If you read my latest GekiHEN Wishlist article or have been reading my articles on emulation in general, you know I am an apologist of doing our best to ditch the PSPemu that everyone is still so obsessed with and this includes de PS1/PSX emulator. It is wonky, not 100% compatible and we have to play it at a god-awful upscaled 480×272. While I don’t know if the guys over at libretro read this blog (I hope they do!) they did heed my plea for a PS1 emulator since the latest RetroArch nightly release brings us PCSX-ReArmed support on the Vita (courtesy of Frangar)! They teased it a few days ago with this tweet:

 PCSX ReARMed (PlayStation emulator) progress on PS Vita! https://t.co/83pOxRQTHU — libretro (@libretro) 24 de setembro de 2016

Which was followed up this morning with the announcement that PCSX-ReArmed is now available on the PS Vita! I tried two games but couldn’t get it to boot, I don’t have the time to troubleshoot right now but you can check here to see what games people are playing and with what success.

What is PCSX-ReArmed?

PCSX-ReArmed is a fork of the popular emulator PCSX-R which itself was a continuation of the original PCSX emulator. One of its most popular features (still today) is the fact that it worked near flawlessly with a BIOS file. ReArmed is the libretro port of this emulator for ARM platforms (Android being the main example) and is probably the most compatible portable emulator in the market. On the PC version of RetroArch PCSX-ReArmed is substituted by mednafen-PSX. The current Vita version runs many games at 60fps, but more optimizations are coming.

Download PCSX-ReArmed

To get the latest version of PCSX-RA, just head over here to the libretro buildbot and get any nightly that is from the 26th September onwards. I would recommend you post on the comments what games are working and how they perform for other users, if you don’t mind the trouble. That would help a lot of people.

A new day is dawning for the Vita, that much is for sure. Enjoy the release everyone!