Vita-launcher

Vita Launcher
File:Vitalaunchervita.jpg
General
Author	cy33hc
Type	Title Launchers
Version	3.9.6
License	GPL-3.0
Last Updated	2022/11/23
Links
Download
Website
Source

Vita Launcher is an application that allows to launch other installed apps, roms from emulators and PSP games and homebrews through Adrenaline. This removes the 500 bubbles limit of LiveArea and allows to categorize applications.

The main purpose of this app is for users who have hundreds of games on their Vita.

Use in conjunction with the CopyIcons app to get icons not created by PS Vita.

Note: This app requires accessing the game icons from the ur0:/appmeta folder therefore compiled with UNSAFE flag. Dev's can verify the code in git.

Features

• Ability to luanch Adrenaline ISO and EBOOT directly within the launcher. No need to create many bubbles.
• Games are display in 4 categories (vita/psp/homebrew/favorites). The psp game categories looks for games starting with the gameid PSPEMU. Mainly the bubbles created with Adrenaline Bubble Manager
• Game caching. With hundreds of games, scanning the folders and building the list takes a long time. So a cache is built on the first scan and subsequent startup of the app reads from the cache.
• Favorites. With hundreds of games, it's takes a quite a while to browse all the games to find your favorite game. Therefore I've implemented a feature to add a game to you favorites for easy access.
• Game images loaded on demand. With hundreds of games, we can't possibly load all the game images into memory. So images are loaded on demand only and a few pages of images are cached.
• You can access you full library of games/apps. Just an FYI, I could load 1600 games/apps on my vita-tv.
• Ability to launch Retro games directly via the launcher. Includes N64,
• Categories for each of the retro cores eg. NES, SNES, GC, GBC, GBA, N64, etc...
• Ability to customize the category where a game or app shows in the launcher.
• Option for parental control to hide dangerous settings.
• Option to change the default retro core used.
• Options to specify where to import roms from.
• Option to change icon path location.

Installation

Install the VPK on your homebrew enabled PS Vita or PSTV.

• launcher.vpk - Vita-Launcher app.
• AdrenalineLauncher.vpk - Custom bubbles required by Vita-Launcher to launch Adrenaline PSP ISO and EBOOT directly via the launcher app/without bubbles.
• yoyo_launcher.vpk - Custom bubbles required by Vita-Launcher to launch Game Maker Studio games via the launcher app/without bubbles.

(Optional) Install CopyIcons to be used in conjunction with Vita Launcher.

User guide

See below section for video tutorials/how-to guides:

• How to change parental controls.
• How to customize the category where bubble goes into.
• How to import ROMs into the launcher.
• How to change the retro core used to start a retro game.
• How to customize icons for the ROM that displays in the app.
• How to setup application to Boot Adrenaline PSP ISO and EBOOT directly without bubbles.
  • Use AdrenalineLauncher.vpk to make use of direct Adrenaline booting.
• How to create folders.
• How to play Retro games from FTP server.
• How to play PSP ISO and EBOOT from FTP server.

Controls

D-Pad or Left Analog - Browse your games

Square - Add the selected game to favorites

Circle - Un-select, Back

Triangle - Display settings dialog.

Cross - Start the selected game/app

L/R - Previous/Next page

Select - Toggle multi selection

Start - Display the search dialog

Screenshots

vitalauncher3.png vitalauncher4.png

vitalauncher5.png vitalauncher6.png

Media

Vita-Launcher Overview (Chee Yee)

How to change parental controls (Chee Yee)

How to customize the category where bubble goes into (Chee Yee)

How to import ROMs into the launcher (Chee Yee)

How to change the retro core used to start a retro game (Chee Yee)

How to customize icons for the ROM that displays in the app (Chee Yee)

How to setup application to Boot Adrenaline PSP ISO and EBOOT directly without bubbles (Chee Yee)

How to create folders (Chee Yee)

How to play Retro games from FTP server (Chee Yee)

How to play PSP ISO and EBOOT from FTP server (Chee Yee)

Known issues

https://github.com/cy33hc/vita-launcher/issues

Changelog

v3.9.6

• Improved download speed of ROMS from FTP server. From my pstv lan cable, speed increase from 3.7MB/s to 6.2MB/s.

v3.9.5

• Launch Dreamcast games via new Flycast app.

v3.9.4

• Fixed issue #48 where duplicate entries of games with DLC.

v3.9.3

• Add ability to config a default global PSP boot settings.
• Expanded the per game PSP boot settings to include the following.
• "Graphics Filtering", "Smooth Graphics", "Flux Filter Color", "PSP/PS1 Scale" etc...

v3.9.2

• Add new YoYo Loader boot options "Use Uncached Memory" and "Use Double Buffering".

v3.9.1

• Added support for EasyRPG games put in sub directories or in zip files. Only zip files with compression method Store or Deflate (not Deflate64) are supported.

v3.9

• Added support for Booting EasyRPG games. Games have to be put into the ux0:data/easyrpg-player folder. You also need to download and install the latest nightly build of EasyRPG from the official website that supports booting games externally https://ci.easyrpg.org/job/player-vita/.

v3.8.5

• Fix updater dialog showing when nothing to update.

v3.8.4

• Add "disable audio" boot settings for yoyo loader.
• Updated yoyo thumbnails db.
• Fixed an issue downloading gms game icons.

v3.8.3

• Fix psp games can't boot after plugin settings changed.

v3.8.2

• Fix adernaline boot settings not saved due to missing tables. Only some people affected based on the upgrade path.
• Improve psp plugins navigation. Default selects the checkbox instead of the "Delete" button.

v3.81

• Fix GPU crash which was caused by texture being deleted while still in use. Fixed by increasing the delay for cleanup of unused textures.

v3.8

• Adds ability to manage PSP plugins from within Vita-Launcher. Also allow per game plugin configuration.

v3.7

• Updated fonts to handle more languages and special characters for copyright, TM etc which shows as "?".
• Better detection of iTLS-Enso and ABB(Adernaline Bubble Booter plugin).
• Warn ONLY ONCE for missing iTLS-Enso/ABB install.
• Overclocked CPU/GPU which seem to fix the random GPU crash.
• Add ability to config a custom location to look for Bubbles/PSP/PS1/PSPMini icons.
• For Bubbles, create a png file with the name of the TITLE_ID (eg. God of War file is PCSA00126.png).
• 'For PSP ISO, create a png file with the same name as the ISO. (eg."Ape Escape.iso", create the png file called "Ape Escape.png").
• F'or EBOOT.PBP, create png file with the same name as the folder that contains the EBOOT.PBP file. (Eg. "ux0:pspemu/PSP/GAME/Final Fantasy VII/EBOOT.PBP", create the png file called "Final Fantasy VII.png".

v3.6.6

• Fix issues where duplicate Retro alternate cores created in settings.

v3.6.5

• Auto installs/updates the flycast core in RetroArch by extracting the smc.bin and smc2.bin from the Flycast app.

v3.6.4

• Fix issue where YoYo settings isn't saved if yy.cfg does not exists.

v3.6.3

• Check if iTLS-Enso is installed before attempt to download updates. iTLS-Enso is needed for this feature.

v3.6.2

• Add "Run with Mem Squeezing" option to YoYo boot settings.

v3.6.1

• Add support for "Enable network features" option to YoYo Launcher boot settings.

v3.6

• Add option to apply Bilinear Filters to icons. This is enabled by default and can be change in the Global Settings.
• Add support to launch Game Maker Studio games via YoYo Launcher (NEW). Thx to @Rinnegatamante for this awesome app.
• Add support for scanning Game Maker Studio games from FTP Server. Like support for ROMS, update the "roms_path" of GMS category with "ftp0:" prefix.
  • For both ux0 and ftp0, put an icon0.png in the same folder as the game.apk. Vita-Launcher will use that for the display icon.
• Add feature to auto-install "Adrenaline Launcher", "YoYo Launcher" (NEW). These are custom bubbles required by Vita-Launcher to launch games without bubbles.
• Add option to check and install updates for "YoYo Launcher", "Adrenaline Launcher", "Vita Launcher". There's a new action "Check for updates" can be found under the "Actions" tab of Settings.

Release notes.

Credits

• Borrowed some audio code from ELEVENMPV.
• Borrowed some code from VitaShell for the ime_dialog and net download.

External links

• GitHub - https://github.com/cy33hc/vita-launcher
• GitHub - https://github.com/cy33hc/copyicons
• VitaDB - https://vitadb.rinnegatamante.it/#/info/583
• GBAtemp - https://gbatemp.net/threads/release-vita-launcher-app-to-launch-games-and-apps.574644/