Bumps in the road to VHBL

July 2nd, 2012, 13:53 Posted By: wraggster

Hey guys, just a quick update to my ongoing port to VHBL, with sadly, not-so-good news so far.as I posted a few days ago, I have access to a few interesting user mode exploits in PSP games, all of them candidates to a VHBL port. One of them is actually ready (the one I showcased in videos so far), but for various reasons it cannot be released.
I’ll stop with the secrets here, and give a few of the reasons:
First, it’s basically the only user mode exploit I have with a fully functional port of VHBL. I’d like to have at least a second one available, as a “backup”. Second, the owner(s) of this exploit are not really inclined to make it public for now. Third, the game is not available in the US store, and this would dramatically limit the amount of people interested in the exploit.
Now, what about the other exploits? I have been working on a promising one for the past 2 weeks, but sadly, it’s a tough nut to crack. I could get super simple homebrews to run, but not more complex ones such as (sigh) the VHBL menu. I am still not giving up on this particular exploit, but it is taking much more time than I initially imagined (I’ve already spent close to 30 hours working on that exploit alone). You can see a few details here.
Some other exploits just don’t have the necessary functions required for VHBL. In particular, many old games do not import the function sceUtilityLoadModule, which is today a central piece of VHBL. Thankfully, it is easy to detect these issues early in the development process, and discard the games.
Other exploits are just incomplete (I hate those) : basically, the author of the exploit sent me a lose proof of concept that only works in some very specific conditions (example: set your language to Spanish and run the exploit on a Tuesday night during a full moon, while singing some Justin Bieber song), without giving me any sort of indication. So, I basically have to figure out why the exploit works for them and not for me, then rewrite the exploit from scratch in a more portable way, which is taking lots of precious hours.
Finally, other exploits have “political” issues. Things such as “yeah, it’s a great exploit but XXX is using it as a way to access their kernel exploit and we’d prefer not to release it publicly”. In essence, the exploit I showcased in the recent VHBL videos is one of those. I don’t think it is actually being used by anybody, but it has some good potential and shouldn’t be used for VHBL if alternate solutions are available.

http://wololo.net/2012/06/30/bumps-in-the-road-to-vhbl/

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