PlayStation Vita: Difference between revisions

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Basics=
[[Filefile:psvita_9360PlayStation-Vita-1101-FR.pngjpg|frame200px|thumb|[[Slogans|Never stop Playing.]]]]
 
Sony's successor to the [[PlayStation Portable]], codenamed the Next Generation Portable or NGP for short. It debuted at the beginning of 2011 in a private press conference by Sony and the official name (Vita) was bestowed to the system at E3 2011.
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* The price was $249 for the wi-fi only model and $299 for the model with 3G support.
 
While not as powerful as a PS3 (the closest equivalent to it in terms of computing capabilities is the iPhone 4S or the third-generation iPad, at least with its shared PowerVR underpinnings), Sony intended the Vita to be easy for developers to import assets from their PS3 games to the Vita, and at least some games were cut-down or even unabridged ports of their home console counterparts such as the 2012 ''Need for Speed: Most Wanted'' reboot. Several games outright support transferring saves between the PS3 or PS4 counterpart (a feature technically first seen on the PSP and PS3 with ''[[Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker]]'', and technically included in the older ''[[Pursuit Force]] 2'' but the console version of that game never materialized), but the need to purchase the same game ''twice'' meant this was actually a great deal less than practical.
 
Another feature of the hardware is the inclusion of a touch-sensitive pad on the back of the system. The first application was shown at the debut of the system demonstrating Nathan Drake of ''[[Uncharted]]'' climbing a vine. Sliding your fingers down the touch pad would cause Nate to ascend the vine. The early models of the system also sported an OLED screen (which is normally seen in smartphones), but this was dropped in later models in favor of a standard screen as a cost cutting and battery life measure.
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The PS Vita was stated to have a battery life of 3 - 5 hours depending on the system's settings, although in practice battery life was even shorter. An external battery, available at the western launch, could increase that time to 15 hours of nonstop play at full settings.
 
The console didn't have appreciable internal memory, it must be bought separately, in the format of a Sony Memory Stick, ''a new type'' of memory stick which so far is exclusive for the Vita; the PRO and DUO Memory Sticks used by the PSP won't work on it. This would prove to be the biggest cause for Vita's downfall, as the memory sticks were absurdly overpriced compared to commodity (Micro) SD Cards. This would prove to be a problem as games were fairly large, and the system's disc management was locked down in a (failed) attempt to prevent custom firmware with a bizarre oversight in the file management software that rendered it impossible to easily backup saves while deleting game data.
 
Continuing on Sony's tradition of backwards compatibility, the Vita is backwards-compatible with PSP and emulated PS1 games, albeit only through downloadable games purchased from the PSN since the Vita lacks a UMD drive. Sony later released a second revision in 2013 (model PCH-2000, colloquially known as the PS Vita Slim) which is 20% thinner and 15% lighter, dispensing the OLED panel with a cheaper LCD display and increasing the battery life. The PCH-2000 also comes with 1GB of onboard storage (though the card slot still remains; said onboard storage is actually part of the Vita's flash chip which remains the same across revisions, only repartitioned to make use of otherwise unused space), replaced the proprietary charging/data port with a micro USB port, and removed the otherwise-unused accessory port.
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When it was released in Japan, on December 17th, 2011, it did well for a week but lost 3/4ths of its sales numbers the next, being outsold the week of Christmas not just by its main competition, the [[Nintendo 3DS]], but by the ''original PSP'' as well. And [[It Got Worse|numbers have only declined since then]]. Unfortunately, the Japanese market would prove to be the ''most'' successful by far, thanks to Japanese developers taking advantage of the lower budgets to make very original and innovative games for the system. The international release would wind up doing even worse, with the cost of the proprietary memory even more absurd (the largest of the memory options never making it to the west), while Sony of America was unwilling to support, and later outright ''hostile to'' (outright banning their release or forcing absurd censorship requirements) the [[Widget Series|oddball Japanese games]] that made of most of the system's exclusives.
 
Though despite having been a critical and commercial flop, the Vita did gain a loyal cult following especially in the late 2010s to early 2020s when security researchers managed to successfully defeat the console's security (though certain aspects of it are still being worked on), paving the way for a thriving homebrew scene. While some of these hacks are in the form of unofficial ports of popular Android games to the Vita, others focused on quality-of-life improvements such as adapters which allow commodity SD cards to be used as external storage instead of the absurdly expensive proprietary memory cards. An essential modification is the [https://henkaku.xyz/ HENkaku] jailbreak, which basically opens the door for modding the Vita and allows for homebrew (and unfortunately piracy). HENkaku in itself isn't persistent and requires the user to reapply it on every reboot, akin to a semi-untethered jailbreak on an iOS device; this can be remedied by installing Enso, which is a custom firmware based on version 3.60 and 3.65 and permanently jailbreaks the Vita, though not without the risk of bricking if you don't know what you're doing. Also essential is Adrenaline, a virtualised PlayStation Portable environment where games and apps written for the PSP can played.
 
As of 2024, the PlayStation Vita lacks a direct successor, the closest being the PlayStation Portal, a handheld released in 2023 that effectively allows streaming from a PlayStation 5, but is otherwise useless on its own.
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Specifications=
==Processors==
* Quad-core 32-bit ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore CPU. Clock speed is up to 444 MHz, but is downclockedunderclocked to 333 MHz to conserve battery life. Can be overclocked to 500 MHz through homebrew apps.
* 333 MHz MIPS32 R4000 R4k-based CPU (as found by security researcher Yifan Lu) for PSP backwards compatibility.
* Quad-core PowerVR SGX543+ GPU clocked at 111 MHz; max clock speed at 222 MHz. Unlike the PS3's GeForce 7800GTX-based Reality Synthesizer whose compute power is at 228.8 GFLOPS, the Vita's PowerVR GPU is capable of 28.4 GFLOPS.
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* Two VGA cameras: one on the front and another on the back
* SIXAXIS accelerometer
* Accessory port; only present on the PCH-1000 model and left unused
* USB port for charging and data exchange. The PCH-1000 uses a proprietary port while the PCH-2000 came with a standard micro-USB port
* 802.11n wireless