How to Downgrade the PSVita Firmware

Sony’s PlayStation Vita was a pretty awesome handheld with a lot of potential. There were some great games on it, but the PSVita felt like a missed opportunity overall. One of the biggest setbacks of the hardware was the overpriced memory cards that was required to own a digital library of games. Not only were the memory cards expensive (sometimes more than the console itself), the overall storage size of up to 64GB was relatively small when you compare them to what sizes a micro sd card is capable of reaching.

Over the years, modders were able to figure out how to hack into the PSVita and enable homebrew, emulators, and enabling support for sd cards when using an “sd2vita” adapter. With the right memory card, you could practically fit your entire Vita library onto your device without having to worry about deleting content to make room. Unfortunately, Sony loved to constantly update the firmware with “stability updates”, which would block the ability to take advantage of these exploits.

Once you updated, that was it, game over. If there was an awesome exploit feature that only worked in an older firmware revision, you had to cross your fingers that a new exploit was released. A firmware downgrader seemed like it was never going to happen at this rate, but surprisingly, a hacker that goes by the name “TheFloW” released one recently. He named it “modoru“, which means “to go back” in Japanese.

According to TheFloW’s github page, this doesn’t take you 100% out of the woods just yet. As of this writing, you currently can’t roll back firmware 3.69 or 3.70 until a new exploit is released. If your firmware can’t run a HENkaku/h-encore exploit, then you will need to wait.

Now that Sony has pretty much abandoned the Vita entirely, it’s great to know that the homebrew community is still alive and well. If you want to give this a try, an up-to-date tutorial and download link can be found here: https://github.com/TheOfficialFloW/modoru