Persona 4 Golden running on Android (screenshot from Gaming DJ)

The folks behind the Vita3K PS Vita emulator have just released a port of the emulator to Android devices. Although Vita emulation still has ways to go, it’s great to see it coming to modern smartphones. Early tests show that depending on the game, the result is actually surprisingly playable (check the video below)

What is Vita3K

Vita3K is a PS Vita emulator. The official Readme describes it as “an experimental PlayStation Vita emulator for Windows, Linux and macOS.”, and now Android as well. The Vita3K emulator supports OpenGL and Vulkan.(Vulkan 1.0 required for Android)

Unfortunately, although the GUI and setup work flawlessly, the emulator crashes on my own phone (Mali G76 MC4 GPU) as soon as I try to run either a homebrew or a commercial game (and the application’s log remains desperately empty in my tests).

But as multiple YouTube videos will show you, the emulator works for most people who tried, and I’m just unlucky (or my phone is too old? It does support Vulkan 1.0 though). Youtuber Gaming DJ has a great video showing all the steps to download, install, and configure the emulator for you (video below).

In his video, we see that 2D games work really well, while 3D games such as Uncharted Golden Abyss, God of War Collection, or Persona 4 Golden are more miss than hit. Conversely, in his tests of Street Fighter X Tekken the game seems playable. A 2D game such as Undertale seems to have no issue.

Clearly this is not what people would call entirely “useable” yet, but it’s a great first step, and, sharing the same codebase as Vita3K for PC, it’s clear that the Android version will benefit from the progress made on the PC version as well.

Download vita3K for Android

• You can download this release here.
• As a reminder you can also download the windows version of the Vita3K Vita emulator on the project’s github here.

Thanks to @Roc6d for the tip!