Will you soon be able to run PS Vita games on your Nintendo Switch? It seems to have gone well. Sergi Granell, a developer, has just created vita2hos, a project to natively open executable files intended for Sony’s old portable console, the PS Vita, on Nintendo Switch.
The project, available on Github, is still in its infancy and obviously requires a Switch jailbroken, but already allows you to run the Vita’s Homebrew binaries using the Switch’s processor. Eventually, vita2hos could natively run commercial PS Vita games on Nintendo’s handheld console.
The vita2hos project is not an emulator. It is based on the technical characteristics of the Switch which is equipped with an ARM v8 processor to be able to natively execute code compiled for the ARM v7 processor of the PS Vita, however using the 32-bit compatibility mode.
To put it simply, when a PS Vita executable file is loaded, vita2hos provides a kind of software layer capable of translating the code imagined for the PS Vita so that it is correctly interpreted by Horizon OS, the operating system of the Nintendo Switch.
The vita2hos project is still at a very early stage of development. The main problem faced by its developers at the moment concerns the support for 3D graphics. While compatibility with commercial, graphically demanding games still seems a long way off, using vita2hos to run unofficial games or Homebrew-like utilities seems to be quite doable.
The developers working on the project have already managed to run the CHIP-8 emulator that Sergi Granell had developed for the PS Vita.
Source: Hackaday