Early this month, we took a stroll down memory lane with the life and times of Dark AleX. Ahh yes, the good ol' days. This time, we're paying tribute to another homebrew hero. To say that his name commands respect from the homebrew community is definitely an understatement, keeping in mind all his contributions to the scene. Now let's take a moment to get to know another god atop the homebrew Olympus, the father of iR Shell, the AhMazing AhMan.

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The man behind the mask

Despite his undeniable popularity, very little is known about the man behind the monicker. The name, however, belongs to a distinguished few that could aptly be referred to as the homebrew hall of fame. AhMan is right up there with DaX, Fanjita, and all the other great devs who pioneered the homebrew scene and revolutionalized the PlayStation Portable.

AhMan has many useful apps under his belt, including the iR Commander, a number of USBhosts, and even a CFW update for Linksys Routers enabling PSP’s to play ad-hoc games via Xlink Kai. He's been developing software for a long time, and he's got loads of them, but every artist has a masterpiece. For AhMan, it's iR Shell.


iR Shell: from botched brew to Homebrew Hall of Fame

It was February of 2006 when AhMan released v1.0 of his iR Shell, and thus began a revolution unlike any Shell program before it. It was, at the time, one of the most stable shell apps out there, if not the best. It was the first multitask shell program, plus it can function as a universal iR remote plus has support for screenshot capturing. Despite having numerous other contributions to the homebrew community, the name AhMan became nearly synonymous with iR Shell.

It all began when AhMan was researching a way to turn brew PSP into a wireless controller to his Pentax cam. He failed. But from this failure, he is able to develop iR Shell, and he's been improving it ever since.


In and out of retirement

Just seven months after the release of v1.0, iR Shell's popularity skyrocketed from its initial release, and people couldn't keep their mouse cursors from hitting the download button on every new update. At this point, iR Shell had become arguably one of the best applications ever made for the PSP.

Reaching a point when the app was, in Ahman's words, already a "pretty stable & mature software under FW 1.5," AhMan decided to wrap it up and label the app "complete," although he did indicate that he may return, depending on the progress of the FW 2.x hacking back then. With a few closing words, the homebrew community said goodbye to iR Shell at v2.2.

It didn't take long for AhMan to update. In December of the same year, three months after retiring iR Shell, AhMan stormed the scene again with v3.0, loaded with a heavy changelog plus new features to his already great program.

For about a year, AhMan stayed in the scene, releasing updates, skins, plugins, and keeping up with the latest CFW. But in January of 2008, the father of iR Shell announced another retirement from the homebrew scene, giving us the final public release of iR Shell at v3.9.

So there goes the great developer...or so we thought. Apparently, he can't keep himself from updating his baby, and so came iR Shell v4.7, which was made compatible with the 5.00M33.3 CFWs, as well as the Popsloader 5.00.

So as of now, AhMan isn't on the "retired" status. The latest version of iR Shell, v4.92, was released only two weeks ago, and another, much bigger update is expected to follow, featuring an advanced multitasking feature.

As skilled a developer AhMan may be, he's certainly not Mr. Popular in some corners of the scene. While they recognize iR Shell for what it is, they're not too fond of ol' AhMan, saying he's a drama queen for his recurring retirements.

There are many other things that AhMan is being accused of, but one of the biggest complaints was that because AhMan doesn't release the source code for iR Shell, even when he said that he was gonna stop updating it. Apparently, some people find that very annoying. Here's a year-old rant posted on TehSkeen.

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Looking ahead, it looks like the upcoming release will be quite the headline-maker. As for us here at QJ, we'll be waiting until AhMan drops the bomb. And as far as his career goes, this homebrew god deserves major props for everything he has given to the homebrew community. Everyone who's ever installed his apps would know - AhMan is the real deal.