Hacking VitaShell 0.4 (switch between apps without restarting Rejuvenate)

[sj33]

http://wololo.net/2016/01/14/vitashell-0-4-released/

This news is a little bit old but worth sharing here for people not aware. This is a significant release. Why? Because we can now exit out of homebrew applications and load another from memory card without having to reload Rejuvenate from your PC! Hold Start for a few seconds, it will exit back to the VitaShell menu allowing you to load a different app.

This means you can load Rejuvenate from your PC just the once, then keep it in sleep mode to avoid having to do it again. A bit like a teathered jailbreak. Great if you're out-and-about.

Still buggy with some apps, but seems to work fine with Retroarch.

UPDATED - 0.5 out now http://wololo.net/2016/02/02/vitashell-0-5-released-and-now-open-source/

 

[Deleted User]

Awesome news! One question though. Is this compatable with Rejuvenate for PSM Dev Unity? I haven't managed to get VitaShell 0.1 nor 0.2 working. :/

 

[sj33]

Yeah it is. I can only use Unity myself.

It's a bit buggy - it's thrown me out to the Vita menu a couple of times when trying to exit app. Still, it's good progress and helps us be less teathered to the PC. Has a built-in FTP client too, activated by pressing Select.

The Vita scene has been completely dead for a while now so it's good to see releases like this.

 

[zekepliskin]

The author has informed me the force quit option is a lot more stable in the newer builds, I'm guessing the next version will be released soon as a result.

 

[sj33]

That's excellent. It's not too bad even with 0.4, just occasionally getting thrown back to the Vita menu. It's great to see this improving because it looks like the Vita scene isn't going to see anything more than Rejuvenate anytime soon - the more user -friendly we can make Rejuvenate, the better!

Are there any other features that people would like? Just for the sake of conversation.

 

[zekepliskin]

That's excellent. It's not too bad even with 0.4, just occasionally getting thrown back to the Vita menu. It's great to see this improving because it looks like the Vita scene isn't going to see anything more than Rejuvenate anytime soon - the more user -friendly we can make Rejuvenate, the better!

Are there any other features that people would like? Just for the sake of conversation.

Yeah I put in a feature request for user customisable shortcuts on the context menu (pressing /\ ) so you can directly launch say five different homebrews from the bottom of the bar and name the shortcuts too. The developer is aware, if we're lucky we might see this in 0.6 or something :-)

 

[sj33]

Interesting tweet from TheFlow regarding 0.5. He seems to be browsing this PC's hard drive from his Vita! Remote loading over wifi maybe?

https://twitter.com/theflow0/status/692323880887779328

 

[Deleted User]

That looks cool! Although I don't see the point of it, since you can:

1) just use Windows Explorer to browse your PC files.

and 2) There's already an FTP function in place if you ever wanted to copy files.

 

[zekepliskin]

That looks cool! Although I don't see the point of it, since you can:

1) just use Windows Explorer to browse your PC files.

and 2) There's already an FTP function in place if you ever wanted to copy files.

I would say it's for development purposes, so you can compile an ELF and then transfer it straight from PC to Vita more quickly for testing purposes.

 

[Deleted User]

I would say it's for development purposes, so you can compile an ELF and then transfer it straight from PC to Vita more quickly for testing purposes.

Ah. That makes sense.

 

[zekepliskin]

Ah. That makes sense.

Yeah I think so, being able to transfer/launch as one simple step from the host PC is quicker than sending files by FTP all day long. :-)

 

[Deleted User]

What I find baffling about VitaShell is how they managed to call pop-up messages with the same pop-up message UI as the normal Vita apps.

 

[zekepliskin]

What I find baffling about VitaShell is how they managed to call pop-up messages with the same pop-up message UI as the normal Vita apps.

Yeah I find that pretty impressive too. I'm hoping TheFloW will implement a few of the feature requests I sent his way recently (shortcuts on the triangle context menu for 5 or so home-brew ELFs, adding memory card freespace/available RAM to the title bar) for VitaShell 0.6.

Technically he's told me all home-brew has access to the touchscreen and rear touchpad, as Vita games would, it's just that no one has bothered to make use of them yet!

 

[Deleted User]

Technically he's told me all home-brew has access to the touchscreen and rear touchpad, as Vita games would, it's just that no one has bothered to make use of them yet!

Actually, SMOKE released Vita Tester, which tests out the touch pad and rear touch pad.

 

[zekepliskin]

Actually, SMOKE released Vita Tester, which tests out the touch pad and rear touch pad.

Ah yeah I remember that. But no emulators or anything are using the touchpad or touchscreen in any meaningful way as an input option or what have you, there's no "VitaPaint" type app where you can do sketches with a stylus on the touchscreen ;-)

 

[Deleted User]

Ah yeah I remember that. But no emulators or anything are using the touchpad or touchscreen in any meaningful way as an input option or what have you, there's no "VitaPaint" type app where you can do sketches with a stylus on the touchscreen ;-)

It would be nice to have something like that! Something similar to Paint Park, but you can also use the rear touch pad too! Plus, maybe some extra features that the paint park team could've added in there! ;-)

 

[zekepliskin]

It would be nice to have something like that! Something similar to Paint Park, but you can also use the rear touch pad too! Plus, maybe some extra features that the paint park team could've added in there! ;-)

Agreed, the physical buttons of the Vita and rear touchpad would make it more fun for doing that sort of thing than it would on a smartphone, IMO.

 

[sj33]

Much of that comes down to the complete lack of activity in the native Vita scene at all, unfortunately. Are there even any Vita devs still active aside from TheFlow?

 

[Deleted User]

Much of that comes down to the complete lack of activity in the native Vita scene at all, unfortunately. Are there even any Vita devs still active aside from TheFlow?

I've only just started learning.

 

[zekepliskin]

Much of that comes down to the complete lack of activity in the native Vita scene at all, unfortunately. Are there even any Vita devs still active aside from TheFlow?

The thing is, some nice novelty apps aside I'd like to see a concerted effort/push for better emulators on the Vita. I respect that RetroArch are doing both stable and nightlies for it but there's no port of their GBA emulator and I feel from my extended testing that at this point nothing is particularly optimised to the hardware. Having said that 1.3.0 stable has great quality SNES emulation and the Genesis emulator, while still having speed and sound issues is a big improvement over the old August builds. It's just a case of "wait and see" I guess.

I think it comes back to how hard it is for the average user to get Rejuvenate running on it. I'm well accustomed to doing softmod/exploit stuff and this is easily the toughest one, I had to make six long attempts before I got it to work. I'm picking up another Phat Vita soon to try with newer firmware so I can get the full 444mhz speed and see if that helps because on 3.18 with Unity 1.05 the 333mhz processor cap is probably hamstringing things.