The PSP homebrew scene has another reason to celebrate today as wololo, m0skit0, ab5000 and JJS releases revision 100 of their infamous Half Byte Loader project, the open source homebrew loader for PSP firmware 5.03 to 6.20 using the Patapon 2 demo exploit and now on firmware 6.30 and 6.31 thanks to the Minna no Golf Portable exploit.

Developer's note:

Less than 2 months after Firmware 6.31 was released by Sony, J416 released a port of our beloved HBL to a new game exploit in the Japanese game "Minna no Golf Portable". Today, less than two weeks after this release, we are releasing HBL for all known versions of the game (EU, US, JP), with also the hope that porting HBL to new game exploits will now be even easier.

There are still a few bumps on the road for people who plan to enjoy homebrews on OFW 6.30 and 6.31. Although HBL has made incredible progress in the past months, adapting it to new exploits and new firmwares still requires lots of testing. People who try HBL on the golf exploits will see that it is not as stable as on the patapon exploit. You might need to give it several tries before the menu accepts to show up, some emulators will not run at full speed, etc... but as I alreay said, compare this to the first HBL release for the patapon2 exploit, and be happy that you can run much more than simple text based homebrews.

There are a few other things with this release: it is not humanly possible for me to test all versions of HBL, first because I don't have all the games, second because I don't have all the firmwares (feel free to donate a psp on OFW 6.31, by the way). If I wanted to test only 5 homebrews for 5 minutes each on the 4 game exploits, on the 4 psp models and theA  10 firmwares compatible with HBL, it would take roughly 80 hours!

I tested HBL R100 on a PSP Go 6.20 for the patapon2 exploit, on a PSP Go 6.20 for the Hot shots golf exploit, and on a psp Phat 5.50 for the everybody's golf exploit. This is much less testing than I would usually expect. In particular, notice that I haven't tested this on a 6.30/6.31 PSP, and that I haven't tested the Japanese version at all. So keep this in mind when you run HBL on your PSP, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports here or on the advancedpsp forums.

Oh, also, this might be worth mentioning, this revision brings nothing new for the patapon exploit, so people who are on 6.20 or below don't really need to download it, except for the test of helping us to catch bugs that might have been introduced.


Update: It seems that for the EU version, some people are having troubles with HBL constantly returning to the XMB. A possible solution is to do the following:

1) rename the folder hbl/libs_6xx to hbl/libs
AND
2) rename the file hbl/config/imports.config_6xx into hbl/config/imports.config
AND
3) try again