Tech

Vita3K begins to reach Android to emulate PS Vita

PlayStation Vita, better known as Playstation Vitawas the last attempt by Sony to compete against Nintendo in the segment in which the latter has always remained strong, the portable, however, and despite its virtues, at the sales level it was well below Nintendo 3DS, console with which it competed at least initially.

Despite having had much less impact than a Nintendo laptop, but rather than any of the desktop consoles that Sony has marketed, there are still users and enthusiasts who try to keep PS Vita alive, so it exists for this Vita3K, an emulator that officially supports Windows, macOS, Linux and more recently Androidplatform to which it has recently arrived.

Vita3K defines itself as “the world’s first functional PlayStation Vita emulator” and is developed as open source under the GPLv2 license, although Android dependencies under that license have been dropped. It is important to note that, as exposed in its GitHub repository, it is still an experimental development, so there are no guarantees when it comes to running many games.

Vita3K for Android can be obtained from the releases section of the GitHub repository that this version of the application has dedicated due to the reasons already stated (at the moment it is not available in the Play Store). From there, the user only has to download the APK file of the most recent version and install it on their Android device, which probably requires prior authorization for the installation of applications from third-party sources.

Once the application is launched, it will ask the user to download and install the corresponding firmware files, something that the emulator is in charge of facilitating by making available the links that must be accessed and knowing how to proceed once the user has selected each of the files. After completing the initial steps, it is possible to install any game available for PS Vita and run it.

Vita3K running

The requirements for the compilation of Vita3K for Android are not high as it is made up of an ARM64 SoC with support for Vulkan 1.0 and Android 7.0, although on the contrary it has to, at least for now, not able to support VPK format ROMs, so only ZIP and PKG are supported for now. The compatible games can be consulted through the list that those responsible for the emulator have published for this purpose.

Vita3K is somewhat reminiscent by its current circumstances of RPCS3, a PlayStation 3 emulator published as free software. The now penultimate Sony console, due to the Cell processor, seems to have made it difficult for emulator developers.

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