Hacked PS3 games running on Vita via Remote Play

YouTube videos have emerged showing hit PlayStation 3 titles running via Remote Play on the new PSVita handheld. Camera footage of titles such as Red Dead Redemption, Mortal Kombat, Battlefield 3 and Batman: Arkham Asylum has been recorded and uploaded, and there's absolutely no reason whatsoever to assume that the videos are anything but genuine.

The games are running on PlayStation 3s that are using hacked versions of the 3.55 firmware - the last update released by Sony that was vulnerable to the Fail0verflow security exploit. Remote Play support is actually an OS-level function that can turned on simply by adjusting a single variable, and as the processing overhead uses a relatively small amount of processing time from just one SPU, a majority of PlayStation 3 titles will work just fine.

While official PlayStation Vita support for Remote Play was only introduced in the PS3's 4.0 firmware, the new handheld is registered as a "mobile phone" on 3.55 and appears to function just fine. However, we would assume that the bespoke support that Sony added would offer up some advantages in terms of picture quality and response time. If there's one thing that's obvious from the footage, it's that latency is a real problem with this hack - this is something that we would hope would be resolved with proper support from Sony.

In November last year, Eurogamer reported that Sony had plans to enable Vita Remote Play on all PS3 games at PSP's 480x272 resolution, while also revealing that titles with specific support would run at 480p resolution. At the Tokyo Game Show last year, games such as LittleBigPlanet 2 and Killzone 3 were shown running via Remote Play at this higher resolution.

Digital Foundry will be taking a closer, more in-depth look at PlayStation Vita's official Remote Play support in a future article - in the meantime, here's how Battlefield 3 looks using the existing hack.