Playstation Vita Architecture (Part 1) | Hacker News Reader

Playstation Vita Architecture (Part 1)

copetti.org

272 pointswicket81 comments

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.

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.

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.

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...

> A "pocketable" gaming console in the modern world is essentially a smartphone with analog sticks.

Yes in a technical sense. But no in a business and ecosystem sense.

PSP and Vita had very impressive game offerings that we don’t get on mobile to this day. The games felt like proper PlayStation games, only about 0.5 console generations behind. Back then it meant PS2.5 games. Today it would mean PS4.5 games on your handheld.

Switch is probably the closest today due to its first party games and very fluent support for many popular titles, unlike Steam Deck which is still a bit hacky and not everything it offers runs well. But Switch technically is several generations behind. PSP and Vita really felt like 2/3rds of your PlayStation 3.

No smartphone with a controller add on offers an experience of PlayStation 4.5 with first party titles and support. The business side was executed very well on PSP/Vita. The developers cared for that console.

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.

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.

the nub was a last minute addition iirc, it probably would've been extremely complicated to squeeze two onto it

The nub was announced at the same time as an announcement where the memory was quadrupled so I think it was probably intended to be only PS1 level games on it originally.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

My vita1000 is still as it was on release, I personally love the screen

screen is great, feels really high quality in general, but the proprietary charging port and lack of internal storage are huge negatives against it

Yeah, that’s fair

>>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).

The slim fits in the hands better and charges via micro-USB.

The white Vita OLED was an excellent device

The 60 grams of weight and 3.5mm of depth are very noticeable on a handheld.

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.

not really an opinion, the mura effect is the ubiquitous and well-documented flaw of Vita 1000 OLEDs

You can’t have an opinion about whether a flaw bothers you?

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).

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")

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

They were right in many regards. The casual gaming audience disappeared in real time over gen 8 to phones. Even the 3DS just did "well" as a result. So sony went all in on the PS4 and Nintendo converged handheld and console to stand out.

It's coming around again now, but through emulators (Analog Pocket and various android handhelds), the blooming market of handheld PCs (Steam Deck, GPD, Aya, etc.), and the occasional novelty device aiming for small markets (Playdate, Gameshell). I don't know if we'll ever get another handheld like the Vita with its balance of power, build, and library.

> They were right in many regards. The casual gaming audience disappeared in real time over gen 8 to phones. Even the 3DS just did "well" as a result.

Exactly. Smartphone games were clearly the reason why Vita+3DS sold much worse than PSP+DS. The Vita failed because the market wasn't large enough anymore to support two systems, and the 3DS had more exclusive franchises.

I don't even think smartphone games were the killer, just smartphones in general. The audience isn't looking for specifically for gaming; they're looking for entertainment in their pocket. With smartphones that can be YouTube/Netflix/Facebook/etc. Those are good enough that you don't need games.

Okay but that possibility would also predict that gaming in general would go down, not just on PS Vita and 3DS. It's true that the overall PC market shrunk (smartphones could replace PCs for many people) but I don't think the home console market was affected.

It may have been? It's a much more complicated story. Consoles haven't decreased, but they have notably stagnated for the past decade in terms of sales. Gaming overall only goes up because the mobile market surged to parity with consoles (in terms of revenue) over the 2010's.

But I doubt that was due to phones. It's more factors like set top boxes, "smart" TV's with built in streaming apps and casting, and the decline of the need for DVD/blu-ray players.

I remember the days of the PS3 where many bought it simply because it was the cheapest Blu-ray player (which is saying something, given its slow adoption rate and infamous "599 USD" reputation), but consoles as a multimedia device has definitely fallen off. It's also infamously one of the worst market reads in the industry when Xbox One decided in 2013 to advertise as a set top box on its reveal over a gaming console.

But unlike handhelds, that lost "non-gaming" market did get made up for with a growing market of dedicated gamers (indicated by games continuing to sell increasing numbers of copies). So it simply evened out instead of trending downwards.

They could have compensated the way Nintendo did for so long, releasing games as late as 2019 for the 3DS - making good exclusive games people would actually want to play.

Sony never really cracked the code of putting out good content at the consistency of Nintendo. Even though they managed to put out a handful of gems over the years, they just don't seem to know how to leverage it. And in the past few years they seem to want to actively undermine whatever they had, disbanding Sony Japan Studio, and they've floundered, spending the entirety of the PS5's life remastering PS4 games that didn't need a remaster. And sitting on Bloodborne all these years, while it's still stuck at 30fps...

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.

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.

> How many mobile games look better than what the Vita was putting out?

This is a surprisingly profound question, because the mobile people absolutely could do games that look better than that and largely found it is not worth doing so. It is partly tech, in that people prefer battery life (you also cannot spend more if your battery has run out), but also technical aspects of graphics simply don’t impress people as much as they did in the 90s. “Content”, and volumes of it, is far more important.

The Vita cards were fast enough but not big enough for games that the Sony demographic would want. For example, a Vita scale Gran Turismo or Metal Gear Solid entry is simply not going to improve on the (great) PSP entries.

By the time the Vita launched we had already been releasing Android builds for the Xperia Play which were straight up ports from the PSP, as betrayed by the almost uniform 1.6GB per game.

Edit: to add a concrete example, the developers of NBA Jam mobile (which was great) went back to 2D afterwards, and came up with a very nice engine for streaming 2D animation and a whole content pipeline system for using it. That ended up making huge amounts of money and entertained tens of millions of people for a long time.

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.

Back then, only a few from companies like Glu (now owned by EA as of 2021) and Gameloft (Aquired by Vivendi) even tried. The mobilew became night and day by the turn of the decade, though. If Vita had a game like Genshin, then maybe its fate (in Asia) wouldn't have been so dire.

But then again, Genshin was 8GB at launch. Definitely shouldn't underestimate how quick storage costs came down from 2012 to 2017 when the Switch launched. enabling larger games to casually be made.

People too often conflagrate performance of a plateform vs the games you can get on that platform. The Nintendo 3DS was released about the same time as the Vita. It and the "new 3DS" that came after it were huge for Nintendo, despite the hardware being far from state of the art (unless you count the 3D display that was more a gimmick than anything). You can say the same thing about the Switch. One of the Vita's biggest problems was Sony itself. Proprietary & expensive memory cards plus poor corporate support doomed the platform.

I have a hacked Vita Slim and it is wonderful. The size is great, the controls are great, and the homebrew scene is incredible. It really holds up.

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.

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.

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.

Writing homebrew for PSP was my first introduction to programming and my gateway to Python (through PyGame).

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.

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.

It’s a great indie machine. LRG and Playasia did a great job of keeping smaller games on carts throughout the Vita’s life.

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/

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/#/

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.

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.

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!

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.

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)

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.

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.

https://android.rinnegatamante.it/

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.

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.

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?

I was partially wrong, it wasn't for the PSP, rather something else,

https://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/11/25/0432204/Sony-Adopt...

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://www.codeproject.com/Articles/535325/Hello-World-on-t...

Many years ago I worked with Toshiba on the Media Embedded Processor (MeP), referenced in this article. We (Red Hat) did some toolchain work to support the configurable nature of the processor, which was novel at the time. The MeP didn't take over the world but I was happy to learn that it landed in the PS Vita.

Note that this is but one article in a long running collection.

https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/

I'm still bewildered that Sony abandoned the portable industry when they were uniquely positioned with the fact that they also had a phone line.

The Xperia Play was too early but I'm pretty confident that now that you've got people very comfortable dropping a lot of money on a phone or the Steam Deck that Sony could've made a very nice successor to both the Vita and the Xperia Play with some kind of Android device with a captive Sony game store.

Sony owns a record label and film studio, phones and has had a cloud distribution network since 2006 via the PS3 but they completely missed the boat on music and video streaming.

Too many of their orgs were siloed from one another. As someone who has kind of admired their products, you can only laugh at how poorly things turned out for them given what we know today.

Just like Nokia, where the organization was made of dozens of business units trying to screw each other over. A great concept on paper ("We have no credible competitors, so to remain fresh, we have to become our own competitor"), but in reality they ended up shooting their own, supernumerous, feet

Just adding to this the peak was Sony acquiring Crunchyroll for over 1B - a "company" who started life as a pirating site for anime

I loved my Xperia Play. PSX games on my phone with the controls? It was so good. Best phone I ever owned. It was ahead of its time in ways but I don't think the gaming landscape was all that suited/ready like it is now for handhelds.

This is awesome and feels providential.

I just dug my Vita out of a drawer last week and have been playing some portable ports of some PS3 games that I wanted to play but can’t hook up the PS3 for (ratchet and clank, sly cooper, god of war 1 and 2, and some other indie games).

Was shocked to discover the store is still functional. I bought the PS1 Armored Core games for it.

Love this thing. It really got done dirty in the market and with Sony’s support.

Tempted to jailbreak it and try to make some homebrew stuff.

The Vita homebrew scene is very mature and surprisingly active. "It's surprisingly easy to hack your 3DS" is a meme for good reason, but it holds even truer for the Vita.

I went through two PS Vitas and replaced control buttons and such numerous times.

I loved the Vita's mix of casual and "serious" games comparing Pixeljunk Monsters to Killzone Mercenary which was as good a 1P shooter as you'd find on a game console in a mobile package. A huge amount of Japanese content such as Akiba's Trip: Undead and Undressed, Danganronpa and Fate/Extella.

They disconnected it from the PS Network and I was finding that the Japanese games I liked were coming out on Steam so I let go of my Vita kit, I have to admit I miss Pixeljunk Shooter.

When was it disconnected? AFAIK it still is working and workarounds even lets you buy games (of you have funds in your PSN account). It’s been a while, but I’ve downloaded previous purchases recently. (I really need to backup everything before it does go down for good).

I had no idea the Vita had PSP hardware. I figured backwards compatibility was software based, but I suppose they already had a long history of shipping backwards compatible hardware on consoles. However, by that time they also had a software PS1 emulator for the PS2 Slim and later PS3s.

PS1 backwards compatibility on the PS2 has always been a mix of software and hardware. This includes the PS2 slim†.

https://israpps.github.io/PPC-Monitor/docs/Architecture%20Ov...

> The PPC-IOP ASIC, present in SCPH-75xxx and newer PS2 models, features a hybrid hardware and software approach to emulating the MIPS R3000A processor found in the PS1 and 70K or older PS2 models. The hardware portion of this emulation comes in the form of an Auxiliary Processing Unit or APU attached to a PPC 440 core clocked at 440MHz. The software portion comes in the form of the “DECKARD” emulation software.

The PS3 has always used pure software emulation for the PS1.

†Technically only the SCPH-7500x and later slim models feature the PPC-IOP and Deckard. The SCPH-7000x works the same as fat consoles, where the CPU side of PS1 games run natively on bare metal.

Books like these fall into the pantheon of didn’t ask for it, didn’t expect it, but now that it’s here, I’m reading it from sunrise til sunset. The author has written several other books on processors and embedded architecture. Much needed, frankly.

The embedded world leans much further towards disassembling, breaking down, explaining, reasoning and so on and so forth compared to the software world. Not sure why, these guys go all out to probe and put together circuit diagrams and just about fucking everything. The recent Nintendo modding scene shows this to an extreme. Software Reverse engineers clutch their IDA licenses and plugins like it’s going out of style. Copetti is the kind of individual we need more of.

On the PS1 side, Splat, m2c, decomp.me and a lot of custom tooling are used.

IDA? More like GHydra and diferent FLOSS tools.

Big fan of both this series of articles and the Vita!

One thing I've been wondering for a while is whether the Vita actually includes both CPU and GPU of the PSP for backwards compatibility, or whether it's only the CPU, with the GPU being mapped to the Vita's.

This article is claiming that it's the former, but hopefully we'll learn more (with references) in the next installment.

Vita was ahead of its time

Ohh boy thank you for this

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