One DashHacker's Opinion: Vita Is Screwed, GameSonic May Be A Fake, PS4 May Never Play Videos Happy Monday ladies and gents! Welcome back to another One DashHacker's Opinion! In this weekly editorial column, I give you my opinion on some of the hottest news leads that DashHacks has to offer. What's on the agenda for today? Vita's troubling hack situation, the latest PS3 scene drama, and PS4's future. Check out all the details right here! Does Vita Need A Bounty Hunter? Resident Vita tinkerer yifanlu posted a rather interesting thought on the Wololo forums last week. What started out as a joke, actually turned into a heated discussion about the best way to allow the Vita scene to progress. To him, it wouldn't be the worst idea if sites like Wololo took optional donations from users, and amassed them to create a small bounty as incentive for finding landmark hacks. Money talks, and coders might be more inclined to consider starting a new project if the pay is high enough. Would this really be a good idea though? I'm not so sure. I think there's a decent chance that more folks might get involved, but a pretty large purse would have to be raised to make that dream a reality; and this is coming from a scene that sometimes complains about putting up $5 for an exploit game. Plus, when money is involved, there are always scam artists looking to take advantage of the opportunity. It would be a huge scandal for small blogs like Wololo if someone stole their earnings without providing a functional hack. Obviously a series of trusted judges would have to make sure this didn't happen, but with so many methods to fake stuff these days, I'm not sure how easy it would be to truly trust anyone. Like yifanlu I wish more folks would be invested in Vita, but money alone may not be the answer. What Role Will Virtual Reality Play In This Generation? During GDC this week, Sony unveiled its long rumored Project Morpheus VR headset. Not much is known about the peripheral for now, other than that it's very similar to Oculus Rift, and requires several Sony accessories like the PS4 camera, PlayStation Move, and DualShock 4, to function properly. Most of mainstream gaming media has already gone hands on with the device, but little old DashHacks couldn't be so lucky. From what I've read, Morpheus is just slightly under par from what Oculus offers in terms of performance, but outpaces it in comfort level. Is this clunky headgear really the game changer that everyone thinks it is? Yes, but not right now. I think the biggest obstacle standing in the way of Morpheus and Oculus becoming popular is their likely high price. Similar head-mounted displays from Sony cost $999, and Oculus has sometimes been projected to be equally as expensive. Are average consumers that have already spent more than enough money on hardware and software really going to invest that much in an unproven peripheral like this? Almost assuredly not. In the case of Morpheus, my guess is that only the truly dedicated few will be willing to buy it; which makes for a pretty solid beta test on PS4. By the time PS5 is here, prices will have come down and the user experience will have improved enough that maybe you can bundle one in with the system itself. I really hope initial slow sales don't force developers to abandon VR, because it looks great. It's just too costly for most people right now. Is GameSonic Lying To Their Users? We've covered the GameSonic Manager project since its inception, but its developers have been put under quite heavy fire over the last couple days. The reliable scene figurehead known as Aldo Vargas has made a sweeping claim that most of the homebrew that GameSonic offers doesn't actually include the changes that their logs advertise. To him, the constant revisions and updates are just a method of bringing traffic (and ad revenue) to the source site itself. Mods at GS deny these allegations of course. So are they true, or is Also just blowing smoke? Honestly I'm not too sure; but I would probably be more inclined to agree with mister Vargas' side of the argument. He has had a longer pedigree of success within our community, and has dissected several source codes to prove that many of them are almost entirely blank. The other thing, is that users beyond Aldo have also stepped up to point out the sparse longs too. I wish I knew more about development so that I could come to a firmer conclusion of my own, but things don't look super legitimate for the work of Orion. I truly wonder what will happen with GameSonic homebrew from here on out. If we never see another update, I guess the answer will have presented itself. On the other hand, how could GameSonic get so many downloads here and elsewhere, and yet no users have complained of missing features? It doesn't make sense; so we'll just have to wait and see! An Old SDK Returns: Just As Useless Back in 2012, a Vita SDK numbered at version 0.945 found its way onto the web. For one reason or another, those exact same files happened to be revived on several scene sites over the past few days. Many folks treated this like a brand new discovery, but the bad news is, it was more of a reupload than anything else. Prominent coders have had the chance to look over these files for about two years now, and unfortunately they're basically useless at the moment. One of the reasons I say that is because the base digits are so freaking old. Considering that zero in the front, it means the kit in question was supposedly standard before the Vita had even arrived on store shelves. My bet is that the code has changed about a million times since then, and any holes that this small development package offered have probably been long patched up. Yifanlu also went on record to say that a lot of the scripts are broken as well, so it would take heavy development and reconstruction to make any of this worthwhile. What I'm saying is, those hoping for Vita homebrew won't find it here. The wait for a proper hack still rages on, and at this point it may never end. PS4 Firmware Overhaul Coming Soon: Can It Deliver? A PS4 firmware update presumably numbered at 1.70 is primed and ready to add a few hotly requested features to the system. HDCP can finally be disabled, which means external capture kits can be used to record video from the console. You'll also be able to edit streams captured with the Share button, then transfer them to a USB stick for uploading to your favorite video service. Twitch streams can be archived, and displayed at 720p as well. If that's not enough, dimming the DualShock 4's light bar will be possible too. Is Sony right when they suggest that this update has "something for everyone?" It's a nice little update, but I wouldn't say everyone will make use of these features. I think what "everybody" wants more than anything else is the ability to play media files on their next-gen consoles. Clearly both Sony and Microsoft are ignoring the massive fan outcry for it right now, and they may continue to do so with hope that consumers just forget about it and move on. Opening your hardware to support external media mostly invites pirates to play their downloaded wares, and neither console maker wants their product to be associated with that. I still have some hope that media features may arrive in 2.0, but if not by then, you might as well say never. I went off topic a bit, but firmware 1.70 sounds good, yet could be better. Source: DashHacks
