261w ago - 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 Wikipedia 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...

289w ago - Each week or so we will post a brief report from the resident PS3 Devs here, and below is one for this week:

The PS3 Boot-up Procedure.

The SCC (Super Companion Chip), made by Toshiba gets the PS3 started up. It reads asecure_loader from flash, and loads it into SPE in isolation mode. The Flash reading is interesting, as the data on the flash chips are interleaved, so the SCC merges them, among other things.

asecure_loader is then decrypted and ran, and it brings up lv1ldr. The keys for self decryption (among other things) are most likely accessible at this time.

lv1ldr is then decrypted and ran, and verifies the integrity of lv1.self , decrypts and runs it.

lv1.self is most likely our base code, also known as the Hypervisor. The Hypervisor then calls lv2ldr.

lv2ldr is ran, and it runs lv2_kernel.self

LV2 kernel.self is essentially the PS3OS, it starts up, brings the XMB up, any game/movie in the drive.

This is a solid working theory. Without expensive hardware, we can not confirm this 100%, but it is the most logical approach!

A few select files from the flash:

asecure_loader
lv1ldr
lv2ldr
isoldr
appldr
default.spp
lv0
lv1.self
lv2_kernel.self