As we promised earlier this week, we are going to explain a PS3 game's boot process, as well as explain why the PARAM.SFO is so important.

The Flowchart in the image attached below explains a PS3 game's startup procedure from insertion to its execution.

Most of it is self-explanatory upon viewing the chart, however, there are a few notes. Any Retail SELF on a Blu-ray disc is flagged so it can only be decrypted and executed from the disc, and nowhere else.

Furthermore, the PARAM.SFO is also of importance... Upon insertion, the PS3 reads the Title ID of the disc in the PARAM.SFO and inserts it into the DB. Once the game is executed and decrypted, the Title ID is checked yet again to make sure it matches. If it does not (think a disc swap), the PS3 will silently error, and return to XMB.

In a final note, our PS3 Devs have been digging through numerous documents and patents, and came to the conclusion that the PS3 uses AIX (Advanced Interactive eXecutive) as a base! See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIX_operating_system for more details on the format.

Later this weekend, we will have more details and a video for those interested on how to run some PS3 games on a Debug/TEST PS3 from an SD card! As most are aware, PS3 games aren't designed to run from SD card at all- even after removing all the lovely layers of encryption.

Flowchart: A PS3 Game's Flow of Execution; PS3's Base AIX!


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