If Sony doesn’t want to be in the handheld market anymore (Nintendo is in a monopoly on the handheld market, if you exclude iOS/Android; and the big N is doing pretty well with the Nintendo Switch…), then fans are going to have to find a way to keep the PlayStation Vita, which has been around for over a decade, relevant…

vita2hos could be a solution that allows the modified Nintendo Switch to run PlayStation Vita tech demos. A Spanish developer created it, and sure enough, it runs programs intended for Sony’s handheld natively on the Switch. Sergi Granell (who goes by Xerpi) has described vita2hos as a PlayStation Vita-Horizon OS translation layer. Horizon OS is the operating system for the Nintendo Switch.

Xerpi stressed that vita2hos, whose code can be found on Github, is not an emulator. When you start a Vita executable, the program redirects the instructions to the Horizon OS routines to run the requested instructions similarly. So it is not an emulation, but a native solution at the operating system level, which seems to be an up-and-coming concept.

The video below from Modern Vintage Gamer shows vita2hos in action, and it’s a success: the tech demos ran without a hitch on the modded Nintendo Switch. He pointed out that no PlayStation Vita games currently on sale can be run with Xerpi’s software, and he believes it will be a while before that’s the case. He pointed out that the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation Vita both have ARM processors, so the big N’s hybrid platform can natively read the Vita’s program code, and Xerpi’s program offers workarounds to Sony’s proprietary callout set.

MVG says, “This is an early proof of concept, and there’s a lot of work to be done. We may see some commercial games start to boot. I do not want to get too ahead of myself – this is still very much a proof of concept – but it is exciting stuff for both Switch homebrew fans and Vita fans.” However, replacing the Vita’s rear touchpad won’t be easy…

Source: VGC