38w ago - Today PlayStation 3 developer FreePlay has released a PC homebrew application dubbed Open BDEMU HDD Manager which allows users to manage their PS3 DEX's Blu-ray emulator hard dive files.

Download: PS3 Open BDEMU HDD Manager / PS3 Open BDEMU HDD Manager (Mirror) / PS3 Open BDEMU HDD Manager (Mirror #2) / PS3 Open BDEMU HDD Manager (Mirror #3) / PS3 Open BDEMU HDD Manager (Mirror #4)

From the ReadMe File: Open BDEMU HDD Manager by FreePlay

Want to manage your DEX's Blu-ray emulator hard dive, but hate that PS3Gen is missing essential features like increasing the number of game slots or dumping a game from a disk to a file? Worry no longer! The Open BDEMU HDD Manager is here for you!

This tool duplicates PS3Gen's ability to manage your BDEMU HDD, but works faster and has some added features.

• Dump an existing game to an EMU image file
  
• Write EMU image files to disk
  
• Erase game slots
  
• Rename...

40w ago - Following up on the previous work by PlayStation 3 developer Graf Chokolo, today naehrwert has announced news of a PS3 HDD decryption proof-of-concept (PoC) from a PC as a result of reverse-engineering work done by flat_z and glevand.

Download: PS3 HDD Decryption PoC / PS3 HDD Decryption PoC (Mirror)

Below are the details (via ps3devwiki.com/wiki/HDD_Encryption), to quote:

Introduction

• The following information was reverse engineered from LV1, Storage Manager in LPAR1 and sb_iso_spu_module.self.
  
• I'm able to decrypt/encrypt my PS3 HDD and VFLASH on PC now.
  

HDD Encryption

• XTS-AES-128 is used to encrypt all data on PS3 HDD.
  
• XTS is NOT CBC!!! It's AES-ECB with tweak XORing. AES-CBC is impractical for HDD encryption. Each sector can be encrypted/decrypted independantly from other HDD sectors.
  
• Good paper about XTS-AES: ntnu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:347753/FULLTEXT01
  
• VFLASH is encrypted twice. First with ENCDEC keys and then with...

92w ago - Today Dutch site PSFocus.nl (linked above) reports that the upcoming PlayStation 3 title Rage will require an 8GB mandatory PS3 HDD installation.

The XBox 360 will also offer an optional HDD install of 21-22GB in size, and the game is scheduled for release to both platforms on October 4 in North America and October 7, 2011 in Europe.

To quote, roughly translated: While our boys on the floors of the gamescom stumble around, we get it all within about RAGE. Tim Willits of Bethesda took the liberty to PSFocus a few details to release about RAGE.

The Internet is already known that there is an optional installation available for the Xbox 360 which is up to 21/22 GB. PlayStation 3 gamers have fortunately not much free space.

With a mandatory installation of 8 GB PlayStation 3 gamers can play the game. Yet a large number of gigabytes on your HDD, but fortunately not 22 GB. We also have picked up some of our loyal Faunus (Roel Wijts).

The controls are also adjustable in RAGE. For example, if you find more comfortable to shoot with R1 instead of R2 which is the default, you can always alter it. So are you a true gamer Call of Duty, you can take the controls more convenient way in this game.

113w ago - Today PlayStation 3 hacker Graf Chokolo has posted that he has successfully installed Gentoo Linux on the PS3 internal hard disk drive.

To quote from his update: Great news, guys I was very busy in the last days and I managed to install Gentoo on the internal HDD of PS3 Slim

I created a new VFLASH region of size 40GB and installing my Linux kernel there right now And GameOS doesn't touch this region when I boot it So you can reformat your HDD (but not VFLASH) and Linux will be still there I resized VFLASH from 256MB to about 40GB

Next steps:

• Compiling petitboot for PS3
• Installing petitboot on VFLASH
• Creating HV CFW which is capable of booting GameOS or petitboot. petitboot can boot Linux (or other OS) from HDD, FLASH, USB, CDROM or NFS (just like 3.15 did it or me on my PS3 3.41)
• Creating a more user-friendly approach for installing Linux on internal HDD

BTW, check out my new ps3stor-utils and Linux device driver ps3stormgr. It allows you to create/delete storage regions on PS3 Linux I used it to create a new VFLASH region for Linux.

Here are my Linux partitions on VFLASH:

brw-rw--- 1 root disk 253, 112 Mar 25 19:19 /dev/ps3vflashh
brw-rw--- 1 root disk 253, 113 Mar...

114w ago - This weekend PlayStation 3 hacker Graf Chokolo has disabled the PS3 internal HDD encryption, opening the door to possibilities such as dual-boot PS3 Firmware and using the decrypted PS3 HDD in another console.

Download: ps3dm-utils GIT repository: git://git.dukio.com/ps3dm-utils.git / linux hv scripts GIT repository: git://git.dukio.com/linux_hv_scripts.git

To quote: Even without having a PS3 to work with, graf_chokolo is really active in distributing updates and fixes to his PS3 Linux gits. The latest one comes with an interesting update as you can see from his post below. Maybe one step further to a dual boot PS3 FW?

Guys, take a look at "ps3dm_sm set_del_def_encdec_key" command. You can disable/enable virtual FLASH/internal HDD encryption with that And by patching HV process 9 (which sets ATA keys before loading GameOS) you can disable it permanently. It means you could swap your internal HDD and use it on another PS3. But you have to restore the content on it after disabling encryption because all data will be encrypted of course.

Soon i will implement ENCDEC device driver for PS3 Linux and you will be able to experiment with ATA encryption. ENCDEC device is responsible...