Today is the third year anniversary of HENkaku’s release for the PlayStation Vita and PlayStation TV. This fully-fledged native hack, the first of its kind for the device, spawned a very active homebrew scene that’s only been really slowing down in the last few months. That being said, there’s still stuff to talk about and we’ll be looking at a Deltarune port, Yifan’s Lu write-up on the first F00D exploit and Xerpi’s sharing of his Vita Linux build instructions!

Release: Deltarune Chapter One ported to the PSVita

It is only appropriate that the PSVita gets a birthday present for the 3rd year of having to endure HENkaku and this present is a port of Deltarune Chapter One.

This massively popular and highly-rated Indie game is written in GameMaker Studio by Toby Fox, the creator of Undertale which was officially ported to the PSVita. Sadly, Deltarune didn’t find its way to the console but Tijesef, who’s ported numerous GameMaker games to the console thanks to Silica’s G*Maker, decided to rectify the situation and create a homebrew port instead!

If you’ve never heard of Delatrune before, it’s an RPG game in which you end up in an unknown place called the ‘Dark World’ where you and a classmate named Suzie are hereos that have to restore balance. This is done by defeating creatures and their bullet heck attacks either peacefully or through violence. From a short period of testing, I can confirm the PSVita port works pretty well and has good performance along with a nicely mapped control scheme. According to tijesef, there are only two minor issues with the port namely long waiting times when saving (around 5 seconds) and that you can’t remap controls

To get Deltarune Chapter One (which is free), check out Tijesef’s Reddit Thread about it and grab the VPK to install on your PSVita.

Other News: Yifan Lu publishes write up on The First F00D Exploit and Xerpi posts Vita Linux build instructions

For HENkaku’s 3 year anniversary, Yifan Lu has something in store as well although it isn’t in the form of some massive release but of an interesting write-up. This write-up, which was originally written in January 2019 was intended to be published when somebody found the same vulnerability in 0x50002 service that it discuses.

Unfortunately, this didn’t happen even though there were various hints on the HENkaku Wiki that the service buggy probably due to lack of interest in hacking the obscure F00D processor. As usual with Yifan Lu’s blog posts, it’s pretty well written and the gist of it can be grasped by anyone with limited knowledge of computer security so if you’re into learning how vulnerabilities/exploit work, you should surely give it a read when you don’t have much on your hands! Yifan notes that the work in the article is from early 2017 and doesn’t open any new doors; the write-up was purely written for entertainment/learning purposes.

On the other hand, Xerpi has recently posted build instructions for generating a Linux kernel to boot with his PSVita Linux Loader software. Unfortunately, Vita Linux hasn’t seen much progress after the initial groundwork done in December of last year but Xerpi’s known for making the seemingly impossible possible, which was the case with udcd_uvc so work on Vita Linux might continue someday. The main purpose of these build instructions is probably to help more experienced developers to get working on improving the PSVita more quickly but aren’t very useful for regular users as a precompiled Linux kernel can already be downloaded. It’s important to note that Vita Linux doesn’t support the PSVita’s display so if you boot it, you’ll just see a black screen; output is currently available via UART0 which is a debug interface that requires soldering to use. Thanks for the heads-up on this @TheheroGAC

Conclusion

While the PSVita scene has slowed down significantly, the Nintendo Switch scene is still full of life especially with the recent release of an Android port. Users have reported that DraStic (Nintendo DS emulator for Android) works perfectly and games like PUBG are also working pretty well. Furthermore, L4T Lakka which is an emulation-focused Linux distro for the Switch received an update with many new cores (including Play!, a PS2 emulator) and some Quality Of Life Improvements!

If you’re not really interested in the Switch, there’s also other news relating to the PSVita with Rinnegatamante just releasing a Vita Nuova which is an updated version of VitaDB that has a bounty section and a Discord channel.