After the release of the custom bubbles a few weeks ago, a lot of people asked us for a tutorial as help.
Even though we provided those, people still had problems (connecting to CMA, renaming EBOOT.PBP files, the bubbles themselves, and much more) and we’ve decided to make a very detailed, but also very long tutorials.
This tutorials includes the installation of OpenCMA (QCMA would work too), preparation of files, creating the fake signed EBOOT.PBP files, actually moving those to the right place, and much, much more…
Tutorial #1: Creating custom bubbles
The first tutorials covers the tasks of setting up the first bubble on your own. All the required things are either listed in the video, the video’s description or are listed somewhere else.
It is worth to mention that you need to have access to an exploit in the first place to set up your very first bubble. An eCFW (TN-V/ARK) on firmwares ≤3.20 or a VHBL on firmwares 3.30+ is required, since access to the memory stick is necessary.
After you are done with setting up a bubble, you won’t have to have an exploit game anymore. This is convenient, since creating a bubble on ≤3.20 will then enable you to update to 3.35 without requiring an exploit game for that firmware to set up even more bubbles (as long as you have set up a working VHBL or FTP bubble prior to updating).
It is also pretty important to mention that some games should not be used as a “base game” for this bubble trick, since some specific games will have either limited or even strictly limited capabilites, which renders the bubbles pretty much useless, if one of these games was chosen.
If you intend to update to 3.30+, then be sure to not choose any of the 3.18 exploit games as a “base game” for your bubbles and also do not choose Minis, since those have limited capabilities since firmware 3.10. A normal PSP game (or even a PSP demo, if it is already installed!) would be the best choice.
Since typing out everything I did in the video would make this news post at least 10 times longer, I am not going to do this and just ask you to watch the video. Every step was done slowly and carefully, so following should be no problem.
If you successfully managed to create your first custom bubble, be sure to keep reading, since the last thing we are going to do is changing the icon and name of the bubble.
Tutorial #2: Changing the bubbles’ appearances
Changing the bubbles icon and name is an easy task. If we simply drop a modified PBOOT.PBP file into the folder of the original base game (the ‘&-folder’) and rebuild the database, the PS Vita is going to change the icon and name of the bubble to the ones of the PBOOT.PBP file.
The PBOOT.PBP file has to be carefully placed into the ‘&-folder’, since usually PBOOT.PBP files have a write protection. Thanks to a trick we are able to move these files, though.
It is also worth to mention that the PBOOT.PBP files have to be hex-edited to have the same Game_ID as the “base game” we have used for the bubbles.
Once again I just ask you to simply follow the video. This one is shorter, since changing the bubbles appearances does only make sense if you successfully set up a working bubble in the first place.
I hope you were successful in creating your own custom bubbles, and I hope that these video tutorials are enough for you to understand what you have to do.
I could provide an additional text tutorial, but that is kind of a waste of time, in my opinion, since the videos should be sufficient.