After Yifan Lu’s great hardware reports about the PS Vita, its motherboard and its nand, our user Katsu found a way for dual booting the PS Vita, which can kind of be seen as a downgrade solution.

But that is not everything that he was able to do. Katsu is on fire and also looked at the Vita cartridges… see below for some more electronics joy!

PS Vita Cartridge dumps now Possible – Does this enable piracy?

Katsu seems to be able to dump a PS Vita cartridge – you know, those tiny physical modules that contain PS Vita games, a cartridge, like we know them from the Nintendo DS and 3DS – and is therefore able to retrieve the games in the format how they are at the cartridge itself, instead of as a .PKG, like you get them via PSN, or encrypted for the CMA backup, like you get them via the PS3 or PC backup method.

This does not imply that the files from the cartridge are decrypted, that would be a pretty big security flaw for Sony, but we might be able to do more with these files, than we could do with the files as a .PKG or in the backup format.

Keep in mind that this will require hardware modification, and that there is currently no software solution for this. Do not try it yourself, except if you are experienced in hardware modding!

But do those cartridge dumped files enable piracy at our beloved PS Vita? Well, currently there is no way to install PS Vita games without the help of a PC (backup), a PS3 (backup/PSN) or the PSN, so we can say that this does not enable piracy at a PS Vita, … yet.

There might be a possibility to use these cartridge dumps for piracy in the future, but before that happens, more knowledge of the PS Vitas file system would be needed, instead of just the current ePSPs file system. There also would need a way to fake these dumps as cartridges, since (digital/) PSN versions of games are account bound and need a valid license file.

Piracy is currently, thank god, not possible on the PS Vita, and we, at least I, hope that this will stay like that for a long time.

Disclaimer:

We at wololo.net do not support piracy in any way. We do not allow questions about how to pirate software, but we do inform about software and hardware hacks of devices. Wololo.net is not responsible for your actions!

Source and more pictures: Katsu via /talk