A quick report: I’m making some progress on porting HBL to the Vita. Although I’m sad to say that I can’t get syscall estimation to work, I got some major homebrews such as Doom to run already, so overall I think it’s in an acceptable shape. Because it is roughly stable now, today I focused on porting HBL to the EU version of the exploited game (I was working – obviously – on the Japanese version of the game so far). This went smoothly and I can confirm HBL runs fine on the EU version of the game, although of course I could only test on a PSP, not on a Vita.
I used the opportunity to refresh my two guides, how to write a binary loader and how to port HBL. The guides are now simplified, and the binary loader tutorial now has download links to the tools used in the examples.
Writing the first “usable” version of HBL for the patapon exploit took several developers and about 4 months. Thanks to the portability of HBL, bringing it to Teck4′s exploit took me only a few days. Adapting that to the EU version took a couple hours (including porting the exploit itself), so I am confident for the US version.