Installing VitaSDK on Apple Silicon (ARM64)

May 20, 2026

I recently decided to install VitaSDK on my Mac to dive into PS Vita homebrew development. While the official installation instructions on the VitaSDK website are a great starting point, Apple Silicon architecture introduces a few hurdles.

Here is my complete walkthrough on how I got everything compiling successfully, including the workarounds for Apple Silicon...

I started by following the official guide, which went smoothly:

First, install wget and cmake via Homebrew.

brew install wget cmake

Next, export the VITASDK environment variable and add it to your PATH.

Open your .zshrc file

nano ~/.zshrc

and add these lines to the end:

export VITASDK=/usr/local/vitasdk

export PATH=$VITASDK/bin:$PATH

(Remember to restart your terminal or run source ~/.zshrc to apply the changes.)

Then, clone the Vita Dev Package Manager (vdpm) and run the bootstrap script:

git clone https://github.com/vitasdk/vdpm

cd vdpm

sudo ./bootstrap-vitasdk.sh

The next official step is to run sudo ./install-all.sh. However, when I did this, the script immediately failed, complaining that $VITASDK is not set. This happens because running sudo strips away your user's environment variables. You can bypass this in two ways:

1. Edit the install-all.sh file and hardcode export VITASDK="/usr/local/vitasdk" right after the set -c command.

2. Run the script with the -E flag, which tells sudo to preserve your environment variables:

sudo -E ./install-all.sh

With that sorted, the tool installed all the packages. I thought I was ready to go...

When I tried to build vita-savemgr, CMake complained. First, it warned me that compatibility with CMake versions older than 3.10 would be removed. I fixed this by opening my CMakeLists.txt file and adjusting the minimum version requirement:

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.5)

(I also had to make this exact same version adjustment in vitasdk/share/vita.cmake on line 14).

Then came the real blocker: CMake told me I was missing libzstd.

Simply running brew install zstd wasn't enough because VitaSDK expects x86_64 libraries, but my default Homebrew installation was pulling ARM64 libraries for Apple Silicon. To fix this, I had to install a secondary version of Homebrew specifically for x86_64 under Rosetta 2.

Here is how to set up the x86_64 environment:

arch -x86_64 /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

arch -x86_64 /usr/local/bin/brew install zstd

After redirecting CMake to the correct x86_64 library, everything finally clicked into place. I was able to build vita-savemgr successfully!

reha

Installing VitaSDK on Apple Silicon (ARM64)