Hacker Gets PSOne Games Running On PS Vita Through PSP Emulator

by Mike Bendel May 19, 2012 @ 9:31 pm


While we’re still awaiting Sony’s implementation of the PSOne emulator for PS Vita, a lone hacker has managed to get PSOne games up and running on the Vita, albeit unofficially. The feat was performed using a kernel exploit inside the emulated PSP environment. That’s right — this is essentially an emulator running inside an emulator.

The hacker, who wishes to remain anonymous, has also shared video proof above of the feat (via PSPKing.de). We couldn’t make out any performance issues, so games appear to be running smooth. However, there’s at least one show-stopping bug made obvious by the lack of sound. The hacker is attempting to fix this and if he succeeds, plans to release the source code.

It’s worth noting however that users of the publicly released Vita exploit (otherwise known as VHBL) will not be able to take advantage of this, as patching the emulator requires kernel-level access. Earlier this month, a complete dump of the PSP emulator flash0 memory surfaced, though the kernel exploit used to obtain those files remains under wraps. So far, Sony has been extremely diligent when it comes to patching up known exploits on the Vita, and with discoveries like this it’s not hard to understand why.

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