How to edit almost everything related to the system (in-app BGs / custom sounds)

Hi, this was released a few years ago but almost nobody knows about it (I mean, it's not common for vita users to do it) so I'll share a tutorial I've written thanks to dms with Li (ex Silica, the dev of the plugin we'll use today, very cool person btw)

The following plugin is used to replace system files without directly editing them hence avoiding a brick if anything goes wrong.

First find an RCO on vs0. Any of them, Then download the CXMLDecompiler

Run : CXMLDecompiler.exe -d -i your_rco.rco -o your_rco.xml -p to decompile. This will output an XML, and a bunch of files (-p will tell it to try work out what those files are) Now you can simply browse the extracted files from it

Now say you want to edit something and put it back into it, Assuming it's an image- you can look in 'Converted/GIMtoPNG' And find all the pngs in there, so just edit it however you want. Now to put it back in, you have to convert it back to a GIM and zlib compress again

To do that use GimConv/GimConv.exe (png_filename) -psvindex8 to make it a GIM Then CXMLDecompiler --compress -i (C:\Users\pc\Desktop\a67cb5df.gim) -o (C:\Users\pc\Desktop\a67cb5df.z) to compress it again. Now replace the original .z file in the files/original folder. Also edit the XML file and find the reference to that .z file, make sure 'origsize' matches the size of the uncompressed GIM file in bytes.

Finally to build it back to an RCO youd do cxmldecompiler.exe -c -i your_rco.xml -o your_rco.rco

(example CXMLDecompiler -c -i "videobrowser_plugin\videobrowser_plugin.xml" -o videobrowser_plugin.rco )

For custom sounds you'll need VAG files : to convert your wav to vag use vagconv2w.exe from the fake pkg tools
Open it then find your wav sample, convert it (CHECK the og sample specifications by opening any sound with audacity), replace the og VAG file and compile the rco with cxmldecompiler

Put the files in ux0:vshPatch then use the vshPatch plugin to load them, reboot after any replaced rco,

Enjoy

Some custom rco files as a POC for you to see what you can achieve with it :

https://vitatricks.xyz/theme/ExampleVideosBlueTheme.zip

https://www.mediafire.com/file/lxcjgxs8asy6ftk/PS2_sounds.zip/file

https://www.mediafire.com/file/utz35qwxucvjzi8/Matrix+Settings+Background.zip/file