Thread

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

285 points · 91 comments · rbanffy

criddell · 1789561579 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. vrighter · 1789562235 · focus · HN ↗
  If you pop in gta6 you'll have exactly no game at all!
2. MYEUHD · 1789562901 · focus · HN ↗
  > 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
3. clownstrikelol · 1789562980 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. pachouli-please · 1789586511 · focus · HN ↗
    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 · 1789600293 · focus · HN ↗
    <a href="https://consolemods.org/wiki/Main_Page" rel="nofollow">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.
4. RajT88 · 1789563384 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. klodolph · 1789563852 · focus · HN ↗
    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 · 1789563984 · focus · HN ↗
    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 · 1789578658 · focus · HN ↗
    unfortunately you need hot air for most slim motherboards if the 4GB NAND fails. only trinity revisions (early slims) have the pluggable module
    doubled112 · 1789653156 · focus · HN ↗
    Sounds like I won a lottery I didn’t know I was entering.
    chocochunks · 1789569248 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    RajT88 · 1789572543 · focus · HN ↗
    This explains all those lots of "untested" WiiU's I see for sale.
    chocochunks · 1789580006 · focus · HN ↗
    To be fair to the Wii U it does need a non-standard power adapter and the Game Pad is necessary to do things like change the video output. It is harder to test than say a PS3 Phat. IIRC the white 8GB Wii Us tend to have more robust NAND chips.
  2. darksim905 · 1789596789 · focus · HN ↗
    >ribbon connector pieces
    ribbon connector like ribbon cables used in IDE/PATA drives? Wild, are they known for breaking down like that?
    a96 · 1789635898 · focus · HN ↗
    I think the problem ones are more likely to be film cables and their delicate connectors. They weren't really intended to be repeatedly removed. The IDC connectors and multi strand cables you get with PATA are far more robust and coarse pitch.
5. sharperguy · 1789565144 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. VulgarExigency · 1789565537 · focus · HN ↗
    Do you honestly believe that most of the thousands of PS2, PS3 and PS4 games will get vibe-coded backend clones?
    patates · 1789566471 · focus · HN ↗
    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 · 1789574842 · focus · HN ↗
    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 · 1789632192 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
6. mitxela · 1789565429 · focus · HN ↗
  In the PS2 days people thought that about the PS2, too.
  1. criddell · 1789566951 · focus · HN ↗
    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 · 1789575426 · focus · HN ↗
    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 · 1789582253 · focus · HN ↗
    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 · 1789588792 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    zache6 · 1789580990 · focus · HN ↗
    It's usually the game being installed from disc to the SSD, as the Blu-Ray drive isn't fast enough for modern standards
    mitxela · 1789601099 · focus · HN ↗
    The game can be downloaded from the internet by any software that can impersonate a PS5.
    Telaneo · 1789641713 · focus · HN ↗
    Right up until Sony's servers stop shut down.
    mitxela · 1789782419 · focus · HN ↗
    Better archive them all before that!
7. jerf · 1789565677 · focus · HN ↗
  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?
  1. Palomides · 1789566657 · focus · HN ↗
    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
  2. functionmouse · 1789566833 · focus · HN ↗
    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 · 1789567418 · focus · HN ↗
    Ah, hardware disk drive replacements, that would make sense. I'm very software oriented so wasn't considering the hardware implications. Thank you.
  3. drdexebtjl · 1789567020 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
  4. ssl-3 · 1789569984 · focus · HN ↗
    The problem with game discs is that they rot. Some of them rot faster than others, but all of them shall eventually rot.
    The problem with hardware is that it is scarce, and ultimately dies.
    The problem with emulators is that they emulate. We can work to make it the same, but it is never going to be the same.
    Even if the math all maths just like they did (bugs and all), and it takes precisely as long, and it shows up precisely at the same time in the same places as it did on the original hardware...and even when things like input latency are nailed down to nanosecond accuracy and the clocks are all just dead-nuts on: The code may run the same way, but the system is still not the same.
    Part of the reason it's not the same is we haven't even touched the analog components yet and all and all of the things they do, whether amazing or ugly. (And no, improving the analog bits through simplification is not necessarily the sane goal at all. Improvement and emulation are different targets.)
    Emulation is useful. It's great, actually. Right now, a person can think about that old PS2 they used to have and get started with playing some of their favorite games yet this afternoon. That's awesome.
    But preservation, as an effort to keep old hardware to keep working as time marches on? That's a wonderful thing in its own right. The better we understand the old hardware, the more-able we are to preserve it and keep it running.
    Getting past the layers of deliberate fuckery helps us to better understand what goes on behind the curtain, and that has now been achieved.
    toomuchtodo · 1789584189 · focus · HN ↗
    Internet Archive Emulation Upload Tutorial - <a href="https://archive.org/details/howtodoupload" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/howtodoupload
    charcircuit · 1789591782 · focus · HN ↗
    >The problem with game discs is that they rot.
    Most discs do not rot. The panic around disc rot has not materialized in discs actually rotting outside some edge cases like faulty manufacturing.
    Lammy · 1789604884 · focus · HN ↗
    Normally I would agree with this, but all of the discs I've ever have that did rot (LD, CD, and DVD) were ones pressed by SONY DADC lol
    pezezin · 1789598530 · focus · HN ↗
    I understand your point, and I kind of agree, but does it really matter? When we enjoy old artifacts we don't have the same experience as someone who did it back in the day. Old paintings will shift colours, old buildings will decay and might become ruins, old books might need to be "translated" due to language shifts, and in any case we lack the proper cultural background to fully appreciate them.
    In a few decades everybody who played the PS2 upon release will be dead, and our descendants will not care if the emulation is 100% accurate or just 99% accurate.
    ssl-3 · 1789635646 · focus · HN ↗
    We often keep old paintings in environmental conditions that slow their decay, and sometimes we also undertake efforts to restore them. We keep a good roof on the old structures that we care about, and we repair and restore them when that is beneficial and affordable.
    Not always, of course. To be very kind: Some paintings are just shit, and some structures are architecturally regrettable. And sometimes, the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
    But not all things are regrettable shit. Some things are found to be worth saving, and are therefore saved.
    You're free to disagree about that, and you certainly don't need anyone's permission to hold any position you wish on any matter at all.
    But others are also free to form their own thoughts and opinions and it is very clear that they don't always agree with your own.
    Apparently, there are people in the world who still care about the PS2. They are likely to continue to do this kind of work whether you find their efforts to be valuable or not.
  5. easyThrowaway · 1789632564 · focus · HN ↗
    > My impression was that PS2 emulation was already solved,
    Far from it. PCSX2 is extremely solid for casual playing, but it takes a lot of shortcuts (especially when enabling upscaling and other enhancements) that differences both in gameplay and visuals in games like Gran Turismo and Ace Combat are extremely evident, more so when framebuffer and/or shader-like effects are applied.
    Mind you it's not a game-breaking experience, but I feel it's differently enough to be considered closer to playing a port rather than an emulated version of the game.
    The PS2 is unfortunately too alien of an architecture to expect BSNES-style accuracy AND an acceptable framerate.
8. vitorfblima · 1789565823 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. sebastiansm7 · 1789577234 · focus · HN ↗
    eDonkey times, nice times.
  2. frou_dh · 1789581884 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
9. deaton · 1789566127 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
10. palmotea · 1789568030 · focus · HN ↗
  > 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.
11. anal_reactor · 1789570707 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
12. telotortium · 1789573841 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. mywittyname · 1789574452 · focus · HN ↗
    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 · 1789579432 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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 · 1789580699 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    manytimesaway · 1789714848 · focus · HN ↗
    Square Enix is known for having little to no archive of its past : KH1 is not the first occurence of lost source in their library.
  2. soulofmischief · 1789580658 · focus · HN ↗
    You don't care about newer games because you've gotten older. Kids younger than us are forming core memories with today's games, and are depending on those more capable to preserve their childhood memories.
    Also, there has been an indie Renaissance since 2010, I could name dozens of games that are already widely regarded classics. Happy to make some recommendations if you are into any particular genres.
13. mywittyname · 1789574084 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. rbanffy · 1789576774 · focus · HN ↗
    > most games will run on future hardware.
    Until Sony decides you no longer own them.
    criddell · 1789588636 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
  2. kibwen · 1789584322 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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.
    mywittyname · 1789765978 · focus · HN ↗
    You're right, IMHO. Platform convergence is already here and I think Minecraft represents the epoch for it. Kids growing up today are used to playing Minecraft on anything, and that will probably grow to be their expectations going forward. Just log into your account from any computing device and play the game.
    Playstation will probably stick around, but it will probably eventually become a Switch/Vita. There's still value in a platform that is a strict set of hardware requirements that are designed ground up for gaming. Plus, Sony & Nintendo have great development studios making games people want to play.
    Tying this back to preservation - there's probably a large number of games that are not preservable due to their "GaaS" model. But anything single player built for Android will be around forever since 99% of the software for it is cracked not long after release. I'm not sure about the iPhone stuff though.
14. ZenoArrow · 1789581093 · focus · HN ↗
  > 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.

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