Questions Regarding A Few Things

[Vita Queen]

Hello everyone,

This is my first post and I'm glad to be here with you all. I've been eyeballing the PS Vita homebrew/general hacking scene for quite some time now. I do have some questions for you all that I hope can be answered and maybe even provide an interesting discussing, too. Without further ado, let's get on with the questions:

1.) What is the point of Vitamin? As we all know, Vitamin has been discontinued by the developer since MaiDumpTool has surpassed it. Vitamin 2.0 was the last release and arguably the most used tool when it comes to dumping games hence the ridiculous amounts of games you can find "out there". This may sound strange but due to the recent activities of a few people who're trying to brick our consoles via fake game dumps and MDT still being updated, why are Vitamin dumps being circulated around? MDT offers superior security, better (and more) features, and numerous other advantages over Vitamin, so it would only come as a security risk to still be dumping games via Vitamin.

Granted, I know not everyone knows MDT exists and does what Vitamin does and more. I'm also aware that not everyone knows that there are English releases of the software, which will enable everyone to start dumping games with relative ease. These two factors explain the low amount of MDT dumps compared to Vitamin dumps. However, now that MDT is the VHS to Vitamin's BetaMax, should we (the community) discourage Vitamin uploads? In my eyes it only serves to be a security risk and creating headaches due to the softwares being unable to install the dumps of the other.

2.) When it comes to the homebrew side of the Vita software, there's a lot to absorb. With the recent fake dumps that are permanently bricking systems, we're seeing a lot of software being made to detect maliciously made dumps. I know MDT checks for malicious content on its own but is there a general consensus regarding what the best software is when checking game dumps?

3.) What is your favorite PS Vita game? I had just got my only recently and I'm in absolute love with Disgaea 4. I also love Duke Nukem 3D: Megaton Edition, which is probably the best first-person shooter I've ever played.

4.) This one is out of the blue but the thing that discouraged me from getting a PS Vita all this time was the ridiculous prices of the proprietary memory cards. Am I the only one that was hesitant because of this?

Edit: I don't claim to be an expert about anything written in this post and it wouldn't surprise me if I'm wrong about something.

[ExByte]

Hello Vita Queen, glad to have you here. Now let's start answering your questions.

1) While Vitamin may have been discontinued I guess that it has grown on people over time since it was the first dumping tool publicly released for the vita, I was one of those people. Now however I do use MaiDumpTool as it is indeed superior to Vitamin in every way, but I still think that Vitamin dumps shouldn't be discouraged. My reason for this is that a lot of Vitamin backups work properly and though it may be true that people could plant viruses in them, the job for detecting such malicious code goes to the installers such as VitaShell and MaiDumpTool. I know that this is a very weak claim, but even though I don't use Vitamin anymore it still seems that I'm very biased in wanting to keep it alive. (Again, your statement is much more reasonable but I'm one of those idiots who can't move on that easily.)

2) I'm not too sure on whether there is a "best known" software to check game dumps, but one of them that I know of is called

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. This program checks various files of the vpk and determines if there are any irregularities within them, note that this is to be used on games since using this program on things like MaiDumpTool vpk will get you a false positive. There is another tool called

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. This tool is used for turning your vpks or MaiDumps into safe varients of themselves. This basically stops the game from running any code that could interfere with the vita's shell, for example os0 and vs0. Whichever one you want to use is up to you, I personally have both of them just in case.

3) My favorite ps vita game is the BlazBlue series, meaning both Continuum Shift and Chrono Phantasma. I absolutely love the story line and it's a fun game to play with friends, pvp. I've also played Disgaea 4 and it appealed to me very much since I love rpgs. I'm planning on buying Disgaea 5 for the ps4 as well.

4) The memory cards are in fact overpriced, $ony didn't hold back when thinking about it. I'm sure that it discouraged many people, but since I got the borderlands bundle I was happy with an 8 gb memory card. There is also no way that I'm buying anything higher than that until they lower their prices to normal rates.

I hope that I was able to answer your questions thoroughly, if you have anything else concerning the ps vita just post it and I'll try answering to the best of my abilities. Welcome to this community btw, hope you find it to be a nice place.

[Vita Queen]

Hello Vita Queen, glad to have you here. Now let's start answering your questions.

1) While Vitamin may have been discontinued I guess that it has grown on people over time since it was the first dumping tool publicly released for the vita, I was one of those people. Now however I do use MaiDumpTool as it is indeed superior to Vitamin in every way, but I still think that Vitamin dumps shouldn't be discouraged. My reason for this is that a lot of Vitamin backups work properly and though it may be true that people could plant viruses in them, the job for detecting such malicious code goes to the installers such as VitaShell and MaiDumpTool. I know that this is a very weak claim, but even though I don't use Vitamin anymore it still seems that I'm very biased in wanting to keep it alive. (Again, your statement is much more reasonable but I'm one of those idiots who can't move on that easily.)

2) I'm not too sure on whether there is a "best known" software to check game dumps, but one of them that I know of is called

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

. This program checks various files of the vpk and determines if there are any irregularities within them, note that this is to be used on games since using this program on things like MaiDumpTool vpk will get you a false positive. There is another tool called

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

. This tool is used for turning your vpks or MaiDumps into safe varients of themselves. This basically stops the game from running any code that could interfere with the vita's shell, for example os0 and vs0. Whichever one you want to use is up to you, I personally have both of them just in case.

3) My favorite ps vita game is the BlazBlue series, meaning both Continuum Shift and Chrono Phantasma. I absolutely love the story line and it's a fun game to play with friends, pvp. I've also played Disgaea 4 and it appealed to me very much since I love rpgs. I'm planning on buying Disgaea 5 for the ps4 as well.

4) The memory cards are in fact overpriced, $ony didn't hold back when thinking about it. I'm sure that it discouraged many people, but since I got the borderlands bundle I was happy with an 8 gb memory card. There is also no way that I'm buying anything higher than that until they lower their prices to normal rates.

I hope that I was able to answer your questions thoroughly, if you have anything else concerning the ps vita just post it and I'll try answering to the best of my abilities. Welcome to this community btw, hope you find it to be a nice place.

Thank you for the response, ExByte. I had no idea SafeDumps existed which means the main drawback of Vitamin in my eyes (i.e. the lack of security) is pretty much a moot point. Granted, the user is still having to do an extra step if they want to be secure but then again I suppose any responsible person would use SafeDumps with MaiDumpTool as an extra precautionary measure. I still think we (the community) should exclusively stick to MaiDumpTool for simplicity as having two that aren't even compatible with each other will be a minor annoyance.

BlazBlue is an interesting fighting game series and one that I wish more people would pay attention to. I don't think it's as good as the Guilty Gear series which it's very similar to for good reason but it's definitely worthy of being owned by any fighting game fan that isn't exclusively into Street Fighter. I've yet to play any Disgaea game past the PS Vita. Disgaea 3 was a bit of a letdown because the main character (Mao) had such an uninteresting personality and goal that it was hard not to skip his dialogue. Unfortunately, the supporting cast aside from Champloo were ripoffs of previous Disgaea series characters like Almaz being a poor clone of Adell.

From what I hear, Sony has been selling the Vita handheld at a loss and they tried to make up for it with their overpriced memory cards. In my eyes, I believe this was a mistake given the push for digital content that requires a memory card like Sly 2: Band of Thieves, and the fact that some games are just enormous in size. It was a poor decision on their part and it wouldn't surprise me if we weren't the only ones who felt hesitant to purchase a PS Vita due to the memory cards costing so much. That being said, hopefully my 8gb memory card will suffice until they drop in price, or else I'm going to have to do what I did with the Wii and refrigerator shuffle whenever I want to install a new game.

Thank you again for the response, ExByte. I will research SafeDump because it sounds like an interesting way to sidestep this whole bricking plague we may or may not be under attack by. It's only two games bricking consoles so far but we have no idea if there could be more or not, so it's best to play things safe.