Crossposted from https://thebrainbin.org/m/auster_info_dumps/t/1336843

Saw someone on Reddit asking if he needed Autoplugin to overclock his Vita. Overclocking lowering the lifespan of any hardware aside, this reminded me, technically, you don't need Autoplugin for anything.

On the contrary, I'd recommend installing everything manually to understand what's going on, avoid potential issues and be able to troubleshoot more easily.

And using that as a topic hook, back when I tinkered a lot of the Vita, I'd test plugins new to me frequently. Most had tutorials for how to install and configure manually. And among those tests, I've noticed behaviors that required some safe procedures.

The very first of these procedures is knowing why you need a given plugin. I can't stress this enough. If you don't know why you need it, nor a tutorial for another tool/plugin explains why you need it, chances are you don't need. Generally everything on the Vita past modding the system is optional, and being polemic here, this includes plugins to circumvent DRM, since for example, PS Vita is a great ebook reader and emulation machine, no DRM involved.

Another safe procedure involves the presence of configuration files, where save for a single case where I've seen the plugins loading only from the SD2VITA, the config files should be erased from ux0:tai/ and (if the uma0 partition exists) uma0:tai/, and you should use only ur0:tai/config.txt. That because SD2VITA can make HENkaku not know where to load from as uma0: is for a brief moment during startup ux0:, before the SD card takes its place.

Another thing, HENkaku loads plugins from the config's lines incrementally, so if it finds any plugins on lines 2, 4 and 37, it'll load in that order, always from the first line to the last. So if a plugin depends on another to work, its dependency should come first.

Still on plugin order in the config order, from some notes I made years back from tests, sparse forum results and interpreting on them, and if all of those are to be used together (again, all optional depending on your use):

• SD2VITA's plugin you chose should come first since it changes partition paths
• NoNpDRM should come after reFOOD or equivalents since apparently NoNpDRM doesn't act in a game if the game isn't loaded onto the memory, and it isn't loaded onto the memory if the system is on a version lower than the game requires to run.
• ReFOOD/0syscall (choose one) and RePatch should come after NoNpDRM since they're some of the plugins that need the game to be loaded onto memory first. Unsure if among the two, they have a needed order.
• Adrenaline's plugin should come last by official instruction.
• Order of other plugins shouldn't matter, or at least I didn't find any other that depends on a specific order.

Edit: this list at the end, checked again my notes and I had them a bit inversed. Now should be fixed.