Qwikrazor just released a port of ARK for Vita Firmware 3.52. Incidentally, this release also works on firmwares 3.5x (including 3.51) and 3.3x

What is ARK for PS Vita?

ARK is a PSP Emulator Custom Firmware for your Vita. It supports most PSP Homebrews, plugins, and backups, as well as PS1 games

Features:

• PSX game support (soundless so far, our sound plugin is too glitchy for public use at the moment)
• ISO/CSO game support
• NoDRM Engine for decrypted dlc playback
• MS-SpeedBoost (most noticable on games like soul calibur)
• Stargate Game Patches (fixes several anti-cfw games)
• Customizable Main Menu
• Plugin support
• Recovery support
• ISO-cache support (speed up ISO gaming)

How to: Install ARK on PS Vita Firmware 3.52

Alright, let’s make things clear: the process to get this to work is fairly complex, and requires lots of manual steps. Hopefully at some point people will automate some of this, but this is what we have for now.

Installing ARK on PS Vita Firmware relies on the recently revealed email hack, the same thing that was used for the Playstation TV hack (whitelist).

The idea is that you are going to “inject” ARK into one of your existing PSP games on the PS vita. The PSP Game in question must be one for which you own the real license, and it doesn’t seem to work with all games. some people have had success with free Demos. Qwikrazor mentions that PSP games used in past exploit might not work, as Sony have added special additional securities on these games.

Hackinformer have a good (but complex) tutorial on how to get things done with this technique (see below).

Remember that PS vita 3.55 was just released today and patches the vulnerabilities required to perform this hack. Do not update if you plan to use ARK.

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From Qwikrazor:

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Included NP.ISO is the necessary loader for ARK.

Follow tutorial here to install ARK ISO using MajorGas method

For the above, you must have a base game installed from PSN, and it should not be a crappy minis,
and full PSP games with previous exploits may not work, but I haven’t tested much.
In my tests, Pool Hall Pro and Numblast didn’t work.

I have provided three separate saves, which have different patches/kexploit depending on the firmware.
For 3.3X, it is possible to create folders in ms0:/PSP/GAME/, but it has been patched in 3.5X.
Folder names should be self-explanatory for which one you require.

In the “menu” folder, you can choose the menu of your choice, current menu in ARK save is ONEMenu,
drag and drop the files into the ARK_01234 save so that VBOOT.PBP is at root of ARK_01234/.

To exit homebrew/ISO, hold button combo L + R + Start + Down.

To enable plugins:
Make a file called PLUGINS.TXT inside ARK_01234/.
Here are some examples for the format to use.
game,ms0:/seplugins/cwcheat.prx,1
game,ms0:/seplugins/tempar.prx,true
umdemu,ms0:/seplugins/cwcheat.prx,on
pops,ms0:/seplugins/cwcheatpops.prx,enabled

As you can see, the format is mode,path,switch

mode:
“game” should be used for homebrew.
“umdemu” should be used for ISO/CSO/PSN.
“pops” should be used for PS1 games.

path points to plugin.

To enable, you can use “1”, “true”, “on” or “enabled”.

Thanks to the authors of ARK, Coldbird and Virtuous Flame.

Note:
This is not ARK-2 or ARK-3, it is the very first ARK, updated for later firmwares.

I hope I didn’t forget anything, enjoy.

Download ARK for PS Vita 3.52

You can download ARK for PS Vita 3.52 here

I’ll be honest here, I don’t think I remember a hack ever being that complicated (in terms of the manual steps required), so I’m hoping tools will show up to make things easier for those of us who can’t get it to work. Nevertheless, impressive work as always from Qwikrazor, Mr.Gas, and the other devs on the vita scene!

Please report success/failure in the comments below, and don’t hesitate to ask for help in our forums

Source: Qwikrazor