As some may know; if you have a Vita card that’s been in a higher firmware PSVita, you can’t use it on a lower firmware one. That is unless you format the card. Thanks to CardUnlock, memory card swapping with higher FW Vitas won’t be a pain anymore.

What’s CardUnlock?

It’s a homebrew utility that requires taiHEN or (thankfully, as you’ll see) HENkaku. This homebrew works by mouting the card used with a higher FW to another mount point and killing off id.dat on it; that way you can use the card on a 3.60 Vita! That’s great but how are you going to access the card? If you have a Vita Slim or a PSTV, it’s easy; simply remove your existing memory card, run taiHEN without a memory card installed, install the homebrew and viola! You can unlock any card you wish (you don’t have to reboot to do it).

On a Vita 1k, the procedure is a tad more complicated and requries you to have a memory card in your Vita before unlocking another card since Sony didn’t make the internal storage of the Vita 1k accessible for whatever reason. You must install CardUnlock and then move it via Application Storage Manager to ur0 (internal storage); after that you can only use HENkaku R6 to run the homebrew since taiHEN doesn’t activate on Vita FAT (1k) models if you don’t have a card installed. You’ll probably see an error message but ignore it, HENkaku is activated. This method may be slightly dangerous but I doubt it should do any harm; a user on Reddit confirms it works and the developer of this homebrew utility mentions it in the readme for this utility.

How do I get it?

You need to install the VPK and read the instructions in the section above to determine what you need to do. Follow the links below and make sure to get this VPK from a trusted source as it needs unsafe permissions! Look for Application Storage Manager yourself as it’s suggested you know what you’re doing before using it. Report any issues to developer ‘cnsldv’ in a civil way on GitHub or elsewhere.

GitHub link (source code+ full instructions): https://github.com/cnsldv/CardUnlock

Download link: https://github.com/cnsldv/CardUnlock/releases/tag/v1.0