PlayStation Vita emulator makers release ‘experimental’ Android version

The Sony PlayStation Vita emulator Vita3K has been available for Android devices since Sunday. The emulator requires at least Android 7 and a device with an ARM64 soc. The developers emphasize that the emulator is still experimental and can therefore crash.

The makers have the Android version of Vita3K published on GitHub and say on Discord that the emulator will at least work on a device with Unisoc T618 soc with 3GB memory and a Mali G52 MP2 GPU. That Unisoc is an entry-level soc that was announced at the end of 2019. With those specs, the emulator can play “many games at a consistent frame rate.”

To install games, they must first be decrypted, which the developers say can take time. The app must remain open during this process. The makers say the keyboard may not always work either, and the touch-sensitive parts that were behind the Vita don’t yet work in the Android version of the emulator. Games that require this must be played in PS TV mode. The makers explain through a guide how to dump a purchased vita game to play it in the emulator.

Vita3K is an emulator that has previously been released in Windows, Mac and Linux versions. The makers claim that 422 of the 1085 published Vita games work in the emulator. Sony released the PlayStation Vita in the Benelux in 2012, but the company stopped selling the handheld four years later. Since 2018, Sony has also stopped making physical games for the console.