We often read of programmers finding ways to get old game titles running on modern smartphones by emulating the original platform. Thanks to the abundance of console emulators for Android, it's truly a wonderful mean to relive some of our best childhood gaming memories. Moreover, emulation is the key to preserve the history of video games, which is why we always find it exciting to see new emulators making their way to Android. This time, Vita3K, a popular PlayStation Vita emulator which has been available on desktop operating systems for years, has received an official Android port.

Persona 4 Golden running on Vita3K
Persona 4 Golden running on Vita3K Android

For the unaware, the Vita3K project started its journey back in 2018. The developers slowly added support for more games over the years, and now it can run numerous PS Vita (as well as PlayStation TV) titles and homebrew apps on Windows, Linux, and macOS. Of course you can’t play every Vita game out there, but it supports quite a few popular franchises such as Persona 4, Uncharted, Hotline Miami, and more.

Porting Vita3K to Android was not an easy task, though. What makes the official Android port so impressive is not that it's a perfectly functioning emulator without any issues right from the beginning. It has numerous glitches, the current GUI needs more polishing, and it's certainly not even remotely functional for more intensive titles. Having said all of that, the initial version already can utilize custom drivers for Adreno devices, has Vulkan support, and a plethora of other tweaks that results in a smooth experience on the best Android phones. In a nutshell, It’s clear that the developers want to deliver a fantastic product to fans of Vita3K on other platforms.

Vita3K currently only works on 64-bit Android devices running Android 7.0 Nougat or higher, with support for Vulkan 1.0 or higher. While the project is open source and is licensed under the GPLv2 license, the source code for the Android version will not be available for at least a few months. The team only offers pre-compiled APKs for now, which can be downloaded from the GitHub repository linked below.

Download Vita3K Android

It’s worth pointing out that the Vita3K team only develops the emulator itself. Pirating PS Vita games is still very much illegal. Even if you own the game card, downloading the backups is still a gray area. The only legal way to get PlayStation Vita games ready for emulation is to dump them yourself from the physical media (or the digital version) you own.