One of the biggest problems the PlayStation Portable faced was piracy. It was absolutely rampant on Sony’s debut handheld game system resulting in developers and publishers being scared off who might have otherwise supported it. With PlayStation Vita, Sony has gone to great lengths to avoid having history repeat itself, opting to use proprietary memory cards as opposed to SD cards or the Memory Stick Duos used by PSP. Sony’s Scott Rohde described the solutions it had implemented as helping to protect the company “from piracy for the long term.” But never doubt the ability of the collective hacker/modder community, as Ars Technica reports a way has already been discovered to run software on the system that Sony did not intend — and Sony has not stood idly by while it happened.
Although it did not provide a way to suddenly run the sort of homebrew content you could on PSP, the Vita Half-Byte Loader is an open-source homebrew loader capable of running, among other things, emulators for NES, SNES, and Game Boy. This is done through a vulnerability discovered in certain PSP games which can be played on Vita (remember, not all digital PSP games are compatible with Vita at the moment). The first game announced to work with the exploit was Motorstorm: Arctic Edge; as demonstrated in the video below, it could be used to load up and play a game like Doom for PC.
