The PS TV has always been a promising device, but its many limitations made it sub par. Some of these limitations, such as the PS TV whitelist, are plain stupid: Sony decided to prevent you from playing certain Vita Games on your PS TV. The rules on which games can go into the whitelist or not seem pretty random. Although the PS TV does not have a touch screen, which makes som PS Vita games incompatible, this was never the whole story, and some games that would play perfectly well on the PS TV are not part of the Whitelist.

Mr.Gas and Qwikrazor87 have now fixed this problem, through a hack. The hack is extremely simple, and as we announced a few days ago, involves the email client on the PS Vita. The Technique should work on any firmware up to 3.52 included.

The steps are fairly simple:

PSTV Whitelist hack – The Easy way

I’m not entirely sure the following works. I’ve had mixed results with testers, and I don’t have a PSTV myself so I can’t test. Give it a try, and if it does not work scroll down for the manual way.

1. Go to http://wololo.net/talk/pstv_whitelist/.
2. Enter your email (the one you use on your ps vita) and click submit
3. You should receive 3 emails on your Vita. One is named “Activate PSTV Writer”. Open it.
4. Click on the attached picture. You will see an error message
5. DON’T CLICK on OK. Instead, press the PS Button, and quit the email app.
6. Open the email app again. It is possible you have to connect to your email account from scratch again, this is normal
7. Open the email entitled ur0:game/launch/list_launch_vita.dat. click on the attached file (#0), and you will see the same error again
8. As above, DO NOT CLICK on OK, but press the PS Button and quit the email app.
9. You’re done, you should now be able to play all Vita games on your PSTV
   

   Screenshot thanks to Rich! on neogaf

10. If you also want to unlock all PSP and PS1 games, open the email ur0:game/launch/list_launch_emu.dat, open the attached file (#0), and as above, just press the PS Button to quit the app.

Thanks to xmax katsu and @Shirai1Kuro for verifying my page works 🙂

PSTV Whitelist hack – The manual way

If the system above does not work for you, try the solution below

1. Download this file: writer.eml.
2. Open that file with thunderbird or any other email client on your PC, and forward it to your email account on the Vita’s email app
3. Load the vita email app, and open the email you just sent:

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Click on the attached image. You will get an error message

DO NOT CLICK OK on the error message. Instead, press the PS button and quit the app.

4. Open the Vita email app again. You might have to enter your mail account’s credentials again, this is normal. Your vita email client is now ready for the hack.
5. Download list_launch_vita.dat and rename it to #0 , with NO file extension
6. Email it to your vita’s registered email address with the following subject: ur0:game/launch/list_launch_vita.dat

To clarify again. Your email contains the file “#0”, and the subject above, that’s it.

Note: to unblock PSP/PS1 games, you can email the same file with the same process, with the subject ur0:game/launch/list_launch_emu.dat

You should now be able to run all of your digital games on the PSTV. Enjoy!

for those of you who prefer a video, here’s a cool tutorial by domthybomb:

 

Known issues and limitations

• Not all games get whitelisted by this technique, Mr. Gas mentions that some newer games have additional security checks.
• There’s a bit of “trial and error” with this, for some reason. If the automated system does not work for you, try the manual one, and vice-versa.
• Resetting your Vita TV will remove the hack, and you’ll have to run through the steps again. However, putting the Vita TV in “sleep” mode will not remove the hack
• People have had a hard time getting the Vita email client to work with gmail. Gmail considers that client insecure. Here is how to enable Gmail on your PS Vita/PS TV if you run into issues

If you need more help, head over to this thread on our forums!

More details and hacks on our Playstation TV Hack page!

Note: we’ve been super late on this, despite it being a huge breakthrough for PSTV owners. I’ll blame my real life on this one, as I had a pretty busy week. The manual steps above have been shamelessly copied from hackinformer, via Neogaf. The tool at http://wololo.net/talk/pstv_whitelist/, however, is my work (and I totally reused some UI from psmplus thanks to Major Tom).