Hardware Requirements

The emulator performance and accuracy varies depending on your hardware. We cannot guarantee it will perform well if your PC barely meets the minimum requirements. For the best experience make sure you're within the recommended requirements as most of the reported games are tested with such requirements.

Minimum requirements

GPU that supports OpenGL 4.1 (some games' graphics might be broken)

CPU with the AVX instruction set

Minimum of 4GB RAM

Recommended requirements

GPU that supports OpenGL 4.3 and above

GPU that supports shader interlock

CPU with the AVX instruction set

8GB of RAM or greater

Other Requirements

Microsoft Redistributable

If you're having trouble running Vita3K and it complains about VCRUNTME140_1.dll was not found, download and install the Visual C++ 2015-2019 Redistributable

Operating System

You need to be running a 64-bit operating system in order for Vita3K to work.

Installing the firmware

Some games require the system modules be present for Vita3K to (low level) emulate them. This can be done by installing the PS Vita firmware through Vita3K.

The firmware can be downloaded from the official Playstation website, there's also an additional firmware package that contains the system fonts that needs to be installed. The font firmware package can be downloaded straight from the Playstation servers.

Install both firmware packages using the File > Install Firmware menu option.

Managing Modules

System modules can be managed in the Configuration > Settings > Core tab of the emulator, we recommend loading libpgf, libpvf, libatrac and libsas for now as almost all other modules either cause crashes or don't work yet. And if you have doubts some modules are causing crashes you can try to remove libsas and libatrac.

Dumping Games

Vita3K does not condone piracy, therefore, you are required to dump your own games.

Currently, Vita3K only supports maidumps, FAGDec, or manually decrypted games (Vitamin dumps are not supported). The games should be in a .zip or .vpk format if you want to install them from the emulator, or if you prefer to copy them yourself, you can drag and drop the game folder in your pref_path/ux0/app folder.

pref_path defaults to:
%Appdata%/Roaming/Vita3K/Vita3K on windows
~/.local/share/Vita3K/Vita3K on linux
~/Library/Application Support/Vita3K on macOS

How to dump your games

These are the several ways to dump and get decrypted games in order of their accuracy.

Using Vitashell and FAGDec

Download Vitashell and FAGDec and install them to your PS Vita
1. If you're dumping from a cartridge:
2. If you're dumping a digital game:
Hover over your game's folder and press △ then choose Open decrypted
Now copy everything inside the game's folder and paste it in a folder of your choosing

That's the game files done, now we need to use FAGDec to decrypt the selfs.

Launch FAGDec and scroll down until you find the game you want to dump
Hover on the game and press the ✖ button, wait for FAGDec to find all the modules and then select DECRYPT ALL
You will see that the modules have been listed on the right side of the screen. Now go back to the main menu and press Start
You will see two options here, select the one that says [START] START DECRYPT(SELF)
Now just wait until it finishes decrypting the game modules
You can find the output files in ux0:FAGDec/app/'title_id'

Now all you gotta do is take the files that FAGDec outputted and put them in the previously copied folder from VitaShell, if asked to replace some files, confirm the replacement.

It's very important that the folder containing the game files be named as the game's Title ID. Otherwise your game won't boot.

Using Maidump (and optionally Vitashell)

It's recommended you use Vitashell with maidump here as it's more stable this way.

Install maidump
Launch maidump and select Extract/Decrypt content
Choose the game you want to dump and press the ◯ button
1. If you're using Vitashell:
2. If you're not using Vitashell:

Note: .pkg installation coming soon™

Quickstart