The PSP homebrew community's been pretty quiet the past several months in anticipation of the next major breakthrough on the yet-unhackable PSP-3000. Upon the arrival of the new year, however, also came new hope that all is not lost in the scene after all. Forces to be reckoned with joined together, and from this union comes the most exciting thing to ever happen in the homebrew front so far in its long history.

For this iteration of the QuickJump QuickGuide (and the following couple of ones, too), we start rolling out our thanks to the folks responsible for this new wave of brew development that all started with the release of the GripShift Exploit.

We have several characters going into play for now, but as the devs deserve to each get their own time under the spotlight, we'll be focusing on them one by one, although in no particular order of importance.

For this week's QJ QuickGuide: Who's Who edition, we center our sights on the one-half of the GripShift Exploit team, MaTiAz.

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If a [PSP] paints a thousand words...

MaTiAz is no newb in the scene. In fact, he's been around contributing his developments as early as the beginnings of this site back in 2006. Doing a quick search on our site, the very first homebrew of his that we covered was his PSPpaint v0.5.

Even as early as then, it can already be seen that he's all up for some good fun on the PSP, but always looking at other ways to go beyond the confines of development space given to him. In example, he developed PSPpaint v0.5 on FW 2.71 as the original platform, but he made sure that it's gonna be workable as well for others.

Apart from wholesome PSPpaint releases, MaTiAz also developed some simple, yet powerful plug-ins, like the one he did for PRX developers, VSH Rebooter PRX.

Shaking, not stirred.

While other homebrew developers out there have gotten themselves embroiled in drama enough to overtake the drinking woes of Lindsay Lohan, MaTiAz, it can be said, is one of the more private of the figures in the scene. To date, he has not been entangled in any crossfire, thus making him relatively uncontroversial.

Not that we'd call him an absolute goody-two shoes, no sir. In fact, being the tweaker that he is, MaTiAz has also displayed some mad sleuthing skills in the past. Long before the possibility of a phone function on the PSP could even be imagined by us mere laymen, MaTiAz was already off, digging deep into the codes of Sony's Firmware.

In February of 2007, he discovered a reference to Skype hidden in the decrypted version of vshmain.prx from Firmware 3.10. A year later, Sony revealed their tie-up with Skype on their new baby, the PSP-2000. He sure called it big time.

And so it was that MaTiAz went on his own quiet way, patiently biding his time in the scene, doing his nifty, little contributions, until one day...

VrooooooM! goes the Exploit.

It was a dull January day, as far as I was concerned. Most of you guys, I bet, were still only getting ready to roll out of bed (or off the floor) after all that hard partying for the New Year. The big oh-nine has struck, and little did we know it brought along with it a big, much-welcomed package.

Thanks to the collaboration of MaTiAz and FreePlay, we all grasped in our hands an honest-to-goodness exploit that works on the resilient PSP-3000: the GripShift Exploit. This is where his star truly began to shine.

Suddenly he was a household name, no longer a low-key homebrew dev. Now sought after, many people send him his thanks for sparking up the hope in having homebrew on the PSP Brite.

But his rise to stardom has only just begun. After being quiet for a couple of months after THE Exploit, MaTiAz surprised us yet again, and like before, it was a highly pleasant one. The quiet spell, as it turned out, was all for a very good purpose. This time, he came back and told the world to say "Hello!" to his new output, the TIFF Hello World exploit for FW 5.03. And didn't we all happily oblige?

Pata-pata-patapon! FEEEEEEEEEEVEEEEEEERRRRR!!!

The latest endeavor of his is a reworked version of the TIFF exploit, this time making it compatible for both the Phat and Slim PSP models. And we highly doubt this will be the last we'll be hearing from him.

He's already promised before that there will be more awesomeness to come, and so far he's already delivered on that with the new TIFF version. But the ball's just started rolling, and the fever has yet to reach its peak, especially now that the crack's been exposed on the supposedly impenetrable PSP-Brite defenses.

What is certain at this point is that he deserves due credit for getting the homebrew development scene up and roaring again, paving the way to the reawakening of the devs race game.

It can only be all good from here on out.

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MaTiAz's homebrew history is a placid one, we could say. His lack of exposure to drama has made him to be one of the more low-profiled homebrew developers. But now we all know that low-profile does not necessariliy mean low-quality. From an underrated dev to one of the most famous ones around today, MaTiAz has gracefully shown us that you don't have to be noisy in order to make noise.

Do join us once again next week as we roll out another edition of our QuickJump QuickGuide: Who's Who edition, this time putting the spotlight on the other half of the GripShift exploit tandem, the guy that you guys love to hate, FreePlay.