PS Vita homebrew help - im sure this is somewhere on here but im too lazy to look

[flexedupicedout]

So 2 years ago I bought a switch and have been utterly disappointed in it. I liked Mario and Zelda but that's all i played on it and it has been a struggle to use when travelling so it has been mostly collecting dust (other than the odd time i play mariokart or marioparty with the bois). I bought a PSVita last week for 100 bucks and plan on using it for totally legal emulation. I have always been a fan of retro gaming anyway so if I knew I could have a N64 PS1 and Dreamcast on a mobile device I never would've bought a switch in the first place. If any kind soul on here is a vita owner that has modified their system or a remotely tech-savvy person willing to help my dumbass out I would greatly appreciate it. The best emulator/ROM/ISO websites and a quick tutorial of what to do with files in my PM or just comment in the thread your email and i'll let you know about my progress. Thanks to whoever gives a fuck enough to helpabrotherout

 

[LateNightComics]

Just stick with the switch instead of fucking up a shitty Sony handheld.

 

[JM 590]

Good deal on the Vita, but sadly it's not the best at emulation. SNES and Genesis work pretty well on it, but with most other things, you'll wanna install something called Adrenaline which lets you run the PSP's firmware (and in turn, PSP games and emulators) on your Vita. Because, for whatever fucking ridiculous reason, most emulators for PSP run better than the ones made for Vita. So you can play GBA roms at half-speed with horrible sound on mGBA, or you can play them at full speed on an emulator like UO gPSP Kai which was made like 12 years ago. It's faster to play GBA games in an emulator within an emulator than on a native emulator on PS Vita. Go figure.

That being said, PS1 is perfect since it actually uses Sony's own emulator. N64 is tolerable for a smattering of games, but only Daedulus on PSP works well enough. I don't know about Dreamcast.

If anyone recommends you use Retroarch, please go buy a fully grown trout and beat them with it. I would wish cancer on my worst enemy, but not Retroarch.

I don't know what exactly's the cutting edge of Vita hacking, but read up on: https://vita.hacks.guide/ and http://henkaku.xyz/

Here's a homebrew app repository (click the drop down box that says All Categories and select Emulators): http://vitadb.rinnegatamante.it/#/

Anyway, Vita aside, if you want to emulate 32-bit onwards on a portable, just buy a newish Android phone and some kind of controller for it. The best one I've personally used is this iPega one that sort of looks like Vita's own controls, but it sometimes flat out throws a bitchfit and just won't cooperate with my phone, so, if you find a good one, let me know. Android can even emulate Gamecube at full speed now, but I don't think there are any notable Android portables out there designed with gaming first in mind.

 

[Green Room]

I was able to successfully mod my VitaTV but found that many of the guides are so complex that they don't really give you the big picture of what you want, even if they are helpful enough to successfully install a specific certain piece of the puzzle. So to give you that big picture: Basically you need to get to the henkaku site in the vita browser to let the exploit run. From there you want to be able to install the Vita Homebrew Browser, and VitaShell. Whatever emulators you want you can get from the homebrew browser, and the others you can install through executing their packages through vitashell. If you want to run actual vita games (or PSP/PSX), you just want to target getting pkg-j installed, which is basically like the freeshop on 3ds and will handle downloading and booting 99% of vita, PSP, and PSX games.

 

[Shaved Kiwis]

I was able to successfully mod my VitaTV but found that many of the guides are so complex that they don't really give you the big picture of what you want, even if they are helpful enough to successfully install a specific certain piece of the puzzle. So to give you that big picture: Basically you need to get to the henkaku site in the vita browser to let the exploit run. From there you want to be able to install the Vita Homebrew Browser, and VitaShell. Whatever emulators you want you can get from the homebrew browser, and the others you can install through executing their packages through vitashell. If you want to run actual vita games (or PSP/PSX), you just want to target getting pkg-j installed, which is basically like the freeshop on 3ds and will handle downloading and booting 99% of vita, PSP, and PSX games.

I fucked around with Henkaku and Vita warez when the exploit first released. Are you telling me they STILL don't have a CFW for the thing? The vita has shit battery life and keeping it in sleep mode to maintain the exploit doesn't help.

 

[TaimuRadiu]

It's literally as simple as visiting a website on the Vita browser. Then you can download a program that will literally let you get every game for free off of Sony's own servers.

The giant enemy crab isn't good when it comes to infosec.

 

[Violence Jack]

No offense to anyone reading this thread in the future, but I recommend buying a psp if you're really hurting for an emulation machine that can play a fuckton of games. The memory cards are pennies now while the vita ones still maintained their price at the time of this post (probably to discourage pirating and cracking). Plus you can use a variety of memory cards with the psp, with the vita sony is the only game in town.

I have a fat psp I've had since 2006 that somehow still works. I also had a slim one but the screen is prone to dead pixels due to the thinner lcd used, plus most of the buttons eventually stopped working. The drawbacks of the fat psp are still the same as they were on launch about 5 hour battery life (you can find replacement batteries cheaply enough), you may have to use the 'claw maneuver' to play certain games, plus it's hefty and fragile in certain places.

 

[BananaSplit]

Use https://vita.hacks.guide/ like Piss said, there are different means to hack the handheld depending of what firmware you're on. 3.60 is generally considered the best because you could just hack the thing from viewing a website in the browser (then install Enso, a permanent hack on boot), but the very late Vita models have motherboards with 3.61+ FW by factory default. 3.65 is the second best firmware and the last one that can enable Enso yet. It's obligatory to own an official memory card in order to hack the original OLED model, but the small 4GB card is fine enough for that task. PSTVs and Slim models have their onboard 1GB memory space to make things easier.

No offense to anyone reading this thread in the future, but I recommend buying a psp if you're really hurting for an emulation machine that can play a fuckton of games. The memory cards are pennies now while the vita ones still maintained their price at the time of this post (probably to discourage pirating and cracking). Plus you can use a variety of memory cards with the psp, with the vita sony is the only game in town.

I have a fat psp I've had since 2006 that somehow still works. I also had a slim one but the screen is prone to dead pixels due to the thinner lcd used, plus most of the buttons eventually stopped working. The drawbacks of the fat psp are still the same as they were on launch about 5 hour battery life (you can find replacement batteries cheaply enough), you may have to use the 'claw maneuver' to play certain games, plus it's hefty and fragile in certain places.

You're very late to the party. There are microSD adapters for the Vita, called SD2Vita, that take up the game card slot, and they can easily support up to 512GB (no idea about the new 1TB microSDs since those are fairly recent therefore expensive as fuck, but they should work technically).

The Vita doesnt have huge improvements in emulation compared to the PSP however, and like piss said the GBA emulator work better on the PSP side (which can be played on Vita through Adrenaline) than the native Vita side. Dont expect to run N64, Saturn or Dreamcast games on it, that's never going to happen. The Vita has also one fatal flaw where it cant change the firmware of POPS for unofficial/converted PS1 eboots, something that was possible with the PSP.

Still a better portable console than the Switch imo

 

[MrSugarcube]

Might be of limited use, though DS4Vita allowed for Dualshock 4 controllers to be usable, kinda irrelevant for PSTV, but pretty good for PS1 emulation.
ShellSecBat is a great QoL add on too, giving an accurate battery percentage & adds seconds to the clock in the main menu

EDIT: Tutorials were posted on being able to downgrade firmware, but also drm workarounds so later firmware titles are still playable on 3.60. Currently posting away from the PC, but can look into extra links if desired.

 

[flexedupicedout]

Thanks mfers I've got adrenaline to work and tried retroarch but it sucks ass

 

[JM 590]

Thanks mfers I've got adrenaline to work and tried retroarch but it sucks ass

Retroarch is one of those things where you'll read posts from spergs that say shit like "Oh, Retroarch is great! Just spend the next seven months of your fucking life tweaking and customizing every little thing and exporting each change to your Vita and testing it because shit crashes or just flat out doesn't work all the time". Retroarch is a clever idea, but janky as FUCK and I've all but given up on it. Its best utility seems to be any kind of integrated system like the Playstation Classic Edition that's just afaik literally a skin for a libretro core (the actual emulation software). Trying to use Retroarch or Libretro to make an all-in-one emulation machine is a fucking nightmare.

If I joined a couple of years ago I would have written a novel right here about how terrible Retroarch is. And it's really not improved at all. Trying to get it to work on PC with all your roms is an exercise reserved for some high level of Hell, due to its nature of demanding ridiculous shit like exact hash calculations for your roms that match up to their database, and Lord help you if you take a crack at running MAME or DOSBOX through it.

No offense to anyone reading this thread in the future, but I recommend buying a psp if you're really hurting for an emulation machine that can play a fuckton of games. The memory cards are pennies now while the vita ones still maintained their price at the time of this post (probably to discourage pirating and cracking). Plus you can use a variety of memory cards with the psp, with the vita sony is the only game in town.

I have a fat psp I've had since 2006 that somehow still works. I also had a slim one but the screen is prone to dead pixels due to the thinner lcd used, plus most of the buttons eventually stopped working. The drawbacks of the fat psp are still the same as they were on launch about 5 hour battery life (you can find replacement batteries cheaply enough), you may have to use the 'claw maneuver' to play certain games, plus it's hefty and fragile in certain places.

To this day there's really still no better way to play NES, GBA, or PS1 games on a portable. SNES is a little janky but still works for most games that don't do anything fancy. GBA is practically perfect anyway and a solid portion of the SNES library got a GBA port, anyway. PSPs are also very easy to repair if something goes bad, and there aren't any models to specifically avoid because of some dumb reason.

The 3DS also makes for an incredibly good emulator system, even moreso with the New 3DS, but then this happens all the time because you're trying to play single-screen games on a dual-screen system:

But it does that on both screens IRL. So that's an option if you don't care or usually play in the dark. Oh also it flat out doesn't have emulators for N64 or Dreamcast, and the PS1 emulator in Retroarch is too jank to matter. And the 2DS is a piece of shit, don't buy one of those even for cheap.

 

[BananaSplit]

Retroarch is one of those things where you'll read posts from spergs that say shit like "Oh, Retroarch is great! Just spend the next seven months of your fucking life tweaking and customizing every little thing and exporting each change to your Vita and testing it because shit crashes or just flat out doesn't work all the time". Retroarch is a clever idea, but janky as FUCK and I've all but given up on it. Its best utility seems to be any kind of integrated system like the Playstation Classic Edition that's just afaik literally a skin for a libretro core (the actual emulation software). Trying to use Retroarch or Libretro to make an all-in-one emulation machine is a fucking nightmare.

If I joined a couple of years ago I would have written a novel right here about how terrible Retroarch is. And it's really not improved at all. Trying to get it to work on PC with all your roms is an exercise reserved for some high level of Hell, due to its nature of demanding ridiculous shit like exact hash calculations for your roms that match up to their database, and Lord help you if you take a crack at running MAME or DOSBOX through it.

To this day there's really still no better way to play NES, GBA, or PS1 games on a portable. SNES is a little janky but still works for most games that don't do anything fancy. GBA is practically perfect anyway and a solid portion of the SNES library got a GBA port, anyway. PSPs are also very easy to repair if something goes bad, and there aren't any models to specifically avoid because of some dumb reason.

I got the nasty surprise of Retroarch hard-crashing my Vita twice during a few GBA emulation sessions in the past, and the other issue is that you cant actually swipe away the app like you could usually do to close vita games, otherwise you lose your recent saves. Despite these flaws, I still use it for SNES, Genesis and Gameboy Color emulation. There are also some neat homebrew ports like Jazz Jackrabbit or Caesar 3, and ScummVM seems to work rather well.

 

[AsbestosFlaygon]

To this day there's really still no better way to play NES, GBA, or PS1 games on a portable. SNES is a little janky but still works for most games that don't do anything fancy. GBA is practically perfect anyway and a solid portion of the SNES library got a GBA port, anyway. PSPs are also very easy to repair if something goes bad, and there aren't any models to specifically avoid because of some dumb reason.

What about PSP Go? Sure UMD's are dumb, and I'm sure it's not that important if you're using it as a emulation machine. But I can't imagine you'd want to pick that model unless you could get for a way lower price than other models.

But it does that on both screens IRL. So that's an option if you don't care or usually play in the dark. Oh also it flat out doesn't have emulators for N64 or Dreamcast, and the PS1 emulator in Retroarch is too jank to matter. And the 2DS is a rétarded piece of shit, don't buy one of those even for cheap.

Is there any reasons you shouldn't get it functionality wise? I know you can find other models used that are about the same price, and it has the form factor of a door stopper, so I'd agree it shouldn't be a first choice. But as far as I'm aware its functionally's the same as the other standard models minus the 3D, so I'd think it would be fine if you could find it for extremely cheap, and give zero fucks about 3D and horrifically ugly it is.

 

[JM 590]

What about PSP Go? Sure UMD's are dumb, and I'm sure it's not that important if you're using it as a emulation machine. But I can't imagine you'd want to pick that model unless you could get for a way lower price than other models.

I actually have a PSP Go! It's the only fully working PSP I have at the moment. If you really like the smaller size, you'll probably really like it, but otherwise, just stick to any other model. The buttons are sort of cramped and don't have much travel at all, so it's a little hard to play fast games like DJ Max and Mega Man on it. And it doesn't use Memory Stick Pro Duos like every other PSP, so you can't use those nifty MicroSD adapters:

But it does have 16gb of storage built in and takes Memory Stick M.2 cards, so that's not too bad. Higher capacity M.2 cards are very rare, though, so I've only got a 4GB one in mine.

Positives: PSP Go also supports Bluetooth for whatever reason, and it's the only model PSP that can, so you can use Bluetooth headphones if that's your thing. You can also sync it with a Dualshock 3, but through a fairly convoluted process by hooking it up to a PS3, for whatever reason. There's also a "pause game" function which is essentially a save state, but for full PSP games, so that's nice but you can only save one state at a time. The speakers are remarkably good and much better than the PSP-1000 ones, especially considering this is a small handheld from 2009. Also, mine's sparkly white, and while I don't normally like glossy white electronics, this one's different. Pictures just don't do it justice, so if you get the chance to look at one in person, check it out.

Negatives: The battery isn't easily removed, there are a few screws on the back but I'm not sure if it's sealed in like a smartphone or if you can just pop the back off. It also uses a proprietary charging cable that was only made for the PSP Go, unlike every other model of PSP that uses the same cable. It looks like a Vita cable, but isn't compatible at all. It also needs its power brick to charge from a dead battery, which is obnoxious because mine does that thing where if it sits in a drawer for a couple of weeks, it'll be completely dead since the battery life's not great. There are component cables for TV play, but they're not cross compatible with the normal PSP cables, so bear that in mind.

The PSP Go does feel very solid and the screen slides really well, so it's a pretty nice thing to hold, and I'd recommend it if you just want a small PSP. But if any of those drawbacks turn you off of it, then just stick with another PSP model. I like mine, but I only spent $50 on it, and I honestly just wanna repair my old one with a bad analog stick and use that. Normal PSPs have much bigger buttons and are more comfortable to hold.

Is there any reasons you shouldn't get it functionality wise? I know you can find other models used that are about the same price, and it has the form factor of a door stopper, so I'd agree it shouldn't be a first choice. But as far as I'm aware its functionally's the same as the other standard models minus the 3D, so I'd think it would be fine if you could find it for extremely cheap, and give zero fucks about 3D and horrifically ugly it is.

If you can get one extremely cheap and don't care about taking it anywhere, then go for it. But, it doesn't fold at all, it's one solid piece, and the screens are just as small as the original model 3DS. It's also from the "old" generation, so you can't play the smattering of "New" games on it like Xenoblade and Minecraft, and SNES9x will run slower.

The "New Nintendo 2DS XL" is more or less its successor, which is a fully-featured New 3DS but without the 3D, and the D-pad seemed a little clickier. But it's at least a proper clamshell, which the 2DS isn't. The 2DS was released around the time Pokemon X and Y were coming out, as it was intended for kids who might be rough on it and snap the hinges on a clamshell 3DS, so unless that's a problem, every single other model is better. Buy a 2DS only if you can get it for absolute dirt-ass cheap.