PSone Games On PS Vita – What To Expect From Firmware 1.8

[drop2]When firmware 1.8 rolls around this ‘summer’ don’t expect to be able to fire up the PlayStation Store on your Vita and start downloading hundreds of PSone games.

It’s not going to work like that.

Like the Vita does with PSP games, the service will start slowly and evolve.

At E3, the emulator was clearly at an early stage: it didn’t have the ability to play games in full screen (PSone games just ran in a little window) and it didn’t use the analog sticks.

This, naturally, won’t be the case when the emulator is released to the public – as far as we know the service will support a full screen mode (with the option to change the size via the touch screen menu) and, of course, it’ll make full use of those twin analog sticks in games that used them originally.

The rear touch screen will take the place of the L2 and R2 buttons.

What we don’t know is whether there’ll be any special filters or upscaling applied to the visuals. Some PSone games still look great, but a lot look pretty ropey now – it’d be nice to see some options in terms of how they’re presented and hopefully the full screen option won’t look as blurry as it does on the 3DS when standard DS games are blown up.

We’ve been informed that any PSone games you’ve bought that run on the PS3 will be free to download again, which is decent, but there won’t suddenly be a massive pile of PSone games on the Store – we understand that there’ll be a handful at the start and then they’ll be released in batches.

The Vita will have its own compatibility list, like the PSP’s, which will double check titles before they go onto the Store. The initial batch of games is likely to include Jet Moto, Tomb Raider, Final Fantasy VII, Cool Boarders 2, Wild Arms, Arc the Lad, and Twisted Metal 2.

At least, they were the games playable at E3.

Of course, Sony haven’t said anything official on this yet beyond the initial press release, but once they do we’ll let you know.