Playstation Vita Architecture (Part 1)

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.

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.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.copetti.org&#x2F;writings&#x2F;consoles&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.copetti.org&#x2F;writings&#x2F;consoles&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;m still bewildered that Sony abandoned the portable industry when they were uniquely positioned with the fact that they also had a phone line.<p>The Xperia Play was too early but I&#x27;m pretty confident that now that you&#x27;ve got people very comfortable dropping a lot of money on a phone or the Steam Deck that Sony could&#x27;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.

This is awesome and feels providential.<p>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).<p>Was shocked to discover the store is still functional. I bought the PS1 Armored Core games for it.<p>Love this thing. It really got done dirty in the market and with Sony’s support.<p>Tempted to jailbreak it and try to make some homebrew stuff.

I went through two PS Vitas and replaced control buttons and such numerous times.<p>I loved the Vita&#x27;s mix of casual and &quot;serious&quot; games comparing <i>Pixeljunk Monsters</i> to <i>Killzone Mercenary</i> which was as good a 1P shooter as you&#x27;d find on a game console in a mobile package. A huge amount of Japanese content such as <i>Akiba&#x27;s Trip: Undead and Undressed</i>, <i>Danganronpa</i> and <i>Fate&#x2F;Extella</i>.<p>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 <i>Pixeljunk Shooter</i>.

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.

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.<p>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.

Big fan of both this series of articles and the Vita!<p>One thing I&#x27;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&#x27;s only the CPU, with the GPU being mapped to the Vita&#x27;s.<p>This article is claiming that it&#x27;s the former, but hopefully we&#x27;ll learn more (with references) in the next installment.

Vita was ahead of its time

Ohh boy thank you for this