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- Hacker News
- after 26 years? its a PS2...
- This is the one you can't mechapwn, right? Can we do anything with this information?by nubinetwork
- What's the practical benefit of this? Will it allow us to reverse-engineer the BIOS so that PS2 emulators can ship with a working one rather than forcing end-users to "procure" a proprietary BIOS blob?
- Yeah, and day-one patches only exist while the servers do. Archive the PKGs.by hn1rig3rak
- by mzs
- Looks like they also wrote a Ghidra Decompiler for the ISA https://github.com/DiscoStarslayer/ghidra-spc970by WhiteDawn
- This will be great for preservation of PS2 games. Well done!
It seems like preservation of games for later consoles is a lost cause. If I pull out my PS5 30 years from now and pop in my Cyberpunk 2077 disk to play, I'm going to have a barely playable game.
It's better than nothing, I suppose, but I won't be able to re-play the excellent version that I played through last year.
by criddell - It's only a matter of time until most of these games get vibe-coded back end clones. Still not as good as a full ROM but at least and improvement over complete unplayability.by sharperguy
- > pop in my Cyberpunk 2077 disk to play
It depends if you have a ps4 disk or a ps5 disk.
The ps5 disk is the "Ultimate Edition" version. It was released 3 years after launch and contains the 2.0 update
by MYEUHD - > If I pull out my PS5 30 years from now and pop in my Cyberpunk 2077 disk to play, I'm going to have a barely playable game.
If we're lucky, it won't be playable at all. Then they'll have the option of selling it to you again, and some shareholders (the only people who matter) will be happy.
With AI-driven hardware price spikes, I think there's a great opportunity to push for a transition to streaming, so users won't have any game files at all, and subscriptions can become the norm.
by palmotea - PS3 has been jailbroken since 2010 (remember geohot?)
The original fat PS3 and the first few years of slims are also completely “open” as well (with custom firmware that’s fairly easy to install).
If anything, the PS3 was easier to break its security on.
- Honest question, not a challenge: In what way will this improve preservation of PS2 games? My impression was that PS2 emulation was already solved, which I mention precisely to invoke Cunningham's Law. What PS2 things don't work right now because this chip hadn't been cracked?by jerf
- The flip side is:
1. Playstation purchases seem to follow accounts and most games will run on future hardware.
2. Cross-platform is near universal now. While you may not be able to play the PS5 version on your PS9, you will likely be able to run the PC version still.
There's a subset of the preservation community who are focusing on decomp/recomp with PCs as the target architecture. x86 / Windows will outlive all of us, and with the source code, games can be recompiled for newer target architectures. This is trivial with LLMs now (targeting new architectures, not the decomp/recomp - though that has made progress too).
It's not a perfect solution, but it's good enough, IMHO.
by mywittyname - It is sad that consoles much newer than the PS2 will be very hard to preserve. On the other hand, I feel that the classic video game era ended by the 2010s or so. So maybe there won’t be that much interest in preserving the newer games, partly because they had so much DRM, required online play, and such, such that they’re harder to preserve.
This may seem a little bit arbitrary, but this is not uncommon throughout history. For example, in a normal English literature class, you’re going to be assigned Shakespeare. You will be assigned a bunch of novels from the 19th century, but not very much in between. Yeah, sure, there are a few works, probably, from the 1600s and 1700s, but not many compared to those other ones that I mentioned.
Video games might be the same way, where the games that were made from the NES to around 2010 are the ones that people care about far into the future.
by telotortium - In 30 years you may need to modify your PS5 just to get it booting. A lot of retro consoles have to be recapped.
Also the plastic gets brittle. I was replacing a fuse on a PS2 motherboard and some of the ribbon connector pieces just shattered on reassembly. There are many challenges to preservation. Eventually all that old hardware will be all gone.
by RajT88 - This article seems to be completely based on the X post by the reverse engineer DiscoStarSlayer : https://x.com/DiscoStarslayer/status/2099132300390744320.
That post reads "After 4 years of effort, I'm happy to announce that one of the final secrets of the PS2 has been broken wide open!
It's been a long process of decapping, optical dumping, and now at last a software solution.
Thank you Libby for finding the exploit from our dirty optical dumps!"
Yesterday DiscoStarSlayer also promised details are coming: "Will share full write-up on how we got here soon!"
by dzdt - > Some of the reverse engineering tricks utilized by DiscoStarslayer include chemically decapping the CXP102064 to expose the die, then using microscopes and optical dumping skills to analyze the silicon chip circuitry. In this case, a lucky break during the hacking apparently uncovered an exploit that provided a method whereby the chip’s data could be extracted through software.
This is next level commitment to the cause.
Also, I can totally imagine their reaction when they discovered the exploit and realized they could put down the ... chemicals. XD
by ethagnawl - Byuu and McMaster decapped all the SNES ones with amazing write-ups a number of years ago.by piltdownman
- There actually is a pretty large community of hardware reverse engineers decapping chips for fun, sometimes just to dump internal ROMs (like in this case) and other times going as far as to try reconstructing the original schematics and netlists in order to document the chip's internals and allow for more accurate emulation, in some cases all the way down to the transistor level [1] [2]. If you want to learn more, Ken Shirriff has written a lot of blog posts on the subject [3] and Siliconprawn [4] hosts a huge collection of die shots from many contributors.
[1] https://floooh.github.io/visual6502remix
by spicyjpeg - Hello! I'm one of the people involved in reverse engineering the MechaCon. Please take note of the following:
* It is already possible to run backup/copied discs entirely using software methods (from memory card, HDD, or DVD video player exploit), and in the case of the 50k series and newer (Dragon MechaCon), can use the "force unlock" patch that does not require any patches to copied discs.
* The dumps, alone, does not give enough information to create an """hardware""" ODE (optical drive emulator). However, it is possible to make a modchip that replaces the MechaCon, relying on the DSP to continue to read discs.
* The current method to dump the ROM used in the SPC970 requires lots of writing to NVRAM.
* These dumps will eventually be useful for full-system low level emulation, as MagicGate and KELF/KIRX security goes through it.
* These dumps are useful for vulnability searching, which can allow functionality to MechaPwn (code execution on MechaCon, unlocking security e.g. set disc type and max LBN) or TonyHax (unlocking PS1 mode to read any disc, on SPC970 based MechaCons and all PS1 MechaCons).
* The contents of game discs (except those that use DNAS online authentication) are not encrypted. These dumps don't unlock anything additional there.
See https://gist.github.com/uyjulian/aaf4f4e2e74d980f620a9b73ba0... for updated info.
by uyjulian - I never could get the DVD player exploit to work, so I ended up buying a memory card with with FreeMCBoot.
I get the feeling that the DVD exploit is fiddly and requires adjustments for each iteration of the possible PS2 hardware configurations.
by jordigh