I recently decided to jailbreak my day one OLED Vita and I wish I had done it ages ago.
I had a fat PS3 with CFW that I was was planning to use as a retro machine. That plan lasted until I booted up Pokemon FireRed.
If you’ve ever tried to play a GameBoy Advance game on a 55 inch 4K TV you’ll know exactly why that brief experience convinced me to finally jailbreak the Vita.
Aside from being able to play retro games a jailbroken Vita removes the need for the expensive proprietary memory cards the system requires. You still need a small one to install the jailbreak but you can avoid the more expensive 8GB & 16GB ones.
With a £4 adapter and an £18 micro sd card my Vita now has 256GB of storage. Which frankly isn’t enough as it’s almost full.
As for what games a jailbroken Vita can play it can obviously play Vita games but now you can play backups of your owned games without needing to swap out the game cart.
It will also play games from the following consoles.
Second gen
• Atari 2600
• Atari 5200
• Colecovision
• Intellivision
• Magnavox Odyssey
• Vectrex
Third gen
• Atari 7800
• NES
• Sega Master System
Fourth gen
• Atari Lynx
• Gameboy
• Gameboy Color
• Game Gear
• PC-Engine/TurboGrafx-16
• Sega Mega Drive/Genesis
• SNES
Fifth gen
• Neo Geo Pocket
• Nintendo 64
• PlayStation
Sixth gen
• Gameboy Advance
• Bandai Wonderswan
Seventh gen
• PSP
Computers
• Commodore 64
• Commodore Amiga
• ZX Spectrum
There are emulators for the Nintendo DS and the Dreamcast but the DS emulator was abandoned by its developers a long time ago.
The Dreamcast emulator while it technically works I tried two games that are listed as perfect compatibility that were nowhere close to playable with glitched graphics and major slowdowns.
Nintendo 64 emulation can be hit and miss but I’m currently playing Super Mario 64 for the first time and it’s running fine.
The Vita will also run the entire PSP firmware which is how you play PSP and PS1 games with damn near perfect compatibility.
So if you want an almost complete retro emulation machine (that isn’t a bulky PC) with an absolutely gorgeous OLED screen than a Vita is what you should buy.
If you want to jailbreak your Vita I followed this guide.
Fantastic info. Thank you for sharing.
Vita is really great for emulator. Played old PS1 games a lot in mine
Was there a specific guide/video you followed to do this?
I used this guide. But if you prefer a video version there are lots on YouTube.
vita.hacks.guide
When you play vita games on it, try using vitagrafix and lolicon (an over clocking tool). A lot of games can actually run at 60+ fps or at a higher screen resolution!
I thought about over clocking it but won’t that affect battery life? It already isn’t great as it’s 10+ years old.
Will overclocking improve emulation too?
It will make your battery empty faster, but you could also underclock it when you play less demanding games. And yes, it will also help for emulation!
I suppose I can install the plugins and if it drains the battery too fast I could just uninstall them. Presumably they are in Autoplugin 2?
Yep, both are on autoplugin. Do note for vitagrafix the community also has made patches that you manually have to add to the config files if you want to use it. For example for Freedom wars, salt and sanctuary and Akiba trip.
Any issues with games not saving? I don’t like using save states as I prefer a more classic experience, but after closing the game and reloading it the data wasn’t there.
I had this problem with RetroArch.
It depends how you’re closing the game. You have to bring up the quick menu and close the game from there. Double tapping the PS button and closing RetroArch will lose your data.
Hear, hear! The Vita is such an astoundingly good retro games machine.
the vita ia a great piece of kit. i just wish it was thicker as with how thin it is its hard for me to hold for long period of time gaming. while the deck is thicker and more ergonomic. also the bigger buttons helps a lot.
I keep watching reviews of devices like Retroid and Anbernic, I still think the Vita is a better experience.
