PS Vita Release: Professor Layton Curious Village/ Pandora’s Box / Lost Future HD (Vita unofficial ports) by Rinnegatamante – FuHEN contest entry chepgamexbox360.com

Developer Rinnegatamante has released some more goodness for the FuHEN PS Vita Homebrew contest, this time with a port of Professor Layton – Curious Village. The developer also released ports for the game’s sequels: Pandora’s Box (aka Diabolical Box) and Lost Future (aka Unwound Future).

The FuHEN contest is technically over, but there has been a stream of releases over the past week, and I haven’t been able to keep up due mostly to being sick. I’m trying to slowly catch up to all the releases that have been done for contest, so bear with me.

What is Professor Layton Curious Village/Pandora’s Box/Lost Future HD for PS Vita

Professor Layton is a famous series of puzzle adventure video games originally published for the Nintendo DS. Curious Village is the first game in the Professor Layton series, released in 2007, followed by Pandora’s box the same year, and Lost Future in 2008. Enhanced mobile ports of those games featuring additional cutscenes, subtitled “HD for Mobile”, were released between 2018 and 2020. This Vita port is based on those.

From Rinnegatamante:

This is a wrapper/port of Professor Layton: Curious Village HD for the PS Vita. The port works by loading the official Android ARMv7 executable in memory, resolving its imports with native functions and patching it in order to properly run. By doing so, it’s basically as if we emulate a minimalist Android environment in which we run natively the executable as is.

These Android ports straight to Vita using TheFlow’s wrapper (a mechanism that allows to un Android apps natively on the PS Vita, without emulation, allowing for impressive performance) have been a godsend for the PS Vita, allowing it to run natively a lot of very good games. Thanks to this system, we’ve seen other great releases recently including Mass Effect Infiltrator, Dead Space, Fahrenheit,  Crazy Taxi, Rockstar’s Bully and GTA San Andreas, the Anomaly Series, as well as Final Fantasy ports by Rinnegatamante and Frangar.

Download and Install Professor Layton 1/2/3 for PS Vita

As a reminder you will need a hacked PS Vita to run homebrew games. Hacking your PS Vita is a super easy and safe process nowadays (our guide here).

• You can download Curious Village from its entry page on the contest
  • Source code
• Pandora’s Box Vita port Download page
  • Source Code
• Lost future Vita Port Download page
  • Source Code

  

Installation instructions

From the developer:

• In order to properly install the game, you’ll have to follow these steps precisely:

  • Install kubridge and FdFix by copying kubridge.skprx and fd_fix.skprx to your taiHEN plugins folder (usually ux0:tai) and adding two entries to your config.txt under *KERNEL:

    *KERNEL
    ux0:tai/kubridge.skprx
    ux0:tai/fd_fix.skprx
  

  Note Don’t install fd_fix.skprx if you’re using rePatch plugin

  • • Optional: Install PSVshell to overclock your device to 500Mhz.
    • Install libshacccg.suprx, if you don’t have it already, by following this guide.

  

  • Obtain your copy of Professor Layton: Curious Village HD legally for Android in form of an .apk file and an obb. You can get all the required files directly from your phone or by using an apk extractor you can find in the play store.
  • Open the apk with your zip explorer and extract the file libll1.so* from the lib/armeabi-v7a folder to ux0:data/layton_curious.
  • Extract the folder assets inside ux0:data/layton_curious (ux0:data/layton_pandora and ux0:data/layton_future respectively for pandora’s box and lost future)
  • Extract the obb file in ux0:data/layton_curious/data (ux0:data/layton_pandora and ux0:data/layton_future respectively for pandora’s box and lost future) and rename the file main.obb.

* Note from Wololo: the name of the .so file is libll1.so, libll2.so, and libll3.so for each respective game in the series.

About FuHEN (PS Vita Homebrew Contest)

FuHEN is a homebrew contest for the PS Vita with more than $1000 in cash prizes. Submissions for the contest are over, and the voting is going on until October 5th. Check their official site here for details.