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

285 points · 91 comments · rbanffy

  1. criddell · · 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. sharperguy · · 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 · · focus · HN ↗
        Do you honestly believe that most of the thousands of PS2, PS3 and PS4 games will get vibe-coded backend clones?
        1. patates · · 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.

        2. mywittyname · · 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.

        3. sharperguy · · 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.
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