EXCLUSIVE: 20 Questions With Naehrwert

To continue our series "20 Questions With a Dev" we met up with naehrwert and asked him or 20 questions and this is what he had to say.

For those of you out there who don't know who naehrwert is lets go over his latest release and explain what he brings to the mod community. naehrwert's latest addition to the vast and growing set of tools for the PS3 is SCETools v0.2.7.  This brings the ability decrypt your SELF/ELF files and a few nice little add-ons.  You can find out all about that HERE. So over the course of 3 days I managed to sit down with naehrwert and ask him our 20 questions and this is how it went.

1. How long have you been developing your own software?
Since about 1999. I started with QBASIC and quickly moved to C as programming language.

2. What's your favorite development language and why?
I'm mostly using C/C++ nowadays because it's fast. Although I'm using python too for quick scripting jobs.

3. Are there any suggestions you would give to people who are just starting to write code?
Start with an easy language, like BASIC, there is a nice distribution called FreeBASIC out there. You won't learn a language from a hello-world example so you should try to understand the basic language structures and try to solve easy problems first and experiment on from that.

4. What's your Favorite video game system of all time?
It's mostly the SNES because of its games, like Chrono Trigger. But the PSP is nice too because of its emulation capabilities.

5. Whats your favorite video game?
Chrono Trigger of course ;) Oh and Cave Story!

6. What got you started on the scetools project in the beginning?
I started it because there was no working tool to create all types of SELF files that existed in public.

7. Youve been working on scetools for a while and adding to it steadily.  What else do you want to add to it in the future?
I really don't know, SELFs should be fully supported by now. But maybe I'll finish the handling of the other file types, like RVK/SPP/PKG, at some point.

8. Do you have any plans to work on another system like the Vita or Xbox?
I'm gonna buy a vita maybe, but I doubt it'll get ever opened up. I don't have any plans to work on xbox though.

9. Are there any other projects you're currently working on that you can tell us about?
I'm working on some (for now) private ps3 projects that may eventually be released to the public if the time is right.

10. Is there anyone youre a fan of in the mod/homebrew community?
All my friends from ps3dev.net and everyone that develops nice homebrews!

11. Developers have been banging their heads against the 3.55+ wall that has stopped people from playing new games on their 3.41-3.55 systems for some time now.  Do you see away around it coming in the near future?
The main problem at the moment is, that we can't get our hands on the new loaders, because they are encapsulated in lv0 now, for which we don't have the decryption keys. So our main goal at the moment is to get lv0ldr running and to dump it or at least get it to spit the lv0 metadata out to decrypt lv0 ourselves but I really don't know when we'll be able to achieve this task.

12. What Dev do you think is someone to watch in the future?
Definitely the developers from ps3dev.net, but everyone releasing nice homebrews/tools too.

13. What do you love / hate about the current state of the Mod community as a whole?
I love the work that is going on behind the scenes to add the missing code execution to KaKaRoTo's jb. I hate all the trolls and pirates screaming for ways to run pirated games and impertinent guys like TB reencrypting stolen binaries.

14. Is there anything you would like to undo in the Mod community?
I've never thought about this actually. Everything I'd undo would probably have happened at some point later anyways. So it's really nothing.

15. What do you think of True Blues announcement about their anti-clone technology being able to erase a HDD?
I say it's an idle threat. They probably panicked, because with announcements like this you really only drive more byers away.

16. Whats the funniest moment you can think of?
Tough question, probably the many bus rides with my friends home from school, but I don't know if the things that happened then were so funny for all of the people on the bus :D

17. Whats the scariest thing that ever happened to you?
Seems like nothing was scary enough that I could remember it right now, but probably one of the times I worked as a medic and something terrible had happened to the person we had to take to the hospital.

18. Xbox360 or PS3 what do you prefer?
That's easy, PS3 of course!

19. What kind of music do you like to listen to, and whats your favorite band?
Mostly indie bands and electronic music but bands like Pink Floyd too, which happen to be one of my favorite bands, along with Streetlight Manifesto.

20. Now Ill ask the obligatory stupid question to finish this off, whats your favorite number?
My favorite number starts with 0x2ED7CE8D.., no just kidding, it's 5.

For more on what naehrwert is up to check out his wordpress site or his Twitter and as always stay tuned to DashHacks.com.  Once again we want to give a big shout out and thank you to naehrwert for taking the time to give us some insights into his work.  Keep up the great work naehrwert and we are certainly looking for more great things from you and the rest of the talented devs that keep the scene moving forward.

Tweet