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Hacking my PS Vita: more storage means more possibilities [1]

['Séamus Bellamy']

Date: 2025-08-05

There are a number of reasons I'm hacking my PS Vita. I own just under 50 Universal Media Disks—Sony's physical media format for the first PlayStation Portable. I want to play those games again. A hacked PS Vita can make that happen. Find the titles you own online and dump them into the handheld. Tons of room for game saves and backups? That'd be nice. Emulators? Heck yeah: Being able to run Retro Arch on something other than my Steam Deck would be boss (and take up a lot less space in my backpack.) And there's quite a bit of home-brew out there just begging to be taken for a spin. But to do any of this, that software and data need somewhere to live.

Sony loves proprietary physical storage. For the OG Sony PSP, it was UMDs. For the PS Vita, Sony birthed an all-new memory card that couldn't be used in anything else. Back in the day, the 64GB card I ordered from Japan set me back close to $150. On a buck-per-gigabyte basis, this was pretty steep. Today, they're more difficult to find and more expensive. On Amazon, it will set you back $220. Nope. So this is what's gonna happen instead.

In addition to the pricey memory card that the console used for storage, the PS Vita also had a slot for games shipped on physical media. As Sony can always be relied on to be Sony, these carts, surprising no one, were a proprietary format. But once I've bent the Vita to my will, I'll be able to use MicroSD cards with it, instead. MicroSD is a far less expensive storage medium and far easier to get hold of. I found a 400GB card kicking around in my desk drawer. 400 gigs is a weird size, and more expensive than it needs to be. But you can get a 512GB card for under $40, any day of the week. In order to use it with the Vita, you're gonna need an adapter sized to fit into its game cart slot. This one from FunTurbo is well-liked and costs less than a latte.

Will it work right out of the box? Of course not. In order to get things rolling, we're gonna have to perform that hack. We'll get down to it later this week.

[END]
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[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2025/08/05/hacking-my-ps-vita-more-storage-means-more-possibilities.html

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