Sony built a fortress, but hackers spent five years digging under the walls. Today, a hacked PS Vita with ROMs is arguably the —it plays PS Vita, PSP, PS1, and dozens of retro consoles flawlessly on an OLED screen.

Buy a used PS Vita, hack it (which is legal), install emulators, and play ROMs of out-of-copyright games (e.g., NES/SNES titles). For PS Vita games themselves, buy physical copies second-hand and dump your own ROMs for backup.

Do not go on public Wi-Fi with a hacked Vita running pirated ROMs if you have a PSN account with purchased games. Sony can ban your account and console ID permanently.

However, the ease of obtaining and playing these ROMs directly contributed to the Vita's commercial failure. Developers saw that almost any hacked Vita could play their game for free, so they stopped porting to the platform.