Dumping carts and that.

Doing a couple of related things today. Looking into dumping out Vita game cards that I own, and cannot find a good guide that will allow me to.

I have it all set up and what I can see from looking at Persona 4 The Golden is that it seems to be an exfat file system and with a few folders. A lot of files in MP4 format and a folder with the file system in it. Can remember there was a thread on RHDN ages ago about hacking the PS2 original, but as I cannot code at all. This is beyond me.

All I really want is a tool that will let me hook up the Vita and dump the contents of the card via USB so I can run it on from my SD2 Vita. (Incidentally will need to set this up as well.)

Also been looking into doing the full Monty and getting the PS3 hacked. Every guide I see for this is either super detailed or written by a chimp. A chimp who's English is remedial at best.

Its either a full range of caveats in a forum post or a few vague instructions of downloading this shady shit from Mega and adding it to a USB drive.

I'm guess I'm spoiled by how the PSP went down and how easy it is to do that. But I'm seriously thinking of looking at shitty video guides on youtube written by gobshites with terrible taste in music and heavily accented English low in the mix.

Oh and anime avatars, not that there's nowt wrong with that, mind. Its just shitty hip hop instrumentals and mumbling.

P5 Further Stuff.

So its been a few months since I last wrote about Persona 5. Back then I had a PS3 that was temperamental and a big CRT block to run it on, well that's sort of changed.  I now have a "new" TV one of the first Sony Bravia models that was a kerbside pick up.  It was being used as a monitor for a long defunct PC and touch wood works.  Resolution is slightly lower for PS3, I would say screen ratio wise its about the same but more crucially weighs a bit less.

The Old TV Via an equally old camera.

 
This is an update of sorts to my original post on Persona 5, I promise that I won't spoil stuff intentionally but game wise I'm up to the middle of September, and the phantom thieves (your gang of sorts) are now quite popular.  The woman interrogating you in the opening part is called Sae Niijima a detective and big sister to one of your team mates (also a social link).  I still haven't been to the Casino palace from the opening either so I guess I have that to come. 

Ryuji I am convinced is the Japanese equivalent of Beavis, though as a lightning user he doesn't have Beavis's pyromaniac tendencies.

Heh heh

Your Margaret / Elizabeth stand ins are Justine and Caroline and just like the previously mentioned duo their social link improves via fusion requests. I haven't gotten anyone to maximum yet but there are a few people that are close.  I still can't get used to them pronouncing Ann as Arne and it really grates on me, but I guess that's murica for you, Its supposed to rhyme with pan.

Also I kinda like Morgana as well, there is a stray near us that looks like him, have a short clip of him raiding the bins next door something the regular Morgana didn't do.

Further notes.

Still can't get the hang of baseball pitcher and always aim low.  Took me ages to get the hang of fishing in P4 too.

Oh they have a regular fishing as well you just have to read a magazine to unlock it.

Akihabara has capsule machines which seem to eat up most of my cash and the arcade there hosts this versions incarnation of the crane toy (and yes you can win a Jack Frost doll).

Despite the bar in Shinjuku being called Crossroads its clearly New Kama in Japanese. I'm guessing its a play on Newhalf / Okama both LGBT slang meaning trans or gay.  its owner Lala Escargot reminds me of old Drag queen Divine in a way, though its clientele doesn't seem to be from the LGBT community.  There are two old poofs down by the station who are quite fun and seem to have a massive hard on for Ryuji.

Finally I found a bug that on the day before your exams on 12/7/20xx (that's July) the game will hang if you do any social links or go to the gun shop in Shibuya. You can ignore this by going to bed instead, its what Morgana wants.

P5

There's a new Persona out now, for PS3 + 4. B So far I've played about 10 minutes of it as I currently have a backlog to get through which includes a few casual beat em ups but also has some full on RPG classics like Fallout 3 and Skyrim. 

Because of reasons and that my main test TV is some massive CRT block and our PS3 has a bit of a temperamental drive (although a darn sight better than the original which was borked) so its not the ideal conditions for testing.  It often needs a bit of Streetfighter or Marvel VS Capcom to soften it up before playing (same goes for fallout too).  What I can say in this is that there is some really tiny text in this as well as it not being really aligned well, possibly due to aspect ratio, however what I've played so far is quite good.

There is an opening on the main character being pursued through some sort of casino using the rooftops and shadows to evade guards before inevitably being caught and interrogated by some police types.  They're a far cry from Dojima san who I thought was firm but fair. you have a lawyer woman represent you and talks to you about how you found yourself in this world.  You get a few shots of Igor and Margaret! as well as a name input screen.  And if you want spoilers there is none, that's as far as I got.

So far its more action than Innocent Sin and both Persona 3 and 4 intro which took their time but gripped like a dog about an hour in.  Its not as bad as the original translation of Persona and there is no blackwashing of a main character here though there are gripes on the quality of translation on line with consensus being it being more of a stilted literal translation rather than what we should have these days.

Picross

I've been getting well into Picross recently.  You may know it under a load of different names but essentially it all boils down to using co ordinates to fill in a grid to make a picture. I'll explain how to do it below.

Pikachu I see you.

The numbers at the side state how many in a row or column there is to fill in so in a 10 by 10 grid if you see a 10 it means you can fill in the whole row. Numbers that are split (like 4 /5) have a space between them so you can fill in 4 spaces leave a space and fill in the rest.

Further rules come into play as if you have more than 6 spaces to fill in a row.  Instead of taking a guess on where they will be, count in the number you have from the edge and then put a cross at its furthest extent, do the same from the other side, finally fill the squares from the cross to the other cross including the squares with the crosses on.  If any of these are at an edge it will give you another chance to fill in some squares as it gives you a base to work from.  There are other better explanations for more advanced techniques out there but these are the basics and the built in tutorial is actually pretty good at explaining.

The downside of this apart from it being a freemium game and all that it entails, (limited energy for puzzling and move sets, pay for extra energy etc etc) is that what you are drawing isn't made clear, in fact I'll go as far as saying that unless you are a Pokemon and know intimately what it looks like from a blown up sprite, then you are going to be scratching your head quite a bit of the time.

It doesn't ruin it but then again it does make it bastard hard especially on the rare 20 by 15 grids.

In further news I've added a few PS3 games including Oblivion, Dark Souls 2 and the PS3 version of  Marvel V Capcom 3 which I played in HMV ages ago.  All that is moot though as I found out why its been chucked out, there are heatsink / GPU problems causing it to glitch like a bastard.  I'm of course going to get it fixed but if its not economical to do so then I won't bother.  Its the only reason why I didn't go all in last gen (that and always on internet connectivity), you can't rely on the hardware anymore.

Round up time.

After an unscheduled appearance yesterday telling you in plain English how to update your PS3's firmware for offline scum, here is a tedious round up of smaller stories.  Incidentally the first was supposed to be up last week.

Dragon's Heaven Neo Geo.

There's been quite a buzz about this early alpha fighting game.  Neo turfmasta managed  to buy some early sram dev karts on Yahoo! auctions.  Thanks to the battery still being viable in one of them he managed to extract most of what was there except for onscreen text, music and energy bars.  Those were held on the other two ram carts and as the battery died so did the data with it.   Further info surfaced (Japanese only) that it was being made by FACE and ex Techno's staff (as they had no real fighting game experience) based on the Gowcaizer engine.  As I've said before its  obviously an alpha, but the sprite work is actually quite good and there's an alignment mechanic going on reminiscent of D+D dependent on whether you are neutral, lawful and chaotic.  There's a bit more info here on the Neo Geo forums.

Romancing SaGa 2 getting an English release.

Its only for mobiles at the moment, but they are translating one of the last untranslated SaGa games into English. Japan gets a Vita port as well, but so far its only for Android and iPhone which is cool.  I really hope they do a good port of this I gave up on a free version of FF2 due to the crappy virtual pad they used and later Final Fantasy ports have been hamstrung with poor quality sprite work and rather substandard filtering added to that.  Gideon Zhi of AGTP has been working on the original Super Famicom game for a while now and reckons its an absolute bastard to work with.  So fingers crossed for a good port to phones.

Green screen PS3.

Half the problem with this I found out is using legacy bits and pieces, the TV I have is a large CRT which can support 60hz (America stuff works with it) and the SCART cable is from my old PS2 which  fits but is hardly ideal.  Remember running DVD's on PS2 where they would play in various shades of green, due to I guess, nonsense.  Will see if I have any other leads that will do it, can remember I think it came with component failing that I will have to get a flat screen and a run it through HDMI.

PS3 Official update guide.

Yeah so we managed to grab a PS3 from the bin.   The person said it didn't work and as there was a few of them that were less complete than this alongside a knacked Xbox 360, we took a punt on the off chance that we had a hard drive ( we did from a much more fucked PS3 80GB literally it was just a shell) and some leads from an old PS2.  Its got a nasty dose of the green screen, much more than the PS2 ever did and I'll need to look into ways of fixing that but it works for now, we're running a DVD I got from Hackney. 

It did give me a not compatible error and to be fair after some googling I managed to fix this. And here's how.  Note it implies that you are running this offline and grabbing all files from PC.

Step one

Grab your firmware from Sony.

Step two

While it downloads, stick a flashdrive in, it unpacks around 220MB so anything above 512MB is fine ; ).

It'll need to be formatted to FAT32 format (though most are already in this).

and your final task will be to create 2 folders, one called PS3 open this and create a folder in this called UPDATE.  Yeah they're in all caps.  It'll look like this PS3>UPDATE.

Step three.

Open the folder the update file and drag it across to the UPDATE folder.  Do NOT rename this and remove your flashdrive.  Stick it in your PS3 and press the PS button (or whatever its called on my one is called P3 but its the button between the start and select).  Follow the onscreen instructions and it'll reboot.  I reckon you could grab a SATA laptop HD and grade up like this.