Ever since the launch of ps vita, people complained about the lack of backward compatibility with the psp games. First of all, Sony abandoned UMD (thank the Lord for that), so no loading of UMD games on the vita; secondly, they announced that the program to get the umd at a lower price on psn was only available on Japan (hummm?!?); and finally they marked on psp games on the psn as ps vita games also, charging a full price for a 4 (or more) years old game.
This attitude left many dedicated fans thinking “What am I going to do with my UMD collection? Do I need to carry two consoles with me or just spend (another) bunch of money re-buying my games? (if they are available on psn, otherwise, tough luck).
The problem seems to be without solution, but only Sony wish it to be without solution. A few years ago, right after the first CFW/devhook for the psp someone release an UMD dump homebrew. The piece of Software basically made a file from the UMD that a CFW could read through an ISO loader. This allow legit buyers that had a cracked psp to carry with them a bunch of games without carrying a bunch of UMD’s. The games would all go to the psp memory stick. This had several advantages.
- you would carry several games on the same card;
- meaning that, when you where tired of a game you could switch to another
- and the games loaded much (really much) faster.
With this in mind, I came up with the idea of a official psp software that would allow us to dump our legit bought UMD’s to a ps3 hard drive and them just copy them to the ps vita.
In order to give some restrain to piracy, the dumped games could only be played on a ps vita registered to the same account on the ps3 where the files had been created. This still doesn’t stop you from borrowing your friends UMD to dump to your ps3, but it would limited it by far.
And if you don’t have a ps3, Sony could create a desktop app with the same functions and restrictions, an addon to CMA so to speak.
This idea might go a long way to boost ps vita sales, because people would at the console and say “Ok, if I buy this device, I can dump all my umd to my ps3/pc and them just play them on the ps vita. Nice”
Cheers!