One cool thing about having a really powerful gaming computer is that you can run so many other operating systems inside virtual environments on it. While virtualization software like VMware Workstation, Qemu and Virtual Box can run almost any operating system on a Windows PC, sometimes you need special emulators like Vita3K.
Vita3K is a PlayStation Vita console emulator that will allow us to run and play many PlayStation games available for this Vita console. It is an open-source experimental project for Windows. It can also run on Linux and macOS.
The user interface of Vita3K looks exactly the same as PlayStation Vita game console. The screen of Vita3K emulator even has a dummy battery icon just like in the real thing. The emulator supports firmware formats such as PKG, ZIP and VPK. However, the developers of this emulators do not offer any firmware or game ROMs. You have to create your own firmware files for which full instructions are provided by the developers on the Vita3K website.
Before we begin using the Vita3K emulator, we have to download and install firmware and font upgrade from Sony website. These downloads are free and can be installed in just a couple of minutes. After this we can proceed to installing game firmware/ROM into Vita3K emulator.
Vita3K does not seem to work well with the keyboard or mouse. It is highly recommended that you connect a PlayStation compatible game controller with your Windows PC in order to play games through Vita3K emulator.
There is another limitation – not all games run on Vita3K. Some games run but they are not playable. You can find the full list of all the compatible games on the Vita3K website. For example, Call of Duty: Black Ops runs pretty well on Vita3K.
You can download Vita3K from https://vita3k.org/ or https://github.com/Vita3K/Vita3K.