So emulators aren't piracy? Since when?... I'm so sick of "homebrew coders" excuse as you put it. I don't know a single person, not one that has ever hacked or jail broken a device and not put some software on it that they did not pay for. The main thing homebrew offers is piracy plain and simple... Unless your talking about a TI calculator emulator you are talking piracy so please don't try and say homebrew and piracy aren't in the same category when you just said you can't wait to get some emulators... Emulators = piracy
I never said anything about the PSP's software lineup (which I personally think is fine); I only mentioned software sales. Without sales, why would devs want to support a system in the first place? Also, I'm not sure if I understand the relevance of your second point.
YES Mortal Kombat's release got bumped up to April 19th!! Also anyone in Australia you'll have to import the game because it's banned in your country http://www.gamespot.com/news/mortal-kombat-vita-banned-in-australia-6365200
That would be a false assumption/excuse by people who pirate. From wiki: "However, in the U.S. it has been illegal since 1983 for a user to create their own backups of video game ROMs onto other cartridges. This was decided in the court case of Atari v. JS&A. JS&A manufactured a "game backup" device that allowed users to dump their Atari ROMs onto a blank cartridge. JS&A argued that the archival rule allowed for this. The court disagreed, noting that ROM media was not subject to the same volatility as magnetic media (for which the law was created). Thus, not being so relatively vulnerable, ROMs were not applicable under section 17 USC 117(a)(2).[5] Chuck Cochems has put forth the argument that copying a legitimate item of software specifically for personal use with an emulator is legally justifiable under principles established by the Sony v. Universal ruling, particularly with regard to personal use being favorable towards justification under the fair use doctrine.[6] Some games companies, such as Nintendo, print warnings inside their game manuals that they do not allow users to make backup or archival copies. Whether or not these warnings in this specific form can be considered valid contracts is legally questionable. For an overview of relevant issues, see user agreement (EULA), shrink wrap contract, clickwrap, Fair Use, Fair Dealing and DMCA. ROM images may be directly licensed by the rights holder. For example, Atari once made a number of their original arcade games available in ROM format which is compatible with the MAME emulator through the online ROM retailer Star ROMs. Nintendo provides a service on their 7th generation console, the Wii, that allows players to purchase old games from various systems, such as the NES, which will download a ROM image and emulator upon purchase (see Virtual Console). This is similar to the PlayStation Store re-releases of games for the original PlayStation for the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable, and the Xbox Live Arcade's re-release of many old video games such as the original Sonic the Hedgehog for the Xbox 360. The vast majority of computer and video games from the history of such games are no longer manufactured. As such, the copyright holders of some games have offered free licenses to those games, often on the condition that they be used for non-commercial purposes only. For example, fourteen of the games emulated in MAME, including Gridlee and Robby Roto, have been made available under such licenses and are distributed by the MAME project.[7]" I don't believe anyone only downloads games they already own anyways, it's just another lame excuse to justify stealing. I'm not saying I haven't done it, I have a MAME arcade machine with litterally thousands of games. But to try and say homebrew has nothing to do with piracy is wrong. Sorry but I don't know anyone that would have gone to the trouble of hacking the psp solely for wallpaper changers and calculators, come on now! In other words I don't want the vita hacked, because I can guarantee the minute it is ROM piracy will be available the same day...
Regardless, emulators themselves aren't illegal, just the roms. Not that it's any good to have an emulator with no games.
I don't buy this talk of PSP-failed-due-to-piracy, it's a lame excuse and can be used to annoy legit consumers with crap such as this one-PSN-account-locked thing for Vita. The X360 and the Wii are heavily pirated. As was the DS. As are the iPhone/iPad. As the 3DS will be soon, probably. All of them huge sucesses. Most important was Sony abandoning the PSP so that the PS3 could catch up with the X360. It was lack of really good games the main reason, not piracy. Even years ago it sometimes took months for a really interesting game to be released.
It's widely accepted the reason dreamcast failed was because of piracy. Why couldn't the same be said for PSP? It all depends on how quickly a company can change software/hardware production methods to stop hacks, something dreamcast and PSP had a hard time doing from the get go... Microsoft changed DVD drives within months of the first hacks and also had an online service which could be jeopardized for hacking which easily contained the amount of people willing to risk getting banned. Also have you ever tried hacking a gen 1 Xbox 360??? I don't know how hard/easy it is these days but man you have to solder your disc drive... How many people are going to take that risk on their brand new $300 console? Nintendo got major laws passed in multiple countries to try and get the flashcarts banned. This tactic worked out in some places but not many.. Once again though because of their vigilant effort in the courts and online to block their titles being uploaded and banning flashcarts this also had some impact on the amount of pirates. Not to mention Nintendo is normally aimed at younger gamers who's parents most likely buys their games anyways. The issue with the dreamcast and PSP is their security holes were too wide and too easy to crack, every patch on the PsP had a crack within a week of any new games requiring a firmware update. Dreamcast was just plain screwed, by the time they started manufacturing new systems with new drives to prevent the boot discs it was already too late as most, if not all publishers had already abandoned ship by that point. So while I can't say without a doubt that piracy was the reason PSP or dreamcast failed I can say it's 100% plausible that it was the major contributing factor.
Emulators are already working on it, but only through an emulator . The Vita itself has yet to be hacked, but the PSP emulator has a lot of similar exploits to the PSP, which led to the half-byte loader to be Vita compatible (the half-byte loader does NOT allow for piracy). I haven't tried it, but keep in mind that Sony supposedly monitors what you put on your Vita (if you don't have an Internet connection, you will be unable to transfer anything to or from your Vita). The game you have to buy for it to work is Motorstorm Arctic Edge, though the American version will not work due to incompatibility with the Vita. Only the JP, EU, and KR versions work. Vita Half-byte loader: http://wololo.net/wagic/vhbl/ A decent Vita site is: http://www.sonypsvitablog.com/ Siliconera is fairly good too. A homebrew site: http://psvita.dashhacks.com/ They are actually 3 different things which are all connected. Homebrew is just custom software/games developed by people for various reasons: they may not want to pay the fees required to release a game for a platform, they may do it as a hobby/for fun, or some other reason. Homebrew games are really similar to the types of games you can play free online (flash games) and freeware (i.e. Cave Story). It's basically an indie gaming scene. Hombrewers are also normally the people that hack the systems (and the only reason they really have to hack them is the fact that they only run certified games- you can't make your own games that work unless you jump through a lot of hoops), and other people come along and exploit those hacks for illegal purposes. If console makers allowed custom programs/games to be made and played on their systems, there wouldn't be as many people trying to hack them, and there'd be a smaller chance of rampant piracy breaking out (though piracy will never be stopped; it's continued for thousands of years throughout human history, and yet, it has failed to cause the end of society). Emulators are applications used to play old games for old systems that are often hard to find or unobtainable. They are often made by hombrewers, and can be considered hombrew applications, but are often considered to be in a different sect/scene. They are not illegal at all, though obtaining games to use with them can be. It depends on the format of the game, patents and copyrights, licenses etc. It should be noted that media based emulators are completely legal (provided you didn't steal the game cart/disc from a store)- there are actually emulators that allow you to run the games off of their original discs. The only way for the emulator itself to be illegal is for it to include the systems BIOS within it's code or as part of the download (it is illegal to download any system's BIOS). It's pretty obvious what piracy is. It's the illegal copying/downloading of content you did not pay for which can only be obtained through a form of payment (so if a musician releases a free album and you torrent it, that isn't piracy). Some people in the hombrew scene are associated with piracy, as some of them make applications that blatantly allow it, but the majority of pirates are people that take advantage of the hombrew communities work. All three are commonly mixed together, but they are all different things.
Yeah, popularity of a platform has been correlated with piracy. The more popular a platform is, the more likely it is that there will be piracy. Piracy can have a lot of negative effects on the life of consoles and the games released. The PSP was far from a failure- it did the best out of any of Nintendo's competitors in the handheld market- it just didn't "beat" Nintendo. The PSP had/has a much larger hombrew scene than the DS, and the DS had/has a much larger piracy scene than the PSP. Some of it has to do with what the systems were capable of- the PSP was a lot more capable which led to it becoming a favorite among hombrewers, whereas the DS was a lot more popular and had a crapload of games released for it.
Not sure if it's a good place for hacking homebrew news, but I like this forum for general Vita discussion:http://psvitaforum.com/ For hacking news:http://pspslimhacks.com/
PSP is still the best selling console in Japan ironicly so I fail to see how anyone could call it a failure. There is also no reason for Homebrewers to hack the Vita everyone can develop for it using PS suite.
Best selling how? The DS sold more than it and it's not currently outselling the 3DS(in Japan). Not that I consider it a failure anyways...
Seems I'm a little out of date it was the best selling in 2010 although I could swear I read a more recent article somewhere stating it was still, but yeah it's definitely no failure it is easily my favourite portable console (barring my new Vita of course).
Yeah, I don't consider it a failure either...I think the PSP might have outsold the DS for one year or so, but the DS still stomped it in Japan since launch. The DS got an early lead and while the PSP started doing better in it's later years(in Japan), it won't ever catch up to the DS in Japan or anywhere else.
Spent most of the day playing Fifa in career mode, one thing is bugging at me though when I played on the PSP it didn't take me very long at all to get international callups for my virtual pro. So far on Vita I haven't even seen a sign of international matches being played. I'm hoping it just takes longer but if they have left that out it's a really big strike against it in my book. I'm maybe being a paranoid because I haven't finished a complete season as yet. edit: Nightmare I just read they aren't in the PS3 version either that's really disappointing that was the most fun thing about the be a pro mode in my opinion. Seems EA actually took them out in Fifa 11 and never put them back which is crazy.
The PSP failed because 3rd party developers abandoned the system. 3rd party developers abandoned the system because of their perception that the PSP was no longer reliable and that they were losing too many sales to rampant soft-mod piracy. They lost confidence in the viability of the system and cut off their support. The truth is that pirates pirate stuff, not because they want the stuff they pirate, but simply because they can pirate it. A pirate would not buy a game if they could not pirate said game. They would simply pirate something else instead. PC games lives on because PC devs understand that they aren't losing sales, despite the piracy, but PSP developers could not wrap their heads around this notion. Piracy didn't really hurt PSP sales. Those people pirating PSP games would have never actually bought those games anyway. It's a complete misconception that developers had. But, in this case, false perception became reality and piracy, in a roundabout way, did, in fact, kill the PSP.
