Brilliant thank you
@Berion you have been most helpful.
Rebug site appears to have been shutdown?
Tonight I have successfully installed rebug 4.84.1 DECR lite but in order to get it working I had to install 3.55 ofw then update to 4.84.1 DECR cfw.
All I'm concerned about now is using rebug online.
In your opinion should I use sen if I decided to go online with it?
Jailbreaking on CECH (retail station) /DECH (debug station) & DECR (reference station) consoles is always the same process.
From OFW 3.55 up, CFWs cannot be installed directly without first applying a patch on the CoreOS files stored in Flash Memory.
The difference being that QA flag is enabled by default on a DECR console so you can downgrade the OFW firmware at will.
So you were able to install 3.55 OFW for DECR before installing a Rebug CFW 4.8x for DECR without ever having to apply a jailbreak patch, whereas with a retail OFW 4.xx console on which downgrading is not possible as QA flag is disabled by default, applying a jailbreak patch would have been absolutely necessary.
The Rebug site is down, most likely for good as Joonie retired last year & there is nobody active left in the team. No DEX OFW PUP has surfaced since 4.84 anyway so even if Joonie was still active he would not be able to keep making the REX releases we loved.
There were so few donations to Rebug through the years that tbph it's not very surprising that the retired member who paid for the hosting & domain finally decided to give it all up without even a warning as soon as the last active member retired.
It is always the same problem & it produces the same effects without fail.
Not sure what you mean by "going online", using the Internet is never a problem but if you are talking about online gaming through PSN, that's of course more of a conundrum. Generally speaking I would assume that you could use on DECR the same tricks as the ones DEX users rely on, ie firmware version & IDPS target ID spoofing if appropriate + adapting the NP environment debug setting appropriately.
However you should keep in mind that s#ny made changes to the PSN login in 4.88 & if you don't use the updated sprx file in charge of PSN login calls or find an alternative way to modify the login arguments sent to PSN by the console, the ban risk is high on CEX & at the time of speaking there is no "ready to deploy" workaround or fix. Evilnat may produce a new spoof feature in the next SEN Enabler update but even if does, will that be relevant in your case? I dunno.
I am NOT able to confirm whether or not the risk associated with connecting to PSN using tricks with a DECR reference tool on older firmware exists & is identical to the one on retail consoles.
Regarding homebrews, you should not expect all homebrews to work on your DECR console.
Every single homebrew that uses symbols in its source code either to apply patches or to execute vsh, lv2 or lv1 internal functions or snippets, set up hooks etc.. will automatically fail to work unless DECR 4.84 support is added specifically.
Because of that some homebrew binaries may crash on loading, others may work fine but crash when using specific features etc..
If you experience such problems with homebrews you wish to use but they are open source, the only solution is to add proper DECR 4.84 symbols & recompile.
And if the source code is closed, one could always patch the binary to modify symbols, however that implies that the binary needs to be analysed, all the symbols identified & patched, and without knowing the symbols to look for, the whole thing may get quite complicated.
Remember as well that while you need CFW to get extra features & Cobra with its iso support etc.., you can already do a lot of things natively on DECR including running homebrew & mounting game backups in legacy JB folder format.
The development features specific to DECR & DEH consoles should always be considered in conjunction with Target Manager & ProDG, those tools give you the means to leverage the features you need to use without CFW.
). D-Rex and Rex are mix-up of DEX and CEX firmwares (users can switching between LV1 and LV2 from both worlds, depend of needs), Lite is only CEX (because we don't have newer DEX firmwares so creating Rex/D-Rex is impossible until then) and DECR is only DECR (and it is only one CFW made for DECRs).
