weeks were pretty kind to the Nintendo 3DS & PlayStation Vita and the stream of exciting news is still flowing. In this article, we’ll be looking at some promising news regarding native resolution PSP games on the Vita and Widescreen DS games on the 3DS!

PSVita: Developer ‘robots’ takes on ‘Native Resolution PSP games for the PSVita’ bounty

In the beginning of this month, Reddit User ‘EpicEpsilon1033’ decided to create a bounty for native resolution PSP games on the PSVita. This bounty, which forms part of Rinnegatamante’s recently created VitaNuova community, aims to achieve native resolution (960×544) on PSP games when run on the PSVita by making clever use of the PSP hardware inside the Vita and the console’s own graphics hardware. Following this article, many people shared the bounty online and it’s currently valued at $500 which is a huge increase from the $75 it was at a week ago!

Now, a developer called Michal (nickname: ‘robots‘) has started working on making the bounty come to life. He said that one shouldn’t expect quick progress and went on to provide a rough timeline for his work which includes:

Figure out how to patch the PSP’s graphics module in order to make it redirect Texture/DrawList memory to the Vita’s shared memory rather than the GE’s memory space Port PPSSPP’s GE to the PSVita – scaling won’t be included at this point Add scaling capabilities to the above so that native PSVita resolution could be achieved These steps are in chronological order. While they might sound simple, it’s important to keep in mind that they require a tremendous amount of work so don’t expect to see much any time soon unless he pulls a Xerpi 😉

Going through the guy’s GitHub repository list, it seems that he’s dabbled a bit with PSVita-related development in the past but hasn’t made an awful lot of work public. That being said, only time will tell if he manages to get anywhere and we at Wololo wish him the best of luck!

Nintendo 3DS: Widescreen mode finally usable & Twilight Menu++ 9.0.4 released!

Contrary to the PSVita, the 3DS’ homebrew haydays have been over for a pretty long time but noteworthy releases still drop from time to time. One of these releases was Twilight Menu++ 9.0.0 some days ago which came with Widescreen support (lets you play DS games in Widescreen (16:10) thus filling up the 3DS’ upper screen).

Unfortunately, this feature wasn’t useable since TWL Patcher was required and that wasn’t out then. That finally changed on Sunday as Sono released his patcher which can enable Widescreen mode by following a short tutorial on a 64-Bit Windows PC. You can grab TWLPatcher from this link and follow the instructions found here to use it on your console!

On the other hand, TWiLight Menu++ received an update to version 9.0.4 yesterday and this brings along:

Support for 202 Widescreen Mode games Combined with version 9.0.3, titles like Final Fantasy IV, Pokemon Platinum and Assassin’s Creed II – Discovery are now supported

Sanity checks relating to Widescreen mode have been added which make sure that a working copy of ‘TwlBg.cxi’ is present in “sd:/luma/sysmodule” and whether it’s backed up

Some small bug fixes having to do with file copying

To grab TWiLight Menu++ 9.0.4 and enjoy DS games in Widescreen, check out this link to grab and install it. Do note that updating via TWiLight Updater doesn’t work as of right now so you must update your binaries manually!

Conclusion

On a concluding note, you might be interested in checking out this article about a significant update to one of the best original PSVita homebrew games called Pingo. Furthermore, there’s also been some nice progress relating to RPCS3 with Demon’s Souls now being playable at 60FPS @ 4K provided you have powerful enough hardware.