It's been a long time coming, but 06/12 is finally here. For months, I've held a secret, something that may have the shear potential to ultimately unlock the PS3. A few select, knew of my work, and my prospects for this project, and a few select others were told "06/12 is the day."
Explanation: So on this day I give to you a PS3 Tri-Fold Attack Potential release (and Update 1.0 Files, NOT NEEDED- but for those who want to examine the file verification system), all stemming from one game that has a very grave security flaw.
Call of Duty 3: Many games prior to discovering this one, had great potential to write files to the PS3 HDD, such as Resistance: FoM, Motorstorm, and Warhawk. Warhawk was a particularly good one at that cause at the time we managed to overwrite other game param.sfo's.
As promised, below you will find a video of our PS3 TEST SD Launcher. The quality is not great nor was there sound, but it's the best capture from the old camera we have so we improvised and added a tune in the background.
A video capture of the PS3 would have been much clearer, but we wanted to show the PS3 in the video as well. It starts from the XMB, and allows non-NPDRM SELF's to be executed from SD card.
In the video you can see the SD Launcher loading and booting to the select screen. There is the ability to "move" throughout the list, and upon hovering on your slot of choice, pressing X.
At the moment the titles and locations are hardcoded, we need to add in support for reading either a filelist or the PARAM.SFO's.
The real impressive part of the video is in regards to the Ridge Racer 7 Demo. We obtained the Ridge Racer 7 Demo from an Official PlayStation Magazine Demo Disc. Upon r... More »
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 (Advance... More »
With the great ongoing work in our PS3 Forums with the RCO files, we are also going to talk about component two of the PS3's XMB includes- its XML Files!
Inside the directory exists 30 XML files. They control quite a bit in regards to the PS3's appearance and functioning, from telling the XMB what types of information to display, all the way to letting you download PlayStation Home!
Do make sure to check out the attached image, as it is code snippets of the XML files we're speaking of below.
For example, in category_game.xml, it appears upon disc insertion, the insertion is added into a database, along with what type of media it's on (CD/DVD/BDVD), and if it detects, what format it is (PS1/PS2/PS3) and so on. Now there are your different media types of course: PS1 CD, PS2 CD, PS2 DVD, PS3 DVD, PS3 BD.
We received this tip via e-mail today: Jan70 (an Administrator) of CDFreaks.com has reported that the Lite-On DH-401S drive can read Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) game discs!
Sure, we've been dumping PS3 images since 6 days after the U.S. launch HERE, however, the big difference is that now users won't have to do it through Linux nor via PS3 SAK anymore... providing they own a Lite-On DH-401S drive.
Of course this doesn't mean they are playable on retail PS3 consoles though (like Linux/SAK image dumps, the PS3 sees the media as a data disc instead of a game disc).
VERY nice find Jan70, and below are a few screenshots and a directory layout for Lost Planet!
More »
While we await the start of our PS3 KeyVault Project for retail PS3 consoles, below is a screenshot of something else I have been tinkering with recently via Debug.
As hinted by PS3News already HERE, it is a Backup Launcher for a PS3 Development Unit as shown. At the moment it it still pre-Alpha and very incomplete, however it allows:
- Boot PS3 Games from HDD
- Boot PS3 Games from DVD/BD-ROM
- Copy Original PS3 Games from DVD/BD-ROM to HDD
- Patch the executable on some games to run from HDD
Note: This will ONLY work on a DEVELOPMENT CONSOLE, not a RETAIL PS3 unit!
To be added soon:
- Read PARAM.SFO for name/titleid, patch to menu (Alpha is hard-coded)
- Support for deleting games from the menu
- Support a few more games to start (Alpha is hard-coded for four)
- Po... More »
Update: Fully lighted, swap of retail PS3 games video:
Here are some things I have so thoroughly withheld.
First off is this video of the SuperSwapMethod in action. (The demonstrated application I am not at liberty to release for the practicality of using it further in the future, and the safety of others.)
This application allows swaps of original PS3 games for other original PS3 of any firmware, of any style, and gave me extensive information on they system's acceptability of burned mediums.
First of all, the system on disk insert takes the param.sfo and copies it to RAM. On execute, RAM is location is cleared, but you may still be able to view garbage data instead. Param.sfo determines if the game is to boot or not.
So if not there (in memory), the game will not launch. As for launching executable files (self, elf, bin, s... More »
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