While the PlayStation Vita can emulate a whole slew of consoles, one generally has to launch games by opening the emulator through its bubble and selecting them from there. Now, a new way of launching your favourite retro titles has landed thanks to custom bubble support in RetroArch & DaedalusX64!
What are Custom Bubbles?
While launching games from emulators is pretty easy to do, having LiveArea bubbles is pretty nice! (From W00lfwang’s guide linked below)
In layman’s terms, custom bubbles are LiveArea bubbles like the ones for native games, homebrew and applications that allow one to directly launch an emulated game by passing its ROM path to the emulator. As a result, this allows for nice-looking LiveArea pages with your favourite retro games while also making it quicker and easier to launch them especially if a less tech-savvy person is using your PSVita.
While custom bubbles have been around since the recent release of RetroArch 1.8.9 and DaedalusX64 0.4, there was no way for the average user to actually make use of them since no instructions were provided for either emulation solution. Now, that has changed thanks to two guides published by community members detailing the process that needs to be followed for creating your own custom bubbles!
How do I create Custom Bubbles?
After creating bubbles, you can check out how they look before installing them on your Vita using Vita3K, a WIP emulator for the console! (Image from Cimmerian Iter’s Guide Below)
As mentioned above, two guides exist to guide you through creating custom bubbles and these can be found below. The first one is by CustomProtocol moderator Cimmerian Iter and it details the process required to create custom DaedalusX64 bubbles which lets you create shortcuts to play your favourite Nintendo 64 games while also being able to bundle in some nice cover art and icons. The other one is by W00lfwang and it details the process for making custom bubbles for both DaedalusX64 and RetroArch.
While the process isn’t too difficult, both guides have you looking up 3 images for the LiveArea bubble (background image, icon and startup image) then using so-called builder utilities that let you create the custom bubble’s VPK which can be installed on your Vita. The builder applications are Windows-only for now and ask you information about the bubble’s name, ROM path, bubble title ID and core path in RetroArch’s case.
Conclusion
As Cimmerian Iter’s guide only contains instructions in how to make custom bubbles for DeadlusX64, there are plans in place to also add a section on how to custom bubbles for RetroArch. You may access the guides mentioned in this article by following the links below.
Cimmerian Iter’s Guide (DaedalusX64 Only): https://samilops2.gitbook.io/vita-troubleshooting-guide/daedalus-x64/making-custom-bubbles
W00lfwang’s guide: https://www.reddit.com/r/vitahacks/comments/hjmn5k/ps_vita_daedalusx64_and_retroarch_custom_bubbles/
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