Concerning the gaming handheld market, there have been few companies that have tried to make it a success. With Nintendo leading the charge with the Game Boy, others have attempted to usurp the company's position as the king of the handheld console. While Sony attempted to throw its hat into the ring with the PlayStation Portable, its follow-up the PlayStation Vita wasn't quite as successful in grabbing attention. With Sony focusing on its next-gen PS5 console, a lot of its older technology like the Vita is being phased out.
Its competitor, the Nintendo 3DS, released a year before the Vita hit the market, with a diverse library of games. In comparison to what the Vita offered at launch, the 3DS was a more appealing choice with titles like Mario Kart 7, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D and Kid Icarus: Uprising leading the charge. Despite this, there have been some hidden gems that helped define the PS Vita, since it was a console that in some eyes had potential to take on Nintendo. Some fans have even begun preservation efforts of the console, including a way for some Vita software to run natively on Nintendo's current hybrid console.
Spanish developer Sergi Granell, known as Xerpi online, has created a tool known as 'vita2hos' which is described as a "PlayStation Vita to Horizon OS (Nintendo Switch) translation layer." This theoretically allows PlayStation Vita executables to run on a modded or dev kit version of Nintendo Switch consoles. Grannell emphasizes that this is not an emulator, stating that when a PS Vita executable is run, the tool redirects it to the Switch's OS to perform the same behavior. Therefore, the executable can be run natively instead of being emulated.
A video by Modern Vintage Gamer shows the tool in action, where it shows a PlayStation Vita tech demo booting up on a modded Switch, which shows a simple triangle render. Other simple games that come on a Vita emulator can also be played this way. The channel notes that since both the Switch and Vita use ARM CPUs, the Switch can read Vita code, with the tool providing a workaround for when the game refers to proprietary code from Sony.
However, Modern Vintage Gamer states that no commercially produced Vita games, such as Persona 4 Golden, can currently run on the Nintendo Switch this way. He states that it will likely be a long time before that is possible, with this acting more as a proof of concept than anything else. This breakthrough should be very exciting for fans who are in the homebrew scene, where it's possible that a lot of the PS Vita's library can be playable natively via the Switch.