7 ms·

I'm a huge fan of the original PSP and the homebrew/jailbreaking scene that came out of it. I recently acquired a PS Vita and have been enjoying it's native and

I'm a huge fan of the original PSP and the homebrew/jailbreaking scene that came out of it. I recently acquired a PS Vita and have been enjoying it's native and homebrew offerings. It's also surprising that the homebrew scene is still fairly active there too. Apparently there's some potential for Android game ports. I wish Sony didn't let the PS Vita flop, it feels like it had so much potential at the time.

tmtvl 2y ago
I preordered a Vita back in the day and when I got it I immediately fell in love with it. It fits in a pocket and it has way better analogue sticks than that garbage the PSP had. I still use it to this day because I can't fit my Steam Deck in my pocket. And I concur that its potential did kinda go to waste. Imagine if we had Shadow of the Colossus and Demon's Souls available on it.
- bitmasher9 2y ago
  The Vita1000 OLEDs in general haven’t aged well, but the Vita2000 is still a strong option for mobile gaming. The handheld emulation machines aren’t made with the same build quality and the Steamdeck style consoles aren’t massive by comparison. The Switch Lite is another fine choice, but still much bigger than the PSPVita 2000. I’m hoping strong sales of the PSPortal encourages development into a standalone mobile device, but I’m not hopeful it’ll replace my PSP3000/Vita2000 for daily driving.
  - theshackleford 2y ago
    My vita oled still functions fine? I have non oled variants as well but I feel no reason to use them, they just exist as spares. Have the OLEDs all started dying or something?
    - hx8 2y ago
      OLEDs degrade faster and stronger than CRT or LCD. OLEDs have three major sources of degradation. The percentage of Vitas will good OLED screens are significantly decreasing. * Burn in. Everyone knows about this, not a huge issue on most Vitas. * Use degradation. Using the OLED panel will slowly cause it to become more dim, and each color dims at a different rate. Blue dims 10% by 1k hours, and by 10k hours you can expect half total brightness. The Vita was released 10 years ago, and many of them have seen thousands of hours of gameplay by now. * UV exposure. UV radiation is damaging to OLED displays, even when powered off. Long periods of small exposure, even if kept enclosed in storage, can damage the display. For Vita displays this is the major problem. Vitas that were rarely used outside/near windows, and were stored in dark places will have the least amount of UV damage. All of them should be noticeably more dim than their time of manufacture if it were possible to compare side by side.
      - theshackleford 2y ago
        Ah yeah, i'm aware of OLED issues. But my Vita OLED shows none of these, save for some diminished brightness perhaps. But I only play them indoors anyway and honestly at this point, i've exhausted most of the library worth playing exclusively on the vita, and I have better emulation machines. The OLED vita side by side with the non OLED is still my preferred display. You are right though, if you want to rack up thousands of hours and add another decade onto the decade already past, the LCD unit is the better bet.
        hx8 2y ago
        I have two OLED Vitas, a beat up one I used for 10 years and a gently used complete in box I imported from Japan. I prefer the LCD, and have for several years. However this is only a recent development (3-4 years) when I noticed the LCD at max brightness was significantly better in bright conditions than the OLED was. I've checked some of my friend's OLED Vitas too, and none of them are nearly as good as they were in the old days. The hue shift on some of the screens is pretty noticeable. Looking back the old screen was awesome. Going forward I think the LCD Vitas will be a better pick.
  - gambiting 2y ago
    >>The Vita1000 OLEDs in general haven’t aged well Really? That's an interesting opinion - I own both and vastly prefer the original Vita due to that OLED screen, it's just better in every way(the screen).
    - radicaldreamer 2y ago
      The white Vita OLED was an excellent device
    - hx8 2y ago
      The 60 grams of weight and 3.5mm of depth are very noticeable on a handheld.
      - tmtvl 2y ago
        I dunno, I seem to recall the original Gameboy being this huge brick and that was entirely fine. Dunno where I put it, though... might've tossed it when I got my Gameboy Colour, which seems like the stupid kind of thing I would've done in my early teens.
    - FactKnower69 2y ago
      not really an opinion, the mura effect is the ubiquitous and well-documented flaw of Vita 1000 OLEDs
      - tightbookkeeper 2y ago
        You can’t have an opinion about whether a flaw bothers you?
    - Hamuko 2y ago
      The slim fits in the hands better and charges via micro-USB.
  - dgellow 2y ago
    My vita1000 is still as it was on release, I personally love the screen
    - JansjoFromIkea 2y ago
      screen is great, feels really high quality in general, but the proprietary charging port and lack of internal storage are huge negatives against it
      - dgellow 2y ago
        Yeah, that’s fair
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  calling the PSP nub an analog stick is almost an insult to the Vita. It was this flat protrusion that you can switch out caps on, and you move it around like some thinkpad nub for analog movement. It made sense for the time, but I still ponder why they never added two of them. Held back so many potential games. And yes, I still consider the Vita the last true "portable". potability in my mind implies pocketability, and the Switch and every other non-phone went beyond that. Devices like the Ayaneo Air do give me hope that that "pocketable" market may make a comback sooner than we think, though.
  - s1gsegv 2y ago
    I have a Retroid Pocket Flip that I’ve loved for this exact reason. It’s just about powerful enough for Gamecube. More recent iterations are definitely powerful enough, and Gamecube is the library I love to play most.
  - flessner 2y ago
    A "pocketable" gaming console in the modern world is essentially a smartphone with analog sticks. There are "controller grips" or "controller mounts" for phones readily available and you can even pair it with Steam in-house streaming or Moonlight to play games at a quality that is impossible at this form factor for cheap. Even at larger sizes it's difficult - The Nintendo Switch only worked because of great franchises and IP. The Steam Deck also required great technological investment into Linux and platform familiarity. It's not hard to see why barely anyone's trying...
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      Yeah, from a logistics point of view I understand it. No one is going to design a smartphone game to be gamepad first , and with the huge cloud push there's less pressure to make console games work on mobile anyway. So the last bastion (unless you have an amazing networking solution in your household) is basically "wait for Windows PCs to become almost smartphone sized". I do in fact have a smartphone with a controller mount. Mostly for emulators at this point. But most of the time it can feel like no one is really taking advantadge of the hardware capabilities of modern phone hardware.
- ninetyninenine 2y ago
  the ps2 emulator can run these pretty well (pcsx2). Though I haven't tried it on the steam deck I'm sure you can get SoTC and Demon's Souls on the deck via emulation.
- radiKal07 2y ago
  Check out Ayn Odin 2 Mini, it's an Android handheld with a PS Vita design, you can use it to emulate lots of games too (including Vita using Vita3k emulator).
  - BossingAround 2y ago
    At first, I thought it was like $35, and was almost ready to order it. Then, I realized, in my morning haze, that I'm not seeing the decimal point, and it is actually $340. For that kind of cash, you might as well get the real Vita from a second-hand market. Better yet, for that kind of cash, get Steam Deck, unless you have some restrictions like OP (i.e. "SD is too big")
    - volfonibros 2y ago
      The real Vita can't play every PS2 game, or any GC game. Different device. And the Steam Deck is vastly different in pocketability, yes.
  - tmtvl 2y ago
    It seems interesting, but I hate asymmetric gamepad layouts. That's one thing I quite like about the Steam Deck: that they made the layout symmetric.
zerocrates 2y ago
They had a variety of issues around cost, competition with Nintendo, their fiddly and expensive proprietary memory card format, but I think just letting it die was a consequence of the then-widely-held view that handheld gaming, and maybe all dedicated console gaming, was sure to be killed by the smartphone. So they let themselves believe that its poor performance was just an inevitable result of a changing market, not the result of their own avoidable mistakes.
- fidotron 2y ago
  Honestly, my view is the Vita was the wrong product at the wrong time. At the time it came out mobile SoCs were improving so rapidly it was never going to maintain an edge over phones for the normal console lifespan. You rightly call out the storage, but it is far from clear what other options really existed. Flash/SSD storage was quite expensive at that time. And market wise, the Sony audience (even more so then) would not have been remotely receptive to the sort of games that made the Switch popular later on. It was doomed from conception, and the other mistakes were inevitable after that.
  - goosedragons 2y ago
    How many mobile games look better than what the Vita was putting out? Even today. CoD Mobile despite releasing 7 years after CoD Black Ops Declassified on Vita and having way better phone SoCs is barely an improvement. The Switch still happily runs games off microSD cards. The home consoles didn't get SSDs till 2020. For Vita, the cards were fast enough. The problem was the proprietary nature of the cards. They just cost way too much for the size especially as time wore on. I think at the time I imported my 64GB Vita card, a microSD card of the same size was half the price. By the end of the Vita's life the 32GB card was laughably bad value.
    - gambiting 2y ago
      Genshin Impact mobile is pretty much on par with PC/console versions, and Vita couldn't do anything even remotely close to it in terms of scale. Although games like Killzone and Uncharted definitely pushed the envelope in terms of what was possible with the Vita, really great games.
benoau 2y ago
I remember getting the PSP, and this was the iPod and PDA era, the PSP was just absolutely amazing. It was better than anything else by far, even with the silly little UMD optical discs. Thanks to EU regulations pressuring Apple's restrictions you can get PPSSPP for iPhone now and the games still hold up amazingly well.
- goosedragons 2y ago
  The Vita, as flawed as it was, was pretty incredible at release too. The OLED screen, the PS3ish level visuals, a second analog stick finally. It was easily my favorite console from when I got it until I picked up a Switch. Sony really bungled it with the over draconian DRM and proprietary memory cards. Had it used microSD cards and not been SO anal about how anything got on there it could have done a lot better. And had they ditched the back touch panel and added real R2/L2 in New 3DS style and perhaps clickable thumbsticks, it could have been something!
  - gambiting 2y ago
    I think Sony was just incredibly scared of having a repeat of the PSP situation where piracy was absolutely dominating, they sold crazy number of consoles and very few games(comparatively). I knew at least 10-15 people with PSPs when I was a teenager and none of us ever owned a single actual PSP game on a disc.
cheeseomlit 2y ago
Same, the PSP was my first introduction to homebrew gaming and custom firmware. Having all those emulators on a handheld blew my mind back then. I actually still have it in a drawer somewhere- which reminds me, check your battery! You don't want a bloated battery ruining such a lovely device (or burning your house down)
- bpye 2y ago
  I recently found my PSP with the battery cover popped off by a swollen battery! I'll need to pick up a new one but I'm glad to have caught it before anything too catastrophic happened.
Sarkie 2y ago
https://android.rinnegatamante.it/ https://android.rinnegatamante.it/
ElCapitanMarkla 2y ago
Hardware wise it was a fantastic console, I picked an OLED version up a couple of years ago. The problem I always had was the lack of games. There were a handful of good titles but nothing really blew me away. I think I spent more time playing Risk or Rain than anything else.
- zelos 2y ago
  Back when I was commuting by train every day, the Vita was my favourite console. It felt like it got a lot of great ports of the big indie titles of the time, plus a decent number of bigger titles: Hotline Miami, Spelunky, Stealth Inc, Wipeout 2048, Resogun, Super stardust, Persona 4, Guacamelee.
  - jonhohle 2y ago
    It’s a great indie machine. LRG and Playasia did a great job of keeping smaller games on carts throughout the Vita’s life.
corysama 2y ago
I never followed the Vita homebrew scene. But, what I've read from following the single board computer emulation scene is that Vita homebrew took a while to pick up speed. But, today the Vita is a respectable portable emulation device on par with many small SBCs currently being manufactured. https://docs.libretro.com/guides/install-psv/ https://docs.libretro.com/guides/install-psv/
- MegaDeKay 2y ago
  That is "just" retroarch. There is a huge amount of homebrew out there for the Vita beyond retroarch. Dead Space, anyone??? https://www.rinnegatamante.eu/vitadb/#/ https://www.rinnegatamante.eu/vitadb/#/
Vitamin_Sushi 2y ago
I miss the PSP jailbreaking scene. Back when I was in high school, I made quite the pocket change cutting PCB traces on people's PSP batteries. Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure that got me interested in electronics in the first place.
- hansonkd 2y ago
  Writing homebrew for PSP was my first introduction to programming and my gateway to Python (through PyGame).
- gambiting 2y ago
  Haha, same. And that's how I got into programming, making homebrew games for my PSP - I taught myself C++, and I even participated in several competitions for homebrew, PSPSnake was one that got thousands of downloads, for a 15 year old that was crazy cool.
  - yard2010 2y ago
    Haha first piece of code I wrote in C++, when I was in highschool, was for April fools joke - I made a homebrew app that should do something really could (I can't remember) and after few seconds of loading, it displayed a blue screen saying "skynet" has breached your PSP and you got pawned. After 3 seconds it showed "It's April 1 you fool". It was so stupid. It took me forever to make, but it was worth it. I gave my friends from the local PSP scene a heart attack, then a good laugh of relief. Fun times.
deergomoo 2y ago
The first code I ever wrote was for my PSP with custom firmware. I used the Lua Player homebrew, setting up a C toolchain was far over my head at the time. I think I spent more time tinkering with that console than I ever did playing games, even though the games were great. I picked up a PSP Go a couple of years ago and that thing is awesome. It flopped hard at the time due to being digital only before people were more okay with that, and because there was no way to play any UMD games you might have already owned. But with custom firmware it’s terrific; it’s less feasible to use a microSD card (unlike the cheap adapters for the original’s Memory Stick Duo), but it has 16GB onboard flash which is perfectly serviceable given PSP ISOs max out at 1.8GB before compression.
pjmlp 2y ago
For a while PSP did had official indie support, there was an Objective-C SDK, a later one in C#, but unfortunely they killed both approaches, because like with PS2Linux, probably people weren't using them for actual new indie games. The related developer sites aren't even online anylonger.
- aktau 2y ago
  Objective-C? That seems like an odd choice, did they want to attract iOS developers? (I know someone ported the mobile game Angry Birds to PSP at some point). Do you have more information about this?
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    I was partially wrong, it wasn't for the PSP, rather something else, https://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/11/25/0432204/Sony-Adopts-Objective-C-and-GNUstep-Frameworks https://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/11/25/0432204/Sony-Adopt... https://www.slashgear.com/sony-snap-connected-device-app-framework-frozen-25116290 https://www.slashgear.com/sony-snap-connected-device-app-fra... And for completness here are some articles about the C# SDK, https://venturebeat.com/games/ps-vita-sdk/ https://venturebeat.com/games/ps-vita-sdk/ https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/535325/Hello-World-on-the-PlayStation-Vita-Deploying-code https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/535325/Hello-World-on-t...
Narhem 2y ago
The packaging for the Vita was as close as you can get to perfect. i check the prices for Vitas every now and then. Reminded me of Star Trek tricorders growing up. Especially with location based games which worked without GPS. Neet programming hacks was the coolest part of playing with embedded electronics.
fennecbutt 2y ago
It was almost 100% because they had a home and portable console. A lot of the games coming out on vita were also on ps4 and Sony never really seemed interested in creating exclusive games for portable platform. Which is exactly why Nintendo forwent the split and went with a combination home/portable with the switch, otherwise one side would cannibalise the other. Whats also interesting that the psp go did the whole portable + TV thing long before the switch. Goes to show that it's not the form factor, it's the franchises for games.

tmtvl 2y ago

I preordered a Vita back in the day and when I got it I immediately fell in love with it. It fits in a pocket and it has way better analogue sticks than that garbage the PSP had. I still use it to this day because I can't fit my Steam Deck in my pocket. And I concur that its potential did kinda go to waste. Imagine if we had Shadow of the Colossus and Demon's Souls available on it.

bitmasher9 2y ago
The Vita1000 OLEDs in general haven’t aged well, but the Vita2000 is still a strong option for mobile gaming. The handheld emulation machines aren’t made with the same build quality and the Steamdeck style consoles aren’t massive by comparison. The Switch Lite is another fine choice, but still much bigger than the PSPVita 2000. I’m hoping strong sales of the PSPortal encourages development into a standalone mobile device, but I’m not hopeful it’ll replace my PSP3000/Vita2000 for daily driving.
- theshackleford 2y ago
  My vita oled still functions fine? I have non oled variants as well but I feel no reason to use them, they just exist as spares. Have the OLEDs all started dying or something?
  - hx8 2y ago
    OLEDs degrade faster and stronger than CRT or LCD. OLEDs have three major sources of degradation. The percentage of Vitas will good OLED screens are significantly decreasing. * Burn in. Everyone knows about this, not a huge issue on most Vitas. * Use degradation. Using the OLED panel will slowly cause it to become more dim, and each color dims at a different rate. Blue dims 10% by 1k hours, and by 10k hours you can expect half total brightness. The Vita was released 10 years ago, and many of them have seen thousands of hours of gameplay by now. * UV exposure. UV radiation is damaging to OLED displays, even when powered off. Long periods of small exposure, even if kept enclosed in storage, can damage the display. For Vita displays this is the major problem. Vitas that were rarely used outside/near windows, and were stored in dark places will have the least amount of UV damage. All of them should be noticeably more dim than their time of manufacture if it were possible to compare side by side.
    - theshackleford 2y ago
      Ah yeah, i'm aware of OLED issues. But my Vita OLED shows none of these, save for some diminished brightness perhaps. But I only play them indoors anyway and honestly at this point, i've exhausted most of the library worth playing exclusively on the vita, and I have better emulation machines. The OLED vita side by side with the non OLED is still my preferred display. You are right though, if you want to rack up thousands of hours and add another decade onto the decade already past, the LCD unit is the better bet.
      - hx8 2y ago
        I have two OLED Vitas, a beat up one I used for 10 years and a gently used complete in box I imported from Japan. I prefer the LCD, and have for several years. However this is only a recent development (3-4 years) when I noticed the LCD at max brightness was significantly better in bright conditions than the OLED was. I've checked some of my friend's OLED Vitas too, and none of them are nearly as good as they were in the old days. The hue shift on some of the screens is pretty noticeable. Looking back the old screen was awesome. Going forward I think the LCD Vitas will be a better pick.
- gambiting 2y ago
  >>The Vita1000 OLEDs in general haven’t aged well Really? That's an interesting opinion - I own both and vastly prefer the original Vita due to that OLED screen, it's just better in every way(the screen).
  - radicaldreamer 2y ago
    The white Vita OLED was an excellent device
  - hx8 2y ago
    The 60 grams of weight and 3.5mm of depth are very noticeable on a handheld.
    - tmtvl 2y ago
      I dunno, I seem to recall the original Gameboy being this huge brick and that was entirely fine. Dunno where I put it, though... might've tossed it when I got my Gameboy Colour, which seems like the stupid kind of thing I would've done in my early teens.
  - FactKnower69 2y ago
    not really an opinion, the mura effect is the ubiquitous and well-documented flaw of Vita 1000 OLEDs
    - tightbookkeeper 2y ago
      You can’t have an opinion about whether a flaw bothers you?
  - Hamuko 2y ago
    The slim fits in the hands better and charges via micro-USB.
- dgellow 2y ago
  My vita1000 is still as it was on release, I personally love the screen
  - JansjoFromIkea 2y ago
    screen is great, feels really high quality in general, but the proprietary charging port and lack of internal storage are huge negatives against it
    - dgellow 2y ago
      Yeah, that’s fair
johnnyanmac 2y ago
calling the PSP nub an analog stick is almost an insult to the Vita. It was this flat protrusion that you can switch out caps on, and you move it around like some thinkpad nub for analog movement. It made sense for the time, but I still ponder why they never added two of them. Held back so many potential games. And yes, I still consider the Vita the last true "portable". potability in my mind implies pocketability, and the Switch and every other non-phone went beyond that. Devices like the Ayaneo Air do give me hope that that "pocketable" market may make a comback sooner than we think, though.
- s1gsegv 2y ago
  I have a Retroid Pocket Flip that I’ve loved for this exact reason. It’s just about powerful enough for Gamecube. More recent iterations are definitely powerful enough, and Gamecube is the library I love to play most.
- flessner 2y ago
  A "pocketable" gaming console in the modern world is essentially a smartphone with analog sticks. There are "controller grips" or "controller mounts" for phones readily available and you can even pair it with Steam in-house streaming or Moonlight to play games at a quality that is impossible at this form factor for cheap. Even at larger sizes it's difficult - The Nintendo Switch only worked because of great franchises and IP. The Steam Deck also required great technological investment into Linux and platform familiarity. It's not hard to see why barely anyone's trying...
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    Yeah, from a logistics point of view I understand it. No one is going to design a smartphone game to be gamepad first , and with the huge cloud push there's less pressure to make console games work on mobile anyway. So the last bastion (unless you have an amazing networking solution in your household) is basically "wait for Windows PCs to become almost smartphone sized". I do in fact have a smartphone with a controller mount. Mostly for emulators at this point. But most of the time it can feel like no one is really taking advantadge of the hardware capabilities of modern phone hardware.
ninetyninenine 2y ago
the ps2 emulator can run these pretty well (pcsx2). Though I haven't tried it on the steam deck I'm sure you can get SoTC and Demon's Souls on the deck via emulation.
radiKal07 2y ago
Check out Ayn Odin 2 Mini, it's an Android handheld with a PS Vita design, you can use it to emulate lots of games too (including Vita using Vita3k emulator).
- BossingAround 2y ago
  At first, I thought it was like $35, and was almost ready to order it. Then, I realized, in my morning haze, that I'm not seeing the decimal point, and it is actually $340. For that kind of cash, you might as well get the real Vita from a second-hand market. Better yet, for that kind of cash, get Steam Deck, unless you have some restrictions like OP (i.e. "SD is too big")
  - volfonibros 2y ago
    The real Vita can't play every PS2 game, or any GC game. Different device. And the Steam Deck is vastly different in pocketability, yes.
- tmtvl 2y ago
  It seems interesting, but I hate asymmetric gamepad layouts. That's one thing I quite like about the Steam Deck: that they made the layout symmetric.

zerocrates 2y ago

They had a variety of issues around cost, competition with Nintendo, their fiddly and expensive proprietary memory card format, but I think just letting it die was a consequence of the then-widely-held view that handheld gaming, and maybe all dedicated console gaming, was sure to be killed by the smartphone. So they let themselves believe that its poor performance was just an inevitable result of a changing market, not the result of their own avoidable mistakes.

fidotron 2y ago
Honestly, my view is the Vita was the wrong product at the wrong time. At the time it came out mobile SoCs were improving so rapidly it was never going to maintain an edge over phones for the normal console lifespan. You rightly call out the storage, but it is far from clear what other options really existed. Flash/SSD storage was quite expensive at that time. And market wise, the Sony audience (even more so then) would not have been remotely receptive to the sort of games that made the Switch popular later on. It was doomed from conception, and the other mistakes were inevitable after that.
- goosedragons 2y ago
  How many mobile games look better than what the Vita was putting out? Even today. CoD Mobile despite releasing 7 years after CoD Black Ops Declassified on Vita and having way better phone SoCs is barely an improvement. The Switch still happily runs games off microSD cards. The home consoles didn't get SSDs till 2020. For Vita, the cards were fast enough. The problem was the proprietary nature of the cards. They just cost way too much for the size especially as time wore on. I think at the time I imported my 64GB Vita card, a microSD card of the same size was half the price. By the end of the Vita's life the 32GB card was laughably bad value.
  - gambiting 2y ago
    Genshin Impact mobile is pretty much on par with PC/console versions, and Vita couldn't do anything even remotely close to it in terms of scale. Although games like Killzone and Uncharted definitely pushed the envelope in terms of what was possible with the Vita, really great games.

benoau 2y ago

I remember getting the PSP, and this was the iPod and PDA era, the PSP was just absolutely amazing. It was better than anything else by far, even with the silly little UMD optical discs. Thanks to EU regulations pressuring Apple's restrictions you can get PPSSPP for iPhone now and the games still hold up amazingly well.

goosedragons 2y ago
The Vita, as flawed as it was, was pretty incredible at release too. The OLED screen, the PS3ish level visuals, a second analog stick finally. It was easily my favorite console from when I got it until I picked up a Switch. Sony really bungled it with the over draconian DRM and proprietary memory cards. Had it used microSD cards and not been SO anal about how anything got on there it could have done a lot better. And had they ditched the back touch panel and added real R2/L2 in New 3DS style and perhaps clickable thumbsticks, it could have been something!
- gambiting 2y ago
  I think Sony was just incredibly scared of having a repeat of the PSP situation where piracy was absolutely dominating, they sold crazy number of consoles and very few games(comparatively). I knew at least 10-15 people with PSPs when I was a teenager and none of us ever owned a single actual PSP game on a disc.

cheeseomlit 2y ago

Same, the PSP was my first introduction to homebrew gaming and custom firmware. Having all those emulators on a handheld blew my mind back then. I actually still have it in a drawer somewhere- which reminds me, check your battery! You don't want a bloated battery ruining such a lovely device (or burning your house down)

bpye 2y ago
I recently found my PSP with the battery cover popped off by a swollen battery! I'll need to pick up a new one but I'm glad to have caught it before anything too catastrophic happened.

Sarkie 2y ago

https://android.rinnegatamante.it/ https://android.rinnegatamante.it/

ElCapitanMarkla 2y ago

Hardware wise it was a fantastic console, I picked an OLED version up a couple of years ago. The problem I always had was the lack of games. There were a handful of good titles but nothing really blew me away. I think I spent more time playing Risk or Rain than anything else.

zelos 2y ago
Back when I was commuting by train every day, the Vita was my favourite console. It felt like it got a lot of great ports of the big indie titles of the time, plus a decent number of bigger titles: Hotline Miami, Spelunky, Stealth Inc, Wipeout 2048, Resogun, Super stardust, Persona 4, Guacamelee.
- jonhohle 2y ago
  It’s a great indie machine. LRG and Playasia did a great job of keeping smaller games on carts throughout the Vita’s life.

corysama 2y ago

I never followed the Vita homebrew scene. But, what I've read from following the single board computer emulation scene is that Vita homebrew took a while to pick up speed. But, today the Vita is a respectable portable emulation device on par with many small SBCs currently being manufactured. https://docs.libretro.com/guides/install-psv/ https://docs.libretro.com/guides/install-psv/

MegaDeKay 2y ago
That is "just" retroarch. There is a huge amount of homebrew out there for the Vita beyond retroarch. Dead Space, anyone??? https://www.rinnegatamante.eu/vitadb/#/ https://www.rinnegatamante.eu/vitadb/#/

Vitamin_Sushi 2y ago

I miss the PSP jailbreaking scene. Back when I was in high school, I made quite the pocket change cutting PCB traces on people's PSP batteries. Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure that got me interested in electronics in the first place.

hansonkd 2y ago
Writing homebrew for PSP was my first introduction to programming and my gateway to Python (through PyGame).
gambiting 2y ago
Haha, same. And that's how I got into programming, making homebrew games for my PSP - I taught myself C++, and I even participated in several competitions for homebrew, PSPSnake was one that got thousands of downloads, for a 15 year old that was crazy cool.
- yard2010 2y ago
  Haha first piece of code I wrote in C++, when I was in highschool, was for April fools joke - I made a homebrew app that should do something really could (I can't remember) and after few seconds of loading, it displayed a blue screen saying "skynet" has breached your PSP and you got pawned. After 3 seconds it showed "It's April 1 you fool". It was so stupid. It took me forever to make, but it was worth it. I gave my friends from the local PSP scene a heart attack, then a good laugh of relief. Fun times.

deergomoo 2y ago

The first code I ever wrote was for my PSP with custom firmware. I used the Lua Player homebrew, setting up a C toolchain was far over my head at the time. I think I spent more time tinkering with that console than I ever did playing games, even though the games were great. I picked up a PSP Go a couple of years ago and that thing is awesome. It flopped hard at the time due to being digital only before people were more okay with that, and because there was no way to play any UMD games you might have already owned. But with custom firmware it’s terrific; it’s less feasible to use a microSD card (unlike the cheap adapters for the original’s Memory Stick Duo), but it has 16GB onboard flash which is perfectly serviceable given PSP ISOs max out at 1.8GB before compression.

pjmlp 2y ago

For a while PSP did had official indie support, there was an Objective-C SDK, a later one in C#, but unfortunely they killed both approaches, because like with PS2Linux, probably people weren't using them for actual new indie games. The related developer sites aren't even online anylonger.

aktau 2y ago
Objective-C? That seems like an odd choice, did they want to attract iOS developers? (I know someone ported the mobile game Angry Birds to PSP at some point). Do you have more information about this?
- pjmlp 2y ago
  I was partially wrong, it wasn't for the PSP, rather something else, https://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/11/25/0432204/Sony-Adopts-Objective-C-and-GNUstep-Frameworks https://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/11/25/0432204/Sony-Adopt... https://www.slashgear.com/sony-snap-connected-device-app-framework-frozen-25116290 https://www.slashgear.com/sony-snap-connected-device-app-fra... And for completness here are some articles about the C# SDK, https://venturebeat.com/games/ps-vita-sdk/ https://venturebeat.com/games/ps-vita-sdk/ https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/535325/Hello-World-on-the-PlayStation-Vita-Deploying-code https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/535325/Hello-World-on-t...

Narhem 2y ago

The packaging for the Vita was as close as you can get to perfect. i check the prices for Vitas every now and then. Reminded me of Star Trek tricorders growing up. Especially with location based games which worked without GPS. Neet programming hacks was the coolest part of playing with embedded electronics.

fennecbutt 2y ago

It was almost 100% because they had a home and portable console. A lot of the games coming out on vita were also on ps4 and Sony never really seemed interested in creating exclusive games for portable platform. Which is exactly why Nintendo forwent the split and went with a combination home/portable with the switch, otherwise one side would cannibalise the other. Whats also interesting that the psp go did the whole portable + TV thing long before the switch. Goes to show that it's not the form factor, it's the franchises for games.