Vita Theme Creator

A desktop app for building custom home-screen themes for the PlayStation Vita. It is a modern, cross-platform reimplementation of ThemeBUILDER by AntHJ, a Windows-only tool whose reverse-engineering of the Vita theme format everything here is built on.

Download for Linux

Always the newest release, built on Ubuntu by GitHub Actions.

AppImage .deb All releases

The AppImage needs chmod +x before it runs. macOS and Windows builds need paid code-signing certificates, so those platforms run from source for now — see the repository for setup.

See it working

Lockscreen editor with notification icon cropping

Demo

1 / 7

What it does

Vita-accurate live preview

The lockscreen and each home page render as you edit, including the status bar, wave-pattern backgrounds, and system icons. The preview was checked against real exported themes and device screenshots.

Full theme editor

Edit the lockscreen, all 10 home pages, 17 system icons, clock and notification colors, background music, and package info, all through native file pickers.

Crop or stretch any image

Drag to pan and scroll to zoom. The editor, the preview, and the export share the same crop math, so the exported image matches what you see.

More customization than the original

Use your own page-indicator dots, and replace the lockscreen and LiveArea preview screenshots independently.

Standalone icon-set builder

Build a reusable 17-icon set without opening a theme, then reuse it across projects.

Theme library

List, reopen, re-export, or delete every theme you have built, from one place.

Real, installable output

Export produces correctly sized PNGs, a generated theme.xml, composited icons, an ATRAC9 bgm.at9, and a .zip laid out the way the community themes repository expects.

Export never fails on empty slots

Every optional image falls back to ThemeBUILDER’s own bundled defaults, so an untouched slot can’t break an export.

Themes made with it

These were built with the app and published on the PS Vita Custom Themes repository, where anyone can install them straight to a real Vita.

Magik Theme on psvt.ovh →

How accurate is it?

The app's domain logic comes from a reverse-engineering analysis of ThemeBUILDER's source. It was then tested against a real third-party PS Vita theme validator, which found two places where the analysis or the original tool was wrong:

Notification icons ship at 120×110. The analysis had cited 40×37, which is only the size of the original tool's small in-app preview.
theme.xml leaves out a page's background-file references when that page has no image. The original tool points at a file that never gets created.

The same testing caught two bugs in this app, both fixed: page backgrounds were serialized incorrectly, and notification icons were masked incorrectly.

Under the hood

TypeScript throughout, with one shared data model that the Electron main process and the React renderer both import, and a typed IPC contract between them.
Image conversion runs through sharp in the main process. On Linux it runs in a separate Node process instead, because the GLib inside sharp's libvips clashes with Electron's and crashes the app on export. The worker's output was verified byte-identical to running sharp directly.
ATRAC9 audio encoding shells out to the original tool's Windows binary, since no legal open-source ATRAC9 encoder exists. It runs natively on Windows and through Wine elsewhere. Existing .at9 files and the bundled default track work everywhere without it.
Tagged releases build the AppImage and .deb on Ubuntu through GitHub Actions and attach them to the release.

Credits

AntHJ/ThemeBUILDER — the original tool, and the reverse-engineering of the Vita theme format this app is built on.
LiEnby/Sony-ThemeTool — a decompile of Sony's official ThemeTool. The app's .at9 header validation is a byte-exact port of its chunk parsers.

Demo themes feature fan art of Marvel's Magik and Naruto's Sasuke. All characters belong to their respective owners.

Source on GitHub