When the PSP and the Vita show their battle scars…

via http://wololo.net/2012/09/01/when-th...-battle-scars/

The PSP has a long history of user mode exploits in its game library. Without going into details, savegames have been our favorite vector of user mode hacks for years.

Some of you might remember the old days of GTA: Liberty City Stories, the dramas around Gripshift or Mercury, the awesome “commit suicide to trigger the exploit” in Medal of Honor, or, more recently, our numerous HBL or VHBL releases.

But did you know that each new firmware on the PSP or the Vita ships with a “blacklist” of those savegame exploits, hashes that help the console identify “bad” savegames? The games themselves are never patched, it would be way too costly to contact the development studio, recompile the game with a patch, go through a release process… not to mention how impractical it would have been to distribute patched UMDs back in the days (as far as I know, the “patched” version of GTA was actually just shipping with an updated firmware that had the blacklist thing implemented).

As a consequence, each new PSP firmware (including the ones on the Vita) ships with a growing list of hacked games, what I like to call the “battle scars” of the PSP in Sony’s fight against hackers.