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Dusting off the PS Vita: Adventures in hacking a forgotten console [1]

['Séamus Bellamy']

Date: 2025-08-01

I move around a lot. It lends me to a weakness for portable electronics. I love wee music players, word processors, and tiny e-readers. I adore handheld gaming hardware: there's something nice about not using your work laptop to play games at the end of the day. When you're a digital nomad, shutting down your computer is as close as you ever get to locking your office door before heading home. I

own a Steam Deck. I love it! Although it teeters on the border of what I consider portable. It's a husky handheld. It's tempting to bring it with me on short trips, but it takes up so much room in my bag. More times than not, I leave it at home in favour of space for my over-ear ANC headphones and laptop. It makes me long for my GameBoy Micro (gifted to a friend in Mexico to enjoy) or GP2X (somehow lost on a move from Victoria, British Columbia, to Rocky Mountain House, Alberta). They were compact, had pretty damn good battery life, despite their age, and so many great games. Last week, while visiting my folks, I went through a crate of my stuff and found that my much-loved PS Vita was still kicking around.

It's in great shape. I still have the original power adapter, a 64GB memory card full of games and there's plenty of play left in its battery. Sony stopped churning Vitas out in the spring of 2019. The final software update for the console popped in 2022. It's a dead platform, with plenty of possibilities left in it. It's the perfect size to live in a backpack and friends, it's my next hacking project.

I'm used to noodling around with Linux, but it's been some time since I worked to force a piece of kit to do something it's not supposed to do. I haven't jailbroken or rooted a phone in close to a decade. I'll let you know how it goes, step by step. If I manage to get the thing running? Awesome. If I screw it up? You'll be the first to ridicule me for turning my gaming relic into a paperweight.

To be continued…

Previously:

• New PlayStation better than old one

• Sony announces miniature Playstation Classic, with 20 games built-in

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[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2025/08/01/dusting-off-the-ps-vita-adventures-in-hacking-a-forgotten-console.html

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