Hey everybody, it's SmokeMonster Welcome to my channel

This video is a result of something I was shooting for the RetroRGB Weekly Roundup roundup and it became a little long for the news, so I decided to make it a standalone video I just wanted to catch people up on some of the things happening in the Vita homebrew world and then cover a couple other little bonuses that I've thrown in now, since I have the extra time So I hope you enjoy it, and I don't know if I'll do videos like this in the future–definitely not in this format–but maybe I'll start posting more videos now that Bob has got me doing this A big thanks to him for being my YouTube vampire-maker I hope you'll enjoy, and let me know in the comments if there's anything in particular you want me to cover in my channel and maybe that'll give me some ideas for future videos

Okay there's been a lot of really cool Vita things going on this week, so I thought I would give a little introduction to the Vita for some of you who haven't been following the homebrew and hacking community so closely, and then get you up to speed with the cool stuff that's been going on If you don't follow the Vita the hacking scene, it kind of comes in waves So you'll have a big amount of activity and then several months will go by without much going on Usually TheFlow will release some new hack or some update to some tool and then a big wave of new content will come out, and apps will get updated What set off the latest wave of activity was the release of two tools: psvgamesd by motoharu-gosuto and NoNpDRM by TheFlow

Psvgamesd is a way of essentially archiving games It gives you a one-to-one copy of any game, including all the padding files and extra information Right now it's being used primarily I believe for archiving but NoNpDRM is a plug-in for Henkaku that gives you a playable copy of a game, without all of that extra padding space This is important because the old ripping tools–Vitamin and Mai–created playable copies of games, but they had some problems, and compatibility was hit or miss With NoNpDRM we have essentially 100% coverage of all games up until firmware 3

60 Certain games that came after the release of 360 require 361 or 365 and those games are still unplayable for now

So, if you don't have a Vita; go out and get one right away You want to get this launch model edition, which has probably the greatest screen ever put on a handheld It's an OLED screen, it has a really great d-pad on it The buttons they're not exactly clicky, but they do have a tactile feedback to them It's definitely Sony's greatest d-pad in my opinion

The PS4 controller is just garbage compared to this, and this makes PS3 and PS2 controllers just feel like trash But, the Vita is magnificent, and you can get all sorts of emulators for it and homebrew tools like RetroArch, which can do basically emulate any console at 60FPS with this really beautiful quality screen on it And you can, of course, go in and do a 1:1 pixel ratio You can set up your screen ratio however you want, you can add scanlines Anything like that

It's powerful enough for the basic stuff So, you've got Super Nintendo, Genesis, PCEngine, PC Engine CD, Sega CD, 32X; all of those kind of things right in your pocket And then another thing that's really cool is that the Vita had a native hardware and software combined emulation of the PSP which also means that it can do PS1 So you can play any PS1 or PSP game as if its the original PSP-1001 I believe Or PS1 games

And that's actually what I use mine primarily for I've got a 128GB card in here now About a hundred gigabytes of it is emulators and PSP/PS1 games, and then a small portion of its left for a few Vita games The Vita doesn't have many great games–it has a few great games and then a lot of garbage pretty much So you'll find a handful of shooters, maybe a dozen, you've got a great version of Shovel Knight: the Shovel Knight Treasure Trove, which has all three games Spectre and Plague Knight, the original Shovel Knight

And Axiom Verge Everything after that is just kind of interesting But the PSP, however, has a huge library with an incredible amount of old PS1 games, you've got shooters, tons of shooters Anything you can imagine is on here So when you're shopping for a Vita, like I said, go with the fat

The slim model–I've seen the screen and it's there's nothing special about it It's kind of like a big PSP screen To me there's no sense in even having that I mean, I'd pay an extra hundred dollars for this OLED screen if it cost that much, but I think the difference in price should be about $20 bucks maybe And you also want to make sure it has no scratches at all

On this screen it's really annoying–with this piano gloss finish any little scratches show up, so pay extra money and get one with a nice screen, and also order a screen protector right away with it This one here that I have is actually a Kiosk model and there's kind of a crazy way of converting a Kiosk unit into a regular unit, once you have Henkaku installed I don't recommend doing that unless you're kind of a power-user and you're ready to do some research because the kiosk units have a tendency to update without asking you I think it checks for an update every minute or two, so there's a period between when you go online to install Henkaku and when it's asking for the update where you're kind of in a danger-zone there And if it updates past 3

60 you're just kind of screwed unless you want to put a new motherboard Another cool tip here care of my friend Saburi is to grab along with your Vita one of these cool vault cases, which I paid like $15/shipped for It's a really nice case It will fit the slim or fat model, and a few games, and your memory card Highly recommended

One annoying thing about the Vita is the swipe-to-unlock thing Normally you swipe the screen and you leave a big fingerprint right across it But you don't actually need to do that There's a little trick To unlock it you just tap in both corners, like that–bang you're in

I have the Golden Henkaku Theme installed on here if you were wondering You install that using the PS Vita DB Theme Installer through WindowsIt will connect through FTP to your Vita and transfer the theme over It's a cool way to get rid of the kind of plain-jane backgrounds that it comes with The first thing you're going to want to once you get a Vita is to order an SD2Vita

SD2Vita is a little device that plugs into the game port here which allows you to use a MicroSD card to store your games This is important because the Vita memory cards are ridiculously expensive A lot of us think that the memory cards are basically the reason that the Vita died Sony put out a 64GB card as the largest size they made, and I think the price was about $150 when it first came out And 64GB doesn't give you much space

It doesn't allow you to download many games from the PlayStation Store, so it was just a really strange marketing decision by Sony And even the four and 8GB cards are not cheap, you know A 4GB SD card is like a dollar probably, but a 4GBVita card is like probably 12 bucks So, once you put the SD2Vita in, you can get a $40 128GB MicroSD card–or in the future of course we will have terabyte sized or better, a few years from now–for dirt cheap And we'll throw those in

This is nice also because the only way normally to transfer content to your Vita is either through USB or through FTP I always did it through FTP just because it was a little more convenient even though it was a little slower But now with the SD card, you just pop the SD card out, put it in your computer and transfer things over And so how this works, you just pop it in–I've got the version 20 SD2Vita in here, so mine doesn't really come out that easily

I do recommend going with SD2Vita v30 now They're like $8/shipped, but it's shaped exactly like a Vita game, and it pops in and out really easily, and there's no electrical connection on it that are exposed–it's fully encapsulated in plastic So a lot safer choice, but that didn't exist when I ordered mine So you pop it in there

Although the Vita doesn't require any hard modding, there are some things that you need to know about it It's very important to get a Vita that hasn't been updated past firmware 360 If it has been updated past 360 which happens any time you would connect to the the PlayStation Store, anytime it was online at all it would get updated, and once it's past 3

60 it's absolutely impossible to be to have Henkaku installed on it The Henkaku exploit is what allows you to run all the homebrew and hacks So if you're buying one on eBay, you have to ask the seller what firmware it's on And if it's past 360, your only option would be to buy a replacement motherboard, which is actually a really easy job if you're handy

You can buy a replacement motherboard on Aliexpress Also last week, VitaShell 174 was released, which adds in the functionality for the NoNpDRM And so the new feature–you copy the games to exactly where they go, on either ux0 ur0 drive, and you just press triangle, "refresh live area", and then it will detect any games You don't even have to install the games anymore using packages or VPKs, you just place the games where they need to go, refresh our live area, and then anything that you've added will just show up and there will be a new bubble on your home screen

Another big release from last week was Arenaline 661-fix by TheFlow Adrenaline is the way that you play PSP games on a Vita, so basically it just launches into this custom firmware version of the PSP dashboard, and from there you're into a PSP So if you put your games where the games need to go– so ISOs are going to the pspemu/ISO/ folder and the games are going to the /pspemu/games/ folder You just copy them there– and if you have a modified PSP, you'll know exactly how old this all works If not, it might take a little reading-up on how the PSP works–the file system–to get this all set up

But the PSP, I thought was a fantastic handheld, and I would have rated it at the time as probably the greatest handheld Up there with the Sega Nomad and NEC Turbo Express The Vita is, to me, an upgraded PSP The PSP's d-pad is not as good, the buttons don't feel as good, the screen is nowhere near this quality–it's not as bright–and the screen on the Vita is a lot bigger too So essentially, the Vita is like just a Super-PSP Here's the new the Adrenaline 6

61-fix So, you've got your games on–oh yeah, I've got Categories Light on here to sort them–and so here's my list of games I think these are the /ISO/ shooters (and CSOs) You get this little heads-up display listing all your games I think I have a 114 on here Almost all of them are shoot 'em ups

Lots of old PS1 games, lots of the great PSP games You launch them up and it boots Right now it thinks it's a Playstation And you have some choices on the Adrenaline set-up The different filters that you want to use

During the day I'll use sharp bilinear, and the exact 2x mode for the PSP, and the original screen mode for PS1 At night I'll switch the graphics filter into the LCD3X, just because it's a really nice sharp image, but it's a bit dark for daytime playing even at full brightness Sharp bilinear looks really good too, so they're both just fantastic looking Another cool program that you can use in conjunction with the new Adrenaline and your PSP/PS1 games is the Adrenaline Bubbles Manager Essentially what the Bubbles Manager is is a front-end for Adrenaline that will create bubbles on your home screen, so you don't have to actually go into Adrenaline and launch the games

You can create icons on the main screen that will load up just as if they were a Vita game So you can see here–I'll get out of here For example, I've got a big set of my favorite PSP games and PS1 games right on my home screen that I can launch straight into Like here is the Castlevania Symphony of the Night Quality Hack that wasn't mentioned in last week's RetroRGB Weekly Roundup I applied the patch to the PS1 game, and then converted it into a PSP game using PSX2PSP– is the name of the converter–and you can add your own custom icon, and boot screen to it, and it just loads right in And this will save any settings that you have applied in Adrenaline – so all of your custom filters will be the same and all of the other miscellaneous settings

Just look at those nice scanlines It's almost like a dot matrix effect, especially if you use the LCD3X filter It's just everything you could want out of a nice handheld screen