The Sony Playstation Vita is a marvelous hand held gaming device.  I personally don’t own one, yet, but I have been fortunate enough to borrow some here and there from friends over the years.  The PS Vita is also a bane for many independent developers that want to release games for it as it has not been opened up.  Until now.  The first release of a new crack that opens the Sony Playstation Vita to independent developers is finally here.  Only took what, four or five years?

Let’s straighten out one misconception before everyone starts yelling that the PS Vita was already hacked.  The PSP side was years ago.  There was also a complicated hack that required a lot of techie know how to install and make run properly.  This newest hack, HENkaku, is easy to install, works fine and opens only the parts of the Sony Playstation Vita that need opening for independent developers.

What does that mean?  You won’t be able to pirate official games.  You won’t be able to rip commercial games or run backups of them using HENkaku.  Basically the only Digital Rights Management (DRM) that was removed was the part stopping unlicensed software from running.

Yifan Lu had this to say about HENkaku, “It does not let you install or run Vita “backups”, warez, or any pirated content. It does not disable any DRM features. It does not let you decrypt encrypted games. Here’s my stance on this: I do not care one way or the other about piracy. I do not judge people who do pirate. I will not act as the police for pirates. However, I will personally not write any tools that aid in piracy. It is my choice just as it is the pirate’s choice to steal content.”

What you can do now is run emulators easier, play the growing amount of independent games that have been released and have less headache doing it.  This crack is reported to work on the Playstation TV though reports from fans are stating troubles in implementing this hack if they can get it working at all.

Head over to yifan.lu to get the details on installing this new exploit.  If you have an independently developed game, or know of one, that we should cover, let us know in the comments below.

If you don’t own a Sony Playstation Vita then hit for a deal on one today.