After a week of trying to dump the eMMC (spoilers: didn’t happen yet), I’ve decided to post this update about things I’ve tried to do (and how I tried to do it) and where the money is going to.
Random observations on Vita logic board
While I’m waiting for more tools to arrive, here’s some things I’ve found while playing around with the continuity test on a multimeter. There is no stunning discovery here, just bits and pieces of thoughts that may not be completely accurate.
PS Vita NAND Pinout
Removing the CPU and NAND from PSVita
Thanks again to everyone who helped fund this project! This is the first part of the long journey into hardware land. I bought a non-working Vita logic board from eBay, which arrived yesterday, packaged like a freeze-dried snack.
Unlimited Backgrounding on iOS
Since iOS4, developers have the ability to perform background tasks with some limitations. Background tasks must fit one of the five different categories for background supported apps. Music and streaming apps can be backgrounded as long as they play music. Newsstand apps can wake once a day to download updates. Location aware apps can wake up once in a while to update their position. VOIP apps can have one socket (I found out the hard way that the one socket does not include listener sockets) connected in the background. General apps can request up to 10 minutes to finish some task. While this is enough for most backgrounding purposes, sometimes we need backgrounding for more advanced tasks. Specifically, I wanted to write a HTTP proxy server that runs on the device (in the future, this proxy server will work as an ad-blocking proxy) in the background. I will show you the steps of making this work. Please note that Apple will certainly reject any app that abuses their backgrounding policy so doing so would only be useful for personal and enterprise uses.