PlayStation Vita, better known as PlayStation Vitawas Sony’s last attempt to compete with Nintendo in a segment in which it has always remained strong, however portable and despite its merits was well below the Nintendo 3DS in terms of sales, with which it competed at least initially.

Despite having far less impact than Nintendo’s laptop, but rather than any of the desktop consoles that Sony has released, there are still users and enthusiasts trying to keep the PS Vita alive, and that’s why it exists. Vita3K, an emulator that officially supports Windows, macOS, Linux and now Androidthe platform he recently arrived at.

Vita3K defines itself as “the world’s first working PlayStation Vita emulator” and is developed as open source under the GPLv2 license, although dependencies on Android under this license have been dropped. It’s important to note that as stated in its GitHub repository, this is still experimental development, so there are no guarantees when it comes to running many games.

Vita3K for Android can be obtained from the release section of the GitHub repository, which this version of the app has dedicated for the reasons already mentioned (it is not available in the Play Store at this time). From there, the user just needs to download the APK file of the latest version and install it on their Android device, which probably requires prior permission to install apps from third-party sources.

Once the app is launched, it will ask the user to do so download and install the appropriate firmware files, something the emulator is in charge of facilitating by exposing the links that must be accessible and knowing what to do once the user selects each of the files. After completing the initial steps, any game available for PS Vita can be installed and launched.

Compilation requirements of Vita3K for Android are not high, since it consists of an ARM64 SoC with support for Vulkan 1.0 and Android 7.0, although on the contrary it must, at least for now, it does not support VPK format ROM, so only ZIP and PKG are supported for now. Compatible games can be consulted through the list published for this purpose by those responsible for the emulator.

In its current circumstances, Vita3K somewhat resembles RPCS3, a PlayStation 3 emulator released as free software. Now the penultimate Sony console, because of the Cell processor, seems to make it difficult for emulator developers.