8 ms·

Original Sony PlayStation 2 security chip 'broken wide open' after 26 years

165 points by rbanffy 18d ago

criddell 18d ago
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.
- vrighter 18d ago
  If you pop in gta6 you'll have exactly no game at all!
- MYEUHD 18d ago
  > 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
- clownstrikelol 18d ago
  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.
  - pachouli-please 17d ago
    Do you know of any good recent-ish resources for learning about jailbreaking and sideloading titles on the ps3? Last time I was trying to figure out how to load my game backups I gave up as it seemed way complex compared to the xbox 360.
    - clownstrikelol 17d ago
      https://consolemods.org/wiki/Main_Page https://consolemods.org/wiki/Main_Page Read the instructions carefully, multiple times. The older PS3s can be jailbroken through a browser exploit. The E3 flasher is also quite nice on those same PS3s if you are feeling more adventurous or your browser exploit fails. Given that most PS3s are getting to be quite old, and you’ll likely want to tear them down and clean / repaste them anyway, using an E3 isn’t too bad of an idea. No soldering required! I bought an early PS3 slim at auction a few months ago, definitely lots of cool things out there for them nowadays.
- RajT88 18d ago
  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.
  - klodolph 18d ago
    I think what’s worse is flash lifespan. You can recap, but can you find replacements for failed flash? Can you reimage it with the correct data? Can you even access the flash, which may be buried inside a chip somewhere? Plastic may get brittle but I think modern plastics do this less than 90s plastics.
    - doubled112 18d ago
      I was surprised that the “fix” for the failed storage module in my slim 4GB Xbox 360 was to tear it down and remove the storage module. It isn’t usually that easy. I am also impressed they managed to use worse flash than the 15 year old $10 USB 2.0 drive I plugged in as a replacement. Yes, it was one of those projects you see what you still have in the bin. Hey, this one is period correct!
      - theokrueger 17d ago
        unfortunately you need hot air for most slim motherboards if the 4GB NAND fails. only trinity revisions (early slims) have the pluggable module
        doubled112 16d ago
        Sounds like I won a lottery I didn’t know I was entering.
    - chocochunks 17d ago
      This has been sort of a problem already in the Wii U community as some units have a less reliable NAND chip. For that console the community has developed the ability to emulate the NAND chip with an SD card. Proper NAND replacements are possible too but obviously more work and more risk and I think you may have needed to dump your encryption keys beforehand. Potentially it can be fixable but for some consoles like the Xbox Series line that we know very little about it may not be.
- sharperguy 18d ago
  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.
  - VulgarExigency 18d ago
    Do you honestly believe that most of the thousands of PS2, PS3 and PS4 games will get vibe-coded backend clones?
    - patates 17d ago
      I have no doubt it'll be attempted, but they won't be clones, they'll be clowns. Even if they were pixel perfect clones with exactly the same play. As a person who vibe codes like there's no tomorrow to have custom software, I still find the color of the bytes important for something like a retrogame. Otherwise it's like color photocopy of an art piece.
    - mywittyname 17d ago
      Yes. My colleague was telling me about how he was vibe coding a port of some random-ass PSP game. So people are clearly already doing it. PS4 is AMD64 based. And so few games leveraged the cell processor in the PS3 to it's fullest, IIRC, the current emulation strategy is to translate the cell calls to x86. So the hard work is actually already done.
    - sharperguy 17d ago
      Honestly the advent of coding agents means that a company could just instruct the agent to strip out any code in their backend that they can't release for legal reasons, and dump a non-compiling zip out into the public and have someone in the community fix it up and make it runnable. The costs of doing it are much lower than in the past.
- mitxela 18d ago
  In the PS2 days people thought that about the PS2, too.
  - criddell 17d ago
    IIRC, the PS2 did not download game updates or patches from the internet. The game on the disk was what you played. As long as you had a PS2 and the disk, you could play the exact game you played so many years ago. With the PS5, the disk is more or less a key that lets the console download the game. Having the console and the disk is a guarantee of nothing in the future other than you can probably play the buggy mess that they packaged up way before the game was done.
    - Yokolos 17d ago
      I don't know why this myth keeps getting perpetuated. It's simply not true. The countless game discs I own that let me install and play the game without internet access are proof of that. There are some games where the game acts as a key and doesn't contain the full game, but this isn't the rule.
      - mrguyorama 17d ago
        This "myth" isn't a myth. Most games aren't the "digital key only" style of discs, like how Nintendo has game cards that are just entitlements now, but game companies took huge advantage of the fact that updates are expected, and the game shipped on disk on release day is almost always unfinished and patched with day one updates. The disk image is submitted for manufacture well before the game actually hits the release date. This goes all the way to things like a version of Tony Hawk skateboarding that only had like one map on the disc itself.
      - criddell 17d ago
        I was thinking mostly about updates. The version of Cyberpunk on the initial disk release for the Play Station was pretty bad but downloaded updates fixed it. AFAIK, the PS2 didn't download patches or updates for games. If you have the disk, you can play the same game that you did 20 years ago.
- jerf 18d ago
  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?
  - Palomides 17d ago
    I think this might allow doing more things with the disc drive on all(?) ps2 models like running copied/homebrew ps1 discs (currently requires a modchip afaik), or potentially developing replacement optical drives/hardware emulators
  - functionmouse 17d ago
    PS2 emulation leaves a lot to be desired in terms of accuracy and authenticity, and current original hardware backup solutions are not ideal or extremely cumbersome, including caveats like relying on homebrew software which alters the memory layout of games as they run, leading to inaccuracies and broken games, and needing to have multiple copies of backup loading software on your console, as some loaders will work with some games, but not with others. It's a right mess. Some solutions, such as MechaPwn, are more transparent, allowing you to burn so-called "master discs" of your game backups to DVD-R. As far as I can tell, compatibility is 100%, but if I recall correctly, this only works on specific models of console, and the process of burning a master disc can be unintuitive and relies on specific, deprecated, commercial DVD burning software. From what I can tell, this opens the door to things like optical drive emulators, which replace the disc laser with an SD card slot, allowing the console to read game disc images no differently than the console would read a retail game.
    - jerf 17d ago
      Ah, hardware disk drive replacements, that would make sense. I'm very software oriented so wasn't considering the hardware implications. Thank you.
  - drdexebtjl 17d ago
    My guess (not involved with PS2 emulation specifically at all) is that this will improve low-level emulation. So things like making a clone of the hardware with an FPGA, making emulators cycle-accurate, removing game-specific hacks that are no longer needed due to more accurate emulation, and achieving 100% bug-for-bug compatibility with original hardware.
- vitorfblima 18d ago
  Back in the day my jailbroken PS2 would run all sorts of CDs with pirated games. It was such a magical time, I would download all sorts of games and spend the evening discovering gems.
  - sebastiansm7 17d ago
    eDonkey times, nice times.
  - frou_dh 17d ago
    I remember downloading ISOs at like 4-8 KB/s from FTPs. It was an achievement to even get one successfully downloaded and ready to burn.
- deaton 17d ago
  Everything gets broken eventually. Every Nintendo console except the switch 2 is wide open. Even the "unbreakable" Xbox consoles were broken with Damage Control. Anything worth breaking will be broken, eventually, whether in software or by a mod chip.
- palmotea 17d ago
  > 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.
- anal_reactor 17d ago
  X360 / PS3 are totally hackable, and those games were released before the PITA of modern gaming began. Maybe the real question is whether these games are worth preserving. Most valuable games have a PC port anyway and those get cracked sooner or later.
- telotortium 17d ago
  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.
  - mywittyname 17d ago
    Games from the 2010s are still "new". There are several major game series where the most current entry came from the 2010s. Think Skyrim & GTA5. Game companies still have the source code an tooling sitting around. With some minor texture brushups, they can release a "remastered" version and get $20 out of people again. Nintendo games are the odd ones here, because their love of novel gameplay means that a lot of first party games need to run on OG hardware for the full experience. Think Wii, DS/3DS.
    - alt227 17d ago
      > With some minor texture brushups, they can release a "remastered" version Unfortunately these versions are usually inferior to the originals, so I dont think they can really be referred to as preservation.
    - chocochunks 17d ago
      Game companies maybe have the source code and tooling around. And can maybe get a remaster. Look at titles like Kingdom Hearts 1.5 HD. Square Enix lost the source to KH 1 despite it only being ~12 years old at release and had to rebuild it. Developers close all the time, they get bought and sold and bought and sold and nobody is entirely sure who owns the rights to X title anymore or where the code is. Then you also have licensing rights for cars, sports leagues, music etc.
- mywittyname 17d ago
  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.
  - rbanffy 17d ago
    > most games will run on future hardware. Until Sony decides you no longer own them.
    - criddell 17d ago
      They did this fairly recently with over 500 movies and TV shows. The licensing agreement with StudioCanal ran out and everybody who had one of those titles in their libraries had it removed (stuff like Terminator 2, Total Recall, Paddington, Apocalypse Now, ...). Who knows what licensing timebombs exist in Sony games? If the license for music played over some title sequence is lost 30 years from now Sony isn't going to fix the problem. They will just make the game unable to start.
  - kibwen 17d ago
    > most games will run on future hardware. I'm starting to get uncertain about how much longer there will even exist future Playstation hardware. Apple and Google phones have devoured the casual/mobile gaming market and as that market hits saturation they'll be eyeing the prestige AAA gaming market. It's not hard to imagine that a modern iPhone or flagship Android has the hardware chops to run something like GTA 6 at an acceptable level of quality. Continuing the GTA 6 example, it's not hard to imagine Rockstar taking one look at the TAM of current-gen console owners vs. the TAM of high-end phone owners and realizing how much more money they could be making by porting it to the majority platform. With the right games signed on (GTA, FIFA, Madden, COD), all it would take is either Apple or Google releasing a $100 dock-plus-controller to absolutely blow the traditional console makers out of the water; everyone either needs or already has a phone, and nobody needs a dedicated game console. The point being, it's not much comfort to preservationists to consider the longevity of a proprietary platform that might realistically be defunct in a decade. I don't know if there will be a PS7, but I tend to doubt there will ever be a PS8.
- ZenoArrow 17d ago
  > but I won't be able to re-play the excellent version that I played through last year Why not? The future of game preservation for games not distributed on disc is probably going to be based around hard disk images, with some kind of overlay filesystem mechanism to allow choosing between different games without relying on standard installations. Will it be legal? Probably not. Will it happen? I suspect it will.
mzs 18d ago
https://github.com/spc970-dumper-union/spc970-dumps-public https://github.com/spc970-dumper-union/spc970-dumps-public
hn1rig3rak 18d ago
Yeah, and day-one patches only exist while the servers do. Archive the PKGs.
nubinetwork 18d ago
This is the one you can't mechapwn, right? Can we do anything with this information?
ethagnawl 18d ago
> 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
- piltdownman 17d ago
  Byuu and McMaster decapped all the SNES ones with amazing write-ups a number of years ago.
  - delinom 17d ago
    I am aware of their collaboration, but where can I find these write-ups?
- spicyjpeg 17d ago
  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 https://floooh.github.io/visual6502remix [2] https://github.com/iaddis/metalnes https://github.com/iaddis/metalnes [3] https://www.righto.com/ https://www.righto.com/ [4] https://siliconprawn.org/ https://siliconprawn.org/
  - darkfloo 17d ago
    Doesn’t decapping chips require hydrofluoric acid ? If so I cannot express enough respect, the one person I’ve interacted with that regularly worked with it put the fear of god with by showing what one insignificant miss for anything else did to his finger
dzdt 18d ago
This article seems to be completely based on the X post by the reverse engineer DiscoStarSlayer : https://x.com/DiscoStarslayer/status/2099132300390744320 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!"
- draw_down 17d ago
  [dead]
WhiteDawn 17d ago
Looks like they also wrote a Ghidra Decompiler for the ISA https://github.com/DiscoStarslayer/ghidra-spc970 https://github.com/DiscoStarslayer/ghidra-spc970
Founderarcstone 17d ago
after 26 years? its a PS2...
- pezezin 17d ago
  The PS2 was released in 2000, so yes, after 26 years.
AdmiralAsshat 17d ago
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?
- throwawayk7h 17d ago
  Maybe it will allow producing homebrew that works on unmodified PS2?
uyjulian 17d ago
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/aaf4f4e2e74d980f620a9b73ba04b309 https://gist.github.com/uyjulian/aaf4f4e2e74d980f620a9b73ba0... for updated info.
- jordigh 17d ago
  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.
  - uyjulian 17d ago
    There are many different revisions of the DVD player software, requiring specific offsets for each exploit. The SPRs (system parameter registers) exposed in DVD player scripting do not expose enough information to be able to merge the exploits onto one disc. FreeMCBoot continues to work, but is no longer updated. I would recommend https://ps2homebrewstore.com/ https://ps2homebrewstore.com/ to check out the latest exploits and devices available, such as sd2psx, an open source reimplementation of a memory card that can also expose the filesystem on its inserted SD card.
Markoff 17d ago
I own HEN jailbroken PS3 Super Slim (after previous Slim died on me, RSX most likely) and honestly I am not even interested in PS4 and PS5 jailbreak, PS3 can play PS1 and PS2 games, PS4 can't. The biggest reason I don't care about jailbreaking PS4 which should be my next upgrade, I play with kids games on split screen TV or they play by themselves and sadly these are produced less and less these days with everyone expecting others to play alone over internet, which ain't fun at all, if you just wanna sit at TV and play all together in 3 people (wife is not into gaming). PS3 was peak PS split-screen gaming and peak PS compatibility with previous consoles.
- parlortricks 16d ago
  What couch co-op games do you play with the kids?
  - Markoff 16d ago
    we/they don't play much CO-OP games, mostly split screen against each other, almost all platformers would be co-op What we/they play: my favorite game (but they are sick of it, not appreciating it, most of the time I win) is Worms Armageddon (part of Worms Revolution collection) Blur - racing with fun for me and son Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing or Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed - all of us including dauther Little Big Planet - co-op platformer, all of us liked it until it got really difficult NHL Legacy edition - all of us ocassionally MotorStorm - Pacific Rift - racing, seems only son, but I can bear it for while Children like (but without me): Minecraft - PlayStation 3 Edition - they play it offline like all games we have, I guess it is co-op Rayman Legends - co-op platformer The Simpsons Game - co-op platformer, but needs to think, can get stuck in places and since we watch together MotoGP and F1 they recently started to play F1 2013 - Complete Edition, but seems too difficult, for racing the best fun is first Sonic all star racing or Blur on PS2: LEGO Batman - co-op platformer, but requires lot of thinking Shrek 2 - same as above we liked from PS1: Crash team racing, but now it is replaced with sonic with better graphics on PS3 Circuit Breakers (USA) - racing, all of us FoxKids.com - Micro Maniacs Racing - racing, but with running characters Tom and Jerry in House Trap - they like

165 points by rbanffy 18d ago

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.

vrighter 18d ago
If you pop in gta6 you'll have exactly no game at all!
MYEUHD 18d ago
> 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
clownstrikelol 18d ago
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.
- pachouli-please 17d ago
  Do you know of any good recent-ish resources for learning about jailbreaking and sideloading titles on the ps3? Last time I was trying to figure out how to load my game backups I gave up as it seemed way complex compared to the xbox 360.
  - clownstrikelol 17d ago
    https://consolemods.org/wiki/Main_Page https://consolemods.org/wiki/Main_Page Read the instructions carefully, multiple times. The older PS3s can be jailbroken through a browser exploit. The E3 flasher is also quite nice on those same PS3s if you are feeling more adventurous or your browser exploit fails. Given that most PS3s are getting to be quite old, and you’ll likely want to tear them down and clean / repaste them anyway, using an E3 isn’t too bad of an idea. No soldering required! I bought an early PS3 slim at auction a few months ago, definitely lots of cool things out there for them nowadays.
RajT88 18d ago
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.
- klodolph 18d ago
  I think what’s worse is flash lifespan. You can recap, but can you find replacements for failed flash? Can you reimage it with the correct data? Can you even access the flash, which may be buried inside a chip somewhere? Plastic may get brittle but I think modern plastics do this less than 90s plastics.
  - doubled112 18d ago
    I was surprised that the “fix” for the failed storage module in my slim 4GB Xbox 360 was to tear it down and remove the storage module. It isn’t usually that easy. I am also impressed they managed to use worse flash than the 15 year old $10 USB 2.0 drive I plugged in as a replacement. Yes, it was one of those projects you see what you still have in the bin. Hey, this one is period correct!
    - theokrueger 17d ago
      unfortunately you need hot air for most slim motherboards if the 4GB NAND fails. only trinity revisions (early slims) have the pluggable module
      - doubled112 16d ago
        Sounds like I won a lottery I didn’t know I was entering.
  - chocochunks 17d ago
    This has been sort of a problem already in the Wii U community as some units have a less reliable NAND chip. For that console the community has developed the ability to emulate the NAND chip with an SD card. Proper NAND replacements are possible too but obviously more work and more risk and I think you may have needed to dump your encryption keys beforehand. Potentially it can be fixable but for some consoles like the Xbox Series line that we know very little about it may not be.
sharperguy 18d ago
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.
- VulgarExigency 18d ago
  Do you honestly believe that most of the thousands of PS2, PS3 and PS4 games will get vibe-coded backend clones?
  - patates 17d ago
    I have no doubt it'll be attempted, but they won't be clones, they'll be clowns. Even if they were pixel perfect clones with exactly the same play. As a person who vibe codes like there's no tomorrow to have custom software, I still find the color of the bytes important for something like a retrogame. Otherwise it's like color photocopy of an art piece.
  - mywittyname 17d ago
    Yes. My colleague was telling me about how he was vibe coding a port of some random-ass PSP game. So people are clearly already doing it. PS4 is AMD64 based. And so few games leveraged the cell processor in the PS3 to it's fullest, IIRC, the current emulation strategy is to translate the cell calls to x86. So the hard work is actually already done.
  - sharperguy 17d ago
    Honestly the advent of coding agents means that a company could just instruct the agent to strip out any code in their backend that they can't release for legal reasons, and dump a non-compiling zip out into the public and have someone in the community fix it up and make it runnable. The costs of doing it are much lower than in the past.
mitxela 18d ago
In the PS2 days people thought that about the PS2, too.
- criddell 17d ago
  IIRC, the PS2 did not download game updates or patches from the internet. The game on the disk was what you played. As long as you had a PS2 and the disk, you could play the exact game you played so many years ago. With the PS5, the disk is more or less a key that lets the console download the game. Having the console and the disk is a guarantee of nothing in the future other than you can probably play the buggy mess that they packaged up way before the game was done.
  - Yokolos 17d ago
    I don't know why this myth keeps getting perpetuated. It's simply not true. The countless game discs I own that let me install and play the game without internet access are proof of that. There are some games where the game acts as a key and doesn't contain the full game, but this isn't the rule.
    - mrguyorama 17d ago
      This "myth" isn't a myth. Most games aren't the "digital key only" style of discs, like how Nintendo has game cards that are just entitlements now, but game companies took huge advantage of the fact that updates are expected, and the game shipped on disk on release day is almost always unfinished and patched with day one updates. The disk image is submitted for manufacture well before the game actually hits the release date. This goes all the way to things like a version of Tony Hawk skateboarding that only had like one map on the disc itself.
    - criddell 17d ago
      I was thinking mostly about updates. The version of Cyberpunk on the initial disk release for the Play Station was pretty bad but downloaded updates fixed it. AFAIK, the PS2 didn't download patches or updates for games. If you have the disk, you can play the same game that you did 20 years ago.
jerf 18d ago
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?
- Palomides 17d ago
  I think this might allow doing more things with the disc drive on all(?) ps2 models like running copied/homebrew ps1 discs (currently requires a modchip afaik), or potentially developing replacement optical drives/hardware emulators
- functionmouse 17d ago
  PS2 emulation leaves a lot to be desired in terms of accuracy and authenticity, and current original hardware backup solutions are not ideal or extremely cumbersome, including caveats like relying on homebrew software which alters the memory layout of games as they run, leading to inaccuracies and broken games, and needing to have multiple copies of backup loading software on your console, as some loaders will work with some games, but not with others. It's a right mess. Some solutions, such as MechaPwn, are more transparent, allowing you to burn so-called "master discs" of your game backups to DVD-R. As far as I can tell, compatibility is 100%, but if I recall correctly, this only works on specific models of console, and the process of burning a master disc can be unintuitive and relies on specific, deprecated, commercial DVD burning software. From what I can tell, this opens the door to things like optical drive emulators, which replace the disc laser with an SD card slot, allowing the console to read game disc images no differently than the console would read a retail game.
  - jerf 17d ago
    Ah, hardware disk drive replacements, that would make sense. I'm very software oriented so wasn't considering the hardware implications. Thank you.
- drdexebtjl 17d ago
  My guess (not involved with PS2 emulation specifically at all) is that this will improve low-level emulation. So things like making a clone of the hardware with an FPGA, making emulators cycle-accurate, removing game-specific hacks that are no longer needed due to more accurate emulation, and achieving 100% bug-for-bug compatibility with original hardware.
vitorfblima 18d ago
Back in the day my jailbroken PS2 would run all sorts of CDs with pirated games. It was such a magical time, I would download all sorts of games and spend the evening discovering gems.
- sebastiansm7 17d ago
  eDonkey times, nice times.
- frou_dh 17d ago
  I remember downloading ISOs at like 4-8 KB/s from FTPs. It was an achievement to even get one successfully downloaded and ready to burn.
deaton 17d ago
Everything gets broken eventually. Every Nintendo console except the switch 2 is wide open. Even the "unbreakable" Xbox consoles were broken with Damage Control. Anything worth breaking will be broken, eventually, whether in software or by a mod chip.
palmotea 17d ago
> 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.
anal_reactor 17d ago
X360 / PS3 are totally hackable, and those games were released before the PITA of modern gaming began. Maybe the real question is whether these games are worth preserving. Most valuable games have a PC port anyway and those get cracked sooner or later.
telotortium 17d ago
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.
- mywittyname 17d ago
  Games from the 2010s are still "new". There are several major game series where the most current entry came from the 2010s. Think Skyrim & GTA5. Game companies still have the source code an tooling sitting around. With some minor texture brushups, they can release a "remastered" version and get $20 out of people again. Nintendo games are the odd ones here, because their love of novel gameplay means that a lot of first party games need to run on OG hardware for the full experience. Think Wii, DS/3DS.
  - alt227 17d ago
    > With some minor texture brushups, they can release a "remastered" version Unfortunately these versions are usually inferior to the originals, so I dont think they can really be referred to as preservation.
  - chocochunks 17d ago
    Game companies maybe have the source code and tooling around. And can maybe get a remaster. Look at titles like Kingdom Hearts 1.5 HD. Square Enix lost the source to KH 1 despite it only being ~12 years old at release and had to rebuild it. Developers close all the time, they get bought and sold and bought and sold and nobody is entirely sure who owns the rights to X title anymore or where the code is. Then you also have licensing rights for cars, sports leagues, music etc.
mywittyname 17d ago
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.
- rbanffy 17d ago
  > most games will run on future hardware. Until Sony decides you no longer own them.
  - criddell 17d ago
    They did this fairly recently with over 500 movies and TV shows. The licensing agreement with StudioCanal ran out and everybody who had one of those titles in their libraries had it removed (stuff like Terminator 2, Total Recall, Paddington, Apocalypse Now, ...). Who knows what licensing timebombs exist in Sony games? If the license for music played over some title sequence is lost 30 years from now Sony isn't going to fix the problem. They will just make the game unable to start.
- kibwen 17d ago
  > most games will run on future hardware. I'm starting to get uncertain about how much longer there will even exist future Playstation hardware. Apple and Google phones have devoured the casual/mobile gaming market and as that market hits saturation they'll be eyeing the prestige AAA gaming market. It's not hard to imagine that a modern iPhone or flagship Android has the hardware chops to run something like GTA 6 at an acceptable level of quality. Continuing the GTA 6 example, it's not hard to imagine Rockstar taking one look at the TAM of current-gen console owners vs. the TAM of high-end phone owners and realizing how much more money they could be making by porting it to the majority platform. With the right games signed on (GTA, FIFA, Madden, COD), all it would take is either Apple or Google releasing a $100 dock-plus-controller to absolutely blow the traditional console makers out of the water; everyone either needs or already has a phone, and nobody needs a dedicated game console. The point being, it's not much comfort to preservationists to consider the longevity of a proprietary platform that might realistically be defunct in a decade. I don't know if there will be a PS7, but I tend to doubt there will ever be a PS8.
ZenoArrow 17d ago
> but I won't be able to re-play the excellent version that I played through last year Why not? The future of game preservation for games not distributed on disc is probably going to be based around hard disk images, with some kind of overlay filesystem mechanism to allow choosing between different games without relying on standard installations. Will it be legal? Probably not. Will it happen? I suspect it will.

mzs 18d ago

https://github.com/spc970-dumper-union/spc970-dumps-public https://github.com/spc970-dumper-union/spc970-dumps-public

hn1rig3rak 18d ago

Yeah, and day-one patches only exist while the servers do. Archive the PKGs.

nubinetwork 18d ago

This is the one you can't mechapwn, right? Can we do anything with this information?

ethagnawl 18d ago

> 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

piltdownman 17d ago
Byuu and McMaster decapped all the SNES ones with amazing write-ups a number of years ago.
- delinom 17d ago
  I am aware of their collaboration, but where can I find these write-ups?
spicyjpeg 17d ago
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 https://floooh.github.io/visual6502remix [2] https://github.com/iaddis/metalnes https://github.com/iaddis/metalnes [3] https://www.righto.com/ https://www.righto.com/ [4] https://siliconprawn.org/ https://siliconprawn.org/
- darkfloo 17d ago
  Doesn’t decapping chips require hydrofluoric acid ? If so I cannot express enough respect, the one person I’ve interacted with that regularly worked with it put the fear of god with by showing what one insignificant miss for anything else did to his finger

dzdt 18d ago

This article seems to be completely based on the X post by the reverse engineer DiscoStarSlayer : https://x.com/DiscoStarslayer/status/2099132300390744320 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!"

draw_down 17d ago
[dead]

WhiteDawn 17d ago

Looks like they also wrote a Ghidra Decompiler for the ISA https://github.com/DiscoStarslayer/ghidra-spc970 https://github.com/DiscoStarslayer/ghidra-spc970

Founderarcstone 17d ago

after 26 years? its a PS2...

pezezin 17d ago
The PS2 was released in 2000, so yes, after 26 years.

AdmiralAsshat 17d ago

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?

throwawayk7h 17d ago
Maybe it will allow producing homebrew that works on unmodified PS2?

uyjulian 17d ago

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/aaf4f4e2e74d980f620a9b73ba04b309 https://gist.github.com/uyjulian/aaf4f4e2e74d980f620a9b73ba0... for updated info.

jordigh 17d ago
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.
- uyjulian 17d ago
  There are many different revisions of the DVD player software, requiring specific offsets for each exploit. The SPRs (system parameter registers) exposed in DVD player scripting do not expose enough information to be able to merge the exploits onto one disc. FreeMCBoot continues to work, but is no longer updated. I would recommend https://ps2homebrewstore.com/ https://ps2homebrewstore.com/ to check out the latest exploits and devices available, such as sd2psx, an open source reimplementation of a memory card that can also expose the filesystem on its inserted SD card.

Markoff 17d ago

I own HEN jailbroken PS3 Super Slim (after previous Slim died on me, RSX most likely) and honestly I am not even interested in PS4 and PS5 jailbreak, PS3 can play PS1 and PS2 games, PS4 can't. The biggest reason I don't care about jailbreaking PS4 which should be my next upgrade, I play with kids games on split screen TV or they play by themselves and sadly these are produced less and less these days with everyone expecting others to play alone over internet, which ain't fun at all, if you just wanna sit at TV and play all together in 3 people (wife is not into gaming). PS3 was peak PS split-screen gaming and peak PS compatibility with previous consoles.

parlortricks 16d ago
What couch co-op games do you play with the kids?
- Markoff 16d ago
  we/they don't play much CO-OP games, mostly split screen against each other, almost all platformers would be co-op What we/they play: my favorite game (but they are sick of it, not appreciating it, most of the time I win) is Worms Armageddon (part of Worms Revolution collection) Blur - racing with fun for me and son Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing or Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed - all of us including dauther Little Big Planet - co-op platformer, all of us liked it until it got really difficult NHL Legacy edition - all of us ocassionally MotorStorm - Pacific Rift - racing, seems only son, but I can bear it for while Children like (but without me): Minecraft - PlayStation 3 Edition - they play it offline like all games we have, I guess it is co-op Rayman Legends - co-op platformer The Simpsons Game - co-op platformer, but needs to think, can get stuck in places and since we watch together MotoGP and F1 they recently started to play F1 2013 - Complete Edition, but seems too difficult, for racing the best fun is first Sonic all star racing or Blur on PS2: LEGO Batman - co-op platformer, but requires lot of thinking Shrek 2 - same as above we liked from PS1: Crash team racing, but now it is replaced with sonic with better graphics on PS3 Circuit Breakers (USA) - racing, all of us FoxKids.com - Micro Maniacs Racing - racing, but with running characters Tom and Jerry in House Trap - they like