PS3 Debug/TEST to Retail Flash Progress and More!

263w ago - We mentioned in previous Site News posts that we're working on converting a Retail PS3 into a Debug PS3.. and we have some updated news on the process to share today.

For starters, we had quite a delay. Our PS3 Devs have been using an expensive external programmer to do the job, however, these dumps differed than the dumps from the Infectus chip. It was quite a puzzling issue indeed.. which was the proper dump?!

After many hours of examination spanning over a few weeks time, it turns out the external programmer was the culprit! The software that the manufacturer provided had a flaw in it that would drop certain bytes, resulting in a corrupt dump missing OOB 64 bytes of data. Luckily our PS3 Devs managed to find and correct the initial problem, so a big THANKS to them!

Once that was sorted, testing began by modifying both the IPL and METLDR.. however, the initial detection byte test failed [received (8002F169) before the install completes, versus the standard: "data type is not supported" (8002F029) mismatched PUP error] although the reprogram worked fine. A retail PUP file currently will not install either.

Needless to say, they are now trying other detection bytes and will continue to share their progress. Below is a picture of the work one of our PS3 Devs did- he wired up an external flash socket to his PS3. This allows for quick removal, reflashing, and retesting of the flash to test different scenarios. He plans to install a second flash socket this week, to facilitate in replacing the entire flash, versus just certain areas.

In other PS3 Dev news, I have been working on some PS3 Debug game patches for OOKAMIDJ which automatically install the games to the PS3 HDD patching them appropriately to run from there.

Finally, although we can't say much yet.. a bit of speculation if you will. We may have found in an earlier PS3 flash version the kernel memory was not seperated from the application memory, meaning it may be possible since kernel memory isn't protected (access restricted) to dump it.. more to come!