PlayStation Vita / Useful Notes

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Short story: Sony's successor to the PlayStation Portable turned the company's "successful failure" in the handheld gaming market into an outright financial failure. While the Vita struggled to cultivate a user base outside of its domestic Asia and became the company's lowest-selling system, the device managed to perform well enough in its home country thanks to Japan's growing preference for handheld gaming over home consoles. Despite the bad luck the Vita suffered, the handheld developed a small yet passionate cult following with smaller Asian studios and Western Indie Game makers still developing games for the system long after Sony gave up on the system, along with modders finding exploits to make the most out of the Vita's hardware.

Long story: Debuting at the beginning of 2011 in a private press conference by Sony under the name "Next Generation Portable" (or "NGP"), and bestowed with the official name of PlayStation Vita at E3 2011, pre-release reactions to Sony's newest handheld eerily mirrored those of its predecessor. Just as the PSP before it, gaming media proclaimed the Vita to be the Nintendo Killer. In light of the Nintendo 3DS's rocky start, combined with the multimedia capabilities the Vita provided and the substantial power gap between the two, Sony's handheld was once again seen as the obvious consumer buy over Nintendo's offering. After all, following their two previous systems falling below expectations in terms of sales, Sony appeared to have learned their lesson and to be making all the right moves:

Instead of using the highly custom components that the PlayStation 3 used, the Vita utilized common smartphone technology in order to ease game development.
It was the first widely-available dual analog handheld. This not only addressed one of the longstanding complaints leveled against the PSP, but also further differentiated it from the Nintendo 3DS, whose early models required an add-on for a second analog stick.
The Vita shared features similar to smartphones, such as a touch screen and motion sensor, in addition to a device called PlayStation Mobile, which allowed users connectivity between the Vita and a smartphone/tablet and essentially allowed developers to put their games onto it for free^note.
The handheld used flashcarts for physical game distribution. The original PSP suffered from minor but compounding problems that stemmed from its use of optical discs. More details are on its own Useful Notes page.

The system supported "Cross Play," a cloud saving system that allowed gamers to take up and continue their console games on their Vita using the same save file. Games that supported this were almost always "Cross Buy" titles as well, meaning that buying one version included a copy on the other platform as well.
It was visually stunning; while not as powerful as the PlayStation 3, games for the Vita did boast similar visuals, with certain titles being decent if not one-to-one ports of their home console counterparts. Need for Speed: Most Wanted (2012) in particular was acclaimed for being largely unabridged, save for less complex lighting, blockier shadows and lower-resolution textures. The system also sported an OLED screen^note at a resolution of 960×544, far surpassing the 3DS's LCD 400×240 screen.
It had the unique feature of a touch-sensitive pad on the back of the system. The first application was shown at the debut of the system demonstrating Nathan Drake of Uncharted climbing a vine. Sliding your fingers down the touch pad would cause Nate to ascend the vine.
Finally, the initial price was US$249 for the Wi-Fi only model, the same as the 3DS. The 3DS had a notoriously rocky start, so for a short while it looked like the Vita had been blessed with an opening to launch against the 3DS at a good price and steal the handheld market for Sony. There was also a model with 3G support for US$299.

So naturally, when it was released in Japan on December 17th, 2011, it performed well for its debut week... before losing almost 80% of its sales numbers the next, being outsold on Christmas week not just by its main competition^note, but by the original PSP as well. Sales also proved nonexistent following its launches in North America and Europe, with the PlayStation Vita selling only 4 million units globally by the end of its first year. The company would stop publicly revealing the sales numbers for the device due to its underwhelming performance after two years on market, instead giving combined figures for both the PSP and Vita, with even those sales projections routinely falling short. While a price cut a few months into the system's life^notefrom 24,980 yen to 19,980 yen allowed the Japanese sales to recover and establish the system as a modest seller in its home country, all attempts to fix the trend fell flat overseas. For details concerning all of this, see the analysis page.

By the end of 2013, Sony decided to shift focus with the PlayStation Vita, pushing it as a companion system to the PlayStation 4, with a firmware update allowing PS4 games to be playable on the PS Vita via Remote Play over a wireless network. This had the unfortunate effect of making the device even less desirable to consumers, as Sony was now painting the Vita as a US$200 game controller in the vein of the Wii U's Gamepad rather than a distinct gaming platform with its own library of titles. At this point, many developers outside of Japanese studios and Western indie creators had all but ceased creating games for the platform due to low sales. Sony themselves would cease development and publication of first-party content in 2015, in addition to porting the handheld's most noteworthy exclusives (such as Gravity Rush and Tearaway) to the home console, further reducing the value proposition of buying a Vita as the system's life dragged on. Production of physical game cartridges ceased in May 2018, while production of the Vita itself would end the following year in February.

Despite all this, the Vita still managed to develop a small but devoted fanbase in non-Asian markets, remaining relevant to that audience thanks to its solid library of Eastern RPGs and Visual Novels and aforementioned PS4 companion features. Regardless, the system's lack of global success meant the company currently has no plans for a successor, with various Sony executives stating that they see no future for dedicated gaming portables and the PlayStation 5 cutting out Vita support for Remote Play, though there remain unspecified plans to remain in the mobile market.

Following the footsteps of the PS2 and early versions of the PS3, the Vita is backwards compatible with PSP games and emulated PlayStation games released for the PSP, though only through downloadable games purchased from the PSN since the Vita lacks a UMD drive. The Vita has a battery life of 2-5 hours depending on the system's settings. Sony also produced a second Vita design (model PCH-2000) in 2013 that was both 20% thinner and 15% lighter, came in several colours, had 1GB of internal storage for small games and media, and replaced the OLED with an LED screen.

Sony also released a home version of the device called the PS Vita TV in Japan on November 14th, 2013. A "microconsole", the Vita TV was a HDMI device that could play PS Vita and PlayStation Plus games on the television with the use of a DualShock controller, as well as stream PS4 games onto a different television through Wi-Fi. The device's primary purpose was to form a foothold for Sony in the multi-function streaming device (Apple TV, Roku Box, etc.) market in the Eastern markets, where living room streaming admittedly had less of a foothold. Sadly, a fair chunk of Vita games are actually incompatible with it^note, though a large collection of PS1/PSN games are downloadable and compatible with it. Due to low sales, it was renamed PlayStation TV when it was released in North America and Japan the following year, to avoid association with the Vita brand.

Compared to the PS3 and PSP, the hacking/homebrew scene for the Vita family was limited and made slow progress for years due to the locked-down nature of the hardware and software. This all changed in July 2016. The firmware v3.60 and 3.65-exclusive Henkaku system hack finally allowed unsigned code to be run freely and is very simple to install straight from the internet browser, and the h-encore exploit was later developed to permit the downgrading of Vita firmware down to v3.60. Several notable developments have resulted from this. The Retroarch multi-console emulator was ported to the Vita, giving good support for all consoles up to and including — though largely redundant because of Adrenaline detailed below — the PS1 (and they're working on the Nintendo 64!). A number of retro PC games also received unofficial ports, ranging from Wolfenstein 3D and Doom (but of course it runs Doom) to Half-Life and Grand Theft Auto III (!!!). Vita Shell is a comprehensive file manager, allowing access to all partitions of the system^note, a FTP for transferring files wirelessly, a QR reader for scanning files in from websites and a USB functionality to allow direct access to the memory card on your PC for the Vita (but not the PSTV)^note. It used to be necessary to use one of those methods to transfer .VPK homebrew files to the Vita, but an ingenious program named Vita Homebrew Loader allows for direct downloads of said files to the device. Similarly, a simple plugin allows for more unconfined downloading via the internet browser, such as classic Sega Genesis ROMs for example.

The Adrenaline custom PSP firmware program allows the entire PSP OS (including the ubiquitous X Cross Media Bar interface) to be emulated on the Vita, essentially allowing you to do anything within that environment that you could with a regular PSP and granting the Vita total backwards compatibility with the PSP and PS1. Henkaku on its own relies on a browser re-install every time the system is rebooted, but the Enso variant has been unleashed to allow permanance of the system modification and removing the requirement to use the browser^note. The VitaDock is a homebrew dock peripheral in the form of a Raspberry Pi build (which, being a Pi, you can assemble yourself) that streams the Vita's output from its USB port to a video player on a TV or monitor, allowing the Vita to function as both a handheld and a home console simultaneously ala the Nintendo Switch. Finally and perhaps most significantly, two important developments have occurred to tackle the notorious problem with overpriced proprietary memory cards (and their reportedly occasional failure rate). On the PSTV side, the USB port has been harnessed to provide this form of storage media via Vita Shell (but note that hard drives must be externally powered for example by a Y-splitter cable)^note.

More generally, the Vita gamecard format has been tinkered with to allow micro-SD cards to be mounted in a card reader, known as "SD2Vita". These readers have progressed from crude prototypes to full-on duplicates of the gamecard board, allowing them to fit flush and pretty in the game slot. This represents a several-fold increase in value when you compare like-to-like prices, R/W speeds and the ease of interface access of Sony and micro-SD card storage, and is essentially limited in capacity only by the constraints of the format ^note. If you're concerned about these devices preventing gamecards from being played, it's possible to use a plugin to switch the ux0 (primary) and uma0 (secondary/backup) partitions back and forth between the official Sony card and SD2Vita, allowing you to use the Sony card for gamecard installs and saves ^note.

All in all, with Sony abandoning official support for the Vita (going up to attempting to close the platform's online store on August 27, 2021, which was reversed on April 19 following a big blowback from the handheld's cult following), the homebrew scene is thriving and breathing new life into the scene alongside developers who are still making official games for the console.

Technical specifications

Processors

The CPU is a quad core 32-bit ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore that can run up to 444 MHz, however, the CPU only runs at 333 MHz to save battery life. Despite being 32-bit, it does come with a plethora of nice features.
Like the Game Boy Advance of yonder drawing on the Game Boy Color's processor, the Vita also includes a 333 MHz MIPS32 R4000 R4k-based CPUs ^note for broad PSP compatibility. This was originally confined to the PSP side, but hackers are just now (as of early 2020) looking at leveraging the MIPS and ARM processors together for even better homebrew projects.
The GPU is a quad core PowerVR SGX543+ running at 111 MHz. Compute performance for the GPU is far worse than the PS3's Reality Synthesizer^note at 28.4 GFLOPS versus 228.8 for the RSX.

Memory

512 MB of general purpose RAM
128 MB of video RAM
The PCH-2000 model has 1GB of internal storage.
External data is officially saved onto proprietary memory cards, not the more commonly used (but not quite common) MemorySticks used in the PSP. Comes in sizes of 4 GB up to 64 GB, with Read and Write rates equivalent to Class-2 and Class-4 SD cards.
Vita games come in game cartridges, like the Nintendo DS and 3DS. Games may reserve some space for save files or patches.
- PSP and PS1 games are run from the memory card.

Graphics

The 5" OLED display has a resolution of 960x566 with a 16.7 million color output
- The PCH-2000 model uses an LCD instead.
The GPU makes 140 million triangles and 4 gigapixels per second per core. Totaling all that up puts this at 560 million triangles and 16 gigapixels per second.
- Polygon-wise, this puts it worse than the PS3 (560 million versus 800 million per second). However, you probably will be hard pressed to notice any issues with polygonal edges because of the smaller resolution.
- Fillrate-wise, this is much better than the PS3 (16 gigapixels versus 6.8 gigapixels per second).

Other

Two touch interfaces, one on the screen, the other on the back.
Two cameras, one on the front, the other on the back.
Accelerometer for motion sensing.
802.11n wireless
Bluetooth 2.1
The 2200mAH battery is rated for about 3-5 hours of game time.
The PCH-2000 model adds a USB Micro port and about an additional hour of battery life.