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Comment by goosedragons | Hacker News Reader

Worth mentioning Vita is pretty finnicky. SD card adapters use the game card slot not the memory card slot and and so aren't the simpliest to configure and get going. Official cards that use the memory card slot are capped at 64GB and 64GB cards were only sold in Asia and have only gotten even more stupid expensive over time.

It's a decent handheld but Sony's paranoia really kneecapped it. And it doesn't quite have the ease of use as a lot of the retro handhelds available today.

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I also have never had a problem with my oled model. Also hard to think other companies can match the vita’s build quality. Or spare parts supply.

Honestly, vita is life!

I recently breathed new life into my Vita with Adrenaline and a whole bunch of old PSX games. It really is a fantastic device, great build quality is exceptional and perfect handheld hardware for anything below 2012-era AAA games.

It really was let down by the business folks at Sony. I guess the upside is that it paved the way for the Switch and Nintendo really learned from Sony's mistakes (but even then, my Vita sees a lot more usage than my Switch).

The ps vita is the one console I keep taking out of storage periodically. It's such a great handheld console with a great library of indie games and amazing for emulation.

I haven't had any issues with mine (OLED model) FWIW. If you have an OLED model I think there is a way to put the card in the PSVSD, which might be more reliable.

Only the 3G models support the PSVSD. You do have to fiddle with the drive setup, some of the adapters don't work with some FW versions, etc. It's just more of a pain IMO than dropping ROMs on an SD card like other handhelds.

The sd2vita is pretty easy to setup these days. I find that it can all be done with gui apps on the vita itself.

Also I just ftp and drop roms on the sd card too.

Yeah but it's a 30+ step process to even to be able to use the sd2vita and emulators. Modern retro handhelds have an ease of use convenience factor. Proper SD card support, USB C charging, TV out, literally drag and drop ROMs, etc.

More like 10 steps. But yes it takes a bit of knowledge.

This is very true, modding any console can be quite the effort and a huge challenge for non technical people.

To get the mod working I had to compile the software for macOS 10.13 as some libusb function wasn’t working correctly and wouldn’t inject the payload to the vita. This was well out of my comfort zone.

The official flash cards also are very prone to corruption, especially the larger sized ones. Getting the SD card adapter is practically a requirement.

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