EXCLUSIVE: 20 Questions With Wololo

First of all I would like to thank wololo for his time he has spent producing homebrew over the years and for answering our "20 Questions". I'm hoping this will give everyone a better understanding and some insight in to who wololo is and what he's about. This marks the First installment of "20 Questions with a Dev" and today we where lucky enough to have gone 20 questions with wololo!!  Here is what he had to say.

1. How long have you been developing your own software?

I started coding in Basic when I was 14, that's 16 years ago.
I really started doing "serious" programming when I was roughly 18 though

2. Are there any suggestions you would give to people who are just starting to write code?

Go to school, get books... anybody can write code, it's not magic, but writing good code requires to learn good practice

3. What video game system do you love most of all?

The PC.
If it has to be a console, the Atari 2600 gave me lots of childhood memories. I also love the PSP for its homebrews

4. Whats your favorite video game?

Ugh, tough question
I loved Monkey Island and all Lucasart point and click adventure games when I was a kid. Alone in the Dark, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Half Life, Jedi Knight and Diablo are other games I really loved. More recently, I really loved Uncharted 2

5. What's your favorite development language and why?

I love C++ for its power when I work on the PSP, but when I write scripts I tend to prefer Ruby which is much more easy to use.

6. So you've been hard at work with HBL, what do you want to see most come out of it in the future?

Honestly I'm not sure how much future there is for HBL. I expect Sony to patch lots of things that made HBL possible on the Vita in the first place... Then again, I was saying the same about HBL back in 2010, so who knows... What I'd like to see now is more and more people getting access to it, which is what we are trying to achieve by porting VHBL to more games, with the help of many devs.

7. Some people say your a pioneer of homebrew on the Vita, what do you think of that?

I wouldn't say that. For now I'm just reusing old recipes on the PSP emulator, the Vita itself has yet to be open.

8. You've mentioned a lot of other Devs on your your site.  Who do you think is someone to watch?

Yfan Lu/Dridri's upcoming OI CMA is something I'm really looking forward to. There are also lots of people looking closely at the Vita, who could come up with interesting thing in the future. SKFU of course, but other people that I probably don't know about yet.

9. When the Vita is eventually hacked wide open and games start being pirated do you think the vita will survive?

I don't like pirates, but my opinion on the subject of piracy is that piracy doesn't kill a device. Bad marketing, lack of games, high prices is what kills a device. Nevertheless, I'm sure as soon as the Vita gets pirated, people will use this as a justification for the (potential) poor sales of the device, or the (potential) bad quality of the games. I've even seen people saying "don't pirate the vita, it's not doing so great already". These people already have in mind that piracy will eventually kill the vita, while they are already seeing it's not doing so well in terms of sales. Such a hypocrisy makes me laugh.
As far as the vita surviving, I'm pretty sure it's doomed already with the quality of smartphones. The Vita targets an audience of 15-20 year old people, who would rather get an iphone and a xbox than a vita and a ps3. The Vita is following the same scheme as the PSP in 2005: great for gaming, sucks at everything else.

10. What do you think the future of Vita mods are?

Honestly no clue, but I'm sure lots of people will try to get android to run on it, and probably a few cool emulators that couldn't run smoothly on the PSP. That's for software mods, of course.

11. Do you have any plans to work on any other consoles?

Sadly, no. At some point I was very interested in the PS3, but I lack the necessary free time.

12. Do you think its time to walk away from the PSP and move on?

Absolutely not. The PSP, as of now, is the best portable device for emulation and homebrews. People like Coldbird are also actively working at making the device even more attractive with community driven networks. In a few months we should be able to play online on many psp games without connecting to the PSN.

13. What do you love / hate about the current state of the Mod community as a whole?

I love the 5% who have a true interest in homebrew and the technical exploits behind hacking, I hate the 95% who are here to simply pirate. I don't mind pirates, but I really hate the people who have a hacked psp only to pirate games and never gave a single try at one of the dozens of great quality homebrews around there. These guys are the ones who are making us look bad.

14. Is there anything you would like to undo in the mod community?

The TrueBlue dongle

15. What is your proudest moment?

The Patapon exploit closely followed by HBL in 2009. We proved that user mode exploits were still useful for homebrew, and that was the beginning of homebrews on the psp go.

16. Whats the scariest thing that ever happened to you?

Related to my work on the PSP, I'd say the legal threats I received from Wizards of the Coast in 2009 (for my game Wagic). Non psp related, every time my kid eats something he's not supposed to.

17. Xbox360 or PS3 what do you prefer?

I never owned an Xbox360, but I really hate my PS3 now, so not sure...

18. whats your favorite TV show?

Extras, by Ricky Gervais

19. What kind of music do you like to listen to, and whats your favorite band?

I'm a huge fan of Electronic Music. I loved Daft Punk, and more recently I've been listening to Madeon's "Icarus" in an infinite loop

20. As you can tell I'm starting to struggle with ideas for things to ask you, so whats your favorite color?

red... no, blue! Aaaaaaaaah....

 

For more on what wololo and what the guys on his site are up to, check out Wololo.net/wagic and as always stay tuned to DashHacks.com.  Once again we want to give a big shout out and thank you to wololo for taking the time to give us some insights into his work.  We couldn't have asked for a better first installment of the "20 Questions with a Dev" series.  Keep up the great work wololo and we are certainly looking for more great things from you and the rest of the talented devs that keep the scene moving forward.

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