Comment by danhor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danhor | Hacker News Reader

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At least regarding the homebrew, I disagree completely. While it took a while for the vita to be thoroughly hacked, it has been thoroughly hacked. And the benefits are numerous: Using normal SD cards, expanding the the integrated psp hardware into a virtual psp, reformatting of the internal storage, extending it by replacing the 3G modem.

Meanwhile the switch had the big bootrom usb stack exploit, but everything apart from the original SoC doesn't have a publicly known easy exploit (there are mod chips, but nothing like the 3DS/PS3/Wii U/Vita/PSP/...). There also wasn't that as much "cool" stuff to do as on older consoles with homebrew due to the hardware simply being an android tablet with controllers (which doesn't make a difference as a console, but makes it more boring homebrew wise). So there is the usual stuff (savegames, different controllers, piracy, themes, overclocking), but nothing unique to the switch.

By the time it was thoroughly hacked, it was too late. Much better hardware was around. People could do most of what the vita was eventually able to do with a phone.

Besides piracy what do you expect from the switch? The PSP had an ebook reader, movie player and could play mp3s as well as other cool old games very early in it's release. It could play media and play games up to the ps1. Modding a PSP vita today is like maxing out a citron 2cv instead of buying an e scooter. When the PSP came out it was amazing. Now it's yesterday's news. I'm impressed by the hackers that did it but the vita just doesn't impress even with hombrew today for the capabilities.

The PSP had amazing battery life and felt like a better Gameboy advance at the time.

I wish the person I sold my fully-loaded 1/2 TB MicroSD Vita to a grand adventure with a pocketable gaming/homebrew/emulation/piracy machine. Nothing matches it in tis market given its capibilities. The Switch lite tried, but I ain't touching that crap without HDMI output and no mods available.

Yeah, hacking portable console was interesting and useful on PSP/DS era even for a script kiddy users, because there are not much affordable portable devices. Now we have a smartphone, so it's for who enjoy hacking and run emulator and/or pirated games.

What really killed the scene for video games was better devices. I got a PS4 that was hacked and there's not much homebrew on it. I would update it to play online since I don't do cool stuff with it but I don't even play it enough to justify that. Now you can get a cheaper better htpc and use that instead of something like xbmc on Xbox.

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