How to Disassemble Vita Game Cartridges, by Yifan Lu
A useful piece of advice for the hardware tinkerers among us, directly from Yifan Lu.
If you’ve been following Yifan Lu’s work, or, more recently, the various ongoing hardware hacks by katsu (His HDMI output mod, his attempts to exploit the Vita NAND, his dual firmware boot prototype), you know we’re quite excited to see any progress on the hardware side of the force.
Opening a Vita cartridge in itself is not useful, but for those of you willing to dig deeper in the internals of the Vita, looking into the game cartridges is one more step you might want to take. Yifan Lu’s technique might be obvious to those who have been looking into these cartridges for a while, but if you’re curious and don’t want to permanently damage your game, you might want to follow his “how to”:
If you take a look at the top right or left corner of the game cart, you can see a line of where the two halves of the plastic was glued together. Locate the upper left corner and, with a sharp knife, push the blade into the line on the corner until you have a small dent. Then, move the knife downwards and wiggle the knife until you loosen the glue for the entire left side of the cart. Then keep moving the knife down and when you hit the bottom of the cart, turn and lose about half the bottom edge of the cart. Now you can use your fingers to spread the two halves apart (but be careful not to use too much force and tear the glue from the other two edges), and you can either shake the memory chip out or use a pair of tweezers.
As usual, Yifan Lu shares some cool pictures on his blog, where more details can be found (link below).
Based on the information from his blog, and Katsu’s recent work, Yifan also explains how games could potentially be dumped with standard NAND dumping techniques. He mentions this is probably as close to piracy as he’s ever gonna get, so I wouldn’t expect any additional information on that front from him.
If you were to follow the pinout, you can see that it appears to be a standard NAND pinout (not eMMC and not Memory Stick Duo). I have not tested this, but I believe this means you can use NANDWay or any other NAND dumping technique (there’s lots for PS3 and Xbox 360) provided you attach to the right pins. I suspect that the Vita communicates with the game cart through the SD protocol with an additional line for a security interface, but that is just speculation. If that were the case, having one-to-one dumps would not allow you to create clone games. Regardless, I will not be looking too much into game carts because they are so closely tied with piracy.
NANDWay can be downloaded here as part of the NORway tool.
Source Yifan Lu
It is nice to see that the hackers are making some bit of progress with the VITA. And I love these articles. Dem circuits.
I wonder if this will lead us somewhere.
I know no one knows this probably but I ask since meh,
But anyone know what type of format PS Vita memory sticks are in ie FAT32(ofc not but an example anyways, probably sony made their own format for their own memory sticks).
Also what pin layout does the Vita mem stick have in common with any of the others? Is it a Micro SD, meaning it won’t be recognized physically (due to its shape it wont get in) but digitally, if someone were to *wire* the micro SD to the vita and format it, would it work?
The memory sticks are most likely exfat or ntsf just because there are 64gb or it may be a sony exclusive format
This could lead to China’s microSD to Vita memory card
I wounder if one day we could..
Exp : If we are able to dumb the game from a cartridge and put it back. Could we put back another game instead ?
If its a NAND then yea it will allow Read RW .However if its got some sort of security to authenticate (which im sure it does Sony has learnt from its mistakes :)) Then writing back to it will just make it useless. But im sure u already knew all this .
Looks like the cartridges insides a poorly built (last pic) literally glued together and stuff
Not to mention that is not best than Nintendo 64 because you put the game and play,this is like a pc game,put it inside vita and “Install instead of just play?” thats ***,then why bother to get that you should better download them from store.
You do know that all that is “installed” is the data needed to launch the game right?
AKA the bubble icon
We want HDMI tutorials!!!!
No actually you want HDMI tutorials the rest of us want people to make progress
This is really interesting, but what I really hope is that we’ll see some progress on the memory sticks. It would be great if more companies could produce them and force sony to price them more competitively.
Of course I don’t know much about them so I’m not sure if it’s something that’s already doable just not legal but eh
Can’t wait til emulators can be used on it. I wouldn’t mind having a portable n64, ps1, and ps2 and original xbox if possible. With the vita’s processing power it might work out.
I cannot wait for a native hack. It seems that the software is far from being hacked, I think that someone should attempt to make a flash card sort of cart that could play homebrew and/or backups
But its probably unrealistic to hope.
are those memorycards write protected?
or can we copy and put back another file on it?
if yes, how much storage each card has?
a lot of vita games data weighs around 800MB to 4GB+…
Of course it has write protection,there was a video of a few people hooking it up to their raspberry pi and arduino boards but could not read it let alone write
some vita games save files are located on vita game cards…
if what you say is true? does that mean there’s a separate storage for the save files inside that tiny card?