Blast Processing on a new PlayStation Vita? It’s true! So come on in, and find out how such smart hackery is possible.
After the online debacle that was last summer’s PlayStation Network outage, which subsequently brought down the console’s digital ecosystem for an entire month, and the plague of gaming piracy that added to the PlayStation Portable’s too-soon demise, Sony has been quite vigilant in trying to outwit savvy Internet ne’er-do-wells everywhere.
Well, now this might not be an actual swing and a miss for Sony’s hungry-for-blood watchdogs, but it appears a group of modders have so far bested their efforts and have managed to get a Sega Genesis emulator, cutely called the Picodrive, to work on the recently released, PlayStation Vita. To the video evidence! Graciously posted on YouTube by hacker alias Wololo.
So exactly what kind of voodoo is behind this hack? Brilliantly the setup involves running the Picodrive though a PlayStation Portable mod tool — the Half Byte Loader — which in turn is emulated through the Vita’s own PSP emulation software (I swear there’s a “Xzibit meme” joke in that paragraph somewhere…)
A few sound stutters every so often not counting, the emulation is amazingly smooth for something that sounds awfully complex to configure out. Plus it really shows just off how powerful the engine underneath the Vita’s hood is; being able to simultaneously run two emulation programs at once is no easy task.
Now, I did say that this wasn’t “an actual swing and a miss for Sony’s watchdogs”, and that’s because with the way this hack-job is done, mainly using Vita PSP emulation to do it’s business, it would only be beneficial for things on the PSP side, nothing more. So for now, all worries (or hopes) of a piracy-laden future for the Vita is out of the scope of possibility, for now.
For me, I’m simply amazed at the skill it took to achieve getting this to work with a portable that’s only been out on the streets of Japan since last month. Wowzers. Oh and it seems this group of hackers aren’t the only ones in the headlines — another set of modders have managed to find a way for Apple TV to run iOS apps. Oooo, I got to see what’s that all about!
