The Life and Death of HBL

Recently we published an article about the Vita's HBL and its impending release, Well its out... and properly its been killed. Wanna know how this happened? Keep reading.

As I'm sure you all know we posted an article that gave away the name of the Title that would let you run the HBL on the Vita, Motorstorm Arctic Edge/Motorstorm Raging Ice. Since that article came out Sony took notice and removed the game from the PSN keeping just about everyone from running the HBL on there Vita... Kinda disappointing. However those of you who have the game can still take advantage of HBL as today Wololo released his Half Byte Exploit.  Below you will find the quote from the source.

Half-Byte Loader (HBL) is an open source Homebrew Loader for the Sony PSP and the PS Vita. It allows to play fan-made games on any PSP up to firmware 6.60, and on the Vita up to firmware 1.61. HBL allows to run emulators for the Game Boy, Nintendo 64, Sega Megadrive, NES, Super NES… and many other applications.

Disclaimer

• VHBL does not technically allow you to play any pirated PSP or Vita games.
• Although VHBL is free and open source, the current version relies on a vulnerability in a specific PSP game (Motorstorm Arctic Edge) that you need to buy from the PSN. VHBL comes with no guarantee, especially I cannot guarantee it will work on your Vita, so remember that you pay for a PSP game, and not for anything else. I do not do refunds for the money you gave to Sony
• It is super easy for Sony to patch the vulnerabilities used by this tool, given the amount of control they have on the PS Vita. VHBL runs fine on firmware 1.61, but for all I know it is possible for Sony to patch the games vulnerability without a firmware update. So, once again, before buying the game and downloading VHBL, you need to understand that you pay for the game, and VHBL is a bonus that might or might not work

VHBL is now available for download, for the people who are lucky to own an unpatched version of Motorstorm Arctic Edge on their vita. Download the version that matches your version of the game:

• EU Version
• JP Version
• KR Version (Seen at least on the HK store)
• US Version(not very useful)

How to Install and Run HBL

• It is *strongly* recommended that you turn of all wireless connections on your PS Vita, and that you use OpenCMA on your PC instead of the regular CMA. This is recommended because otherwise your console has a way to force you to upgrade the firmware even before you get a chance to use the exploit.
• Extract this HBL archive in your CMA PSP Savedata folder. It is a folder on your PC named PSSAVEDATA/[lots of random characters here]. If you dont know where it is, check your settings in CMA
• Connect your PS Vita to the PC through the CMA, it should give you the possibility to copy the savedata from your PC to the Vita. If not, you probably extracted it in the wrong folder. (Note: You will also want to install some homebrews with a similar technique, read the section below)
• To run HBL, start the Motorstorm game, select Load in the savegame menu, open the HBL savegame, then go to Wreckreation > Time Attack and select No. At this point, HBL should start. See the video below for details:

How to Install and Run Homebrews

Installing homebrews on the PSP was an easy task. On the Vita, until better solutions are provided, its quite a pain in the ass.
The CMA will only let you copy savedata, and will not recursively browse folders.

To address this, HBL comes with a tool that can extract archives with a specific structure.

Packaging the homebrew for installation on the Vita:
1) download PSP homebrews from your favorite website
2) extract the homebrew somewhere on your hard drive, and with your favorite utility, zip it again with the *store* setting (no compression), in a file that you will name install.zip
3) take any PSP savedata (but not the one used for HBL!), and add the install.zip to that folder, in your PC CMA folder. so your PSP Savedata will look something like this:
in folder PSSAVEDATA/1a2b3c4def5678/UCUS12345000/ (or something like this) you will have the following files:
- ICON0.png
- PIC1.png
- DATA.bin
- PARAMS.SFO
- install.zip

Here you can download an example of packaged homebrew: Doom

Installing:
1) run OpenCMA on your PC, and CMA on your Vita
2) copy the previously packaged SAVEDATA (see above) with your homebrew in install.zip on your Vita
3) run HBL (how to run HBL is explained in the previous section)
4) navigate with the HBL menu to the SAVEDATA folder, then go to the folder you just downloaded (in my example, UCUS12345000), and clikc cross or circle on it
5) At this point, the HBL menu should ask you if you want to install the homebrew. select yes, and wait until HBL is done extracting your homebrew
6) The homebrew is now installed, and you can run it by going to the GAME folder, if everything went well, a new subfolder with your homebrew has been created here, and you can run the homebrew

Source

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