Slow, but steady progress. PS Vita emulator Vita3K keeps getting daily builds on the project’s github, with the most recent breakthrough being the release of an Android version of the emulator. Vita3K remains very much an “experimental” emulator, but keeps adding fixes and patches to support more games. Compared to last year where we had roughly 400 games playable, Vita3K now runs about 500 Commercial games, or roughly 40% of tested games.

What is Vita3K

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

What’s new in Vita3K

PS Vita Emulation compatibility is making slow but steady progress with now almost 500 games reported as playable, up from 400 last year. This remains at a rate of roughly 40% of tested games.

The big new in 2023 for Vita3K is of course Android compatibility, which was added earlier this year. Your mileage might vary depending on your phone: on my own device, the emulator refused to run a single game, but folks with a recent phone can actually enjoy a lot of Vita games, as demonstrated in the video below.

Among popular playable games on Vita3K are Persona 4 Golden, Velocity 2X, Velocity Ultra, Tales From space: Mutant Blobs attack, OlliOlli2 and Hotline Miami.

I won’t lie though, what we stated based on ourtests in 2022 remains mostly true in 2023: in our tests, “playable” didn’t necessarily mean “enjoyable”. With an RTX 2080 and a Ryzen 5600G, Persona 4 Golden ran at full 30 FPS speed (an improvement from the 15fps we experienced in 2022), but with some sound glitches, and the occasional crash or texture issue, depending on whether we were using Vulkan or OpenGL. 

Simpler games (such as homebrew game “Treasure Chasers“) work flawlessly though, and that might be were Vita3K will turn to be priceless in the years to come: as a way to preserve homebrew games that only ever made it to this platform. Vita exclusive commercial games are of course the other obvious target for playability as well (Uncharted Golden Abyss, LittleBigPlanet Vita, and more come to mind), but for now I would not recommend Vita3K to run those (compared to purchasing an actual Vita secondhand), as you might spoil the fun.

The following paragraph, which was written last year, remains true in my tests with version 3118:

I also occasionally found untested games to work pretty well, such as Broken Sword 5, which as far as I could tell worked great in the emulator. Interest is limited of course, for games which already exist, often in a superior version, on PC. And of course, there still remains a good 60% of games for which heavy work is still required. In my tests, games such as LittleBigPlanet or X-Com, as expected, were able to load, but were unplayable due to graphical glitches.

In related news, the Vita3K revived their Twitter account, and now have a ko-fi page if you want to support them.

An actual PS Vita remains the best way to enjoy Vita games today (and it’s super easy to hack!), but it’s great to see that Vita3K is getting almost daily improvements to this day!

Download Vita3K

You can Download the latest Vita3K builds here.