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Hey everyone. Here's another update for the European PlayStation Store. Age of Booty finally appears in the region with some good demos you should give all a try.

Here's the full list and Happy Thanksgiving day!

Full Games

* Age of Booty (£7.99)
* Syndicate Wars (PS1 game) (£3.99)

PS3 Demos

* Age of Booty demo (free)
* Dead Space demo (free)
* GTI Club+ demo (free)

Add-on Content

* LittleBigPlanet Chimera costume (£1.59)
* LittleBigPlanet Thanksgiving costume (free)
* G1 Jockey 4 add-on (free)
* Far Cry 2 "Fortunes" add-on pack (£7.99)
* Rock Band DLC (listed after the break)
* Guitar Hero World Tour DLC (listed after the break)

PS3 Videos

* Tomb Raider Underworld video
* Resistance 2 trailer
* Resistance 2 TV ad
* Shoot! episode 2 "Citizen Hero"
* Shoot! episode 2 be... More »  


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Pop quiz: Which is the cheapest current-gen home console? If you said the $250 Nintendo Wii, you’d be wrong — it’s actually the $200 Xbox 360 Arcade, which eschews the hard drive, headset and premium cables of its Pro cousin to shed a full $100 off of the regular price.

But though the entry-level 80GB PlayStation 3 usually clocks in at nearly twice that last price — with “no plans” for a March price cut — a new Sony offer will put the PS3 in a very close third-place finish with its rivals. If you’re willing and able to sign up for the new Sony PlayStation credit card, you can get a PS3 shipped to your door for exactly $284.

While I would not advocate credit even if the US financial market wasn’t currently in death throes due to its mismanagem... More »  


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Sony's Hardware Marketing Director Posted by John Koller announced the following today via PS Blog:

You may have seen the mailers, and it’s true. We’ve introduced our very own PlayStation credit card to offer fans a new way to show off their PlayStation pride and earn reward points towards the purchase of PlayStation and SONY products.

We’ve even sweetened the pot with a special introductory offer. Starting today until December 31, 2008, you could save $150 on the purchase of a PLAYSTATION 3 this holiday. There are a couple ways to do this. You can go to to www.sony.com/newpscard to get instant approval for your card, and an immediate $150 credit when you purchase a PS3 directly through the Web site.

Or you can go www.sony.com/getpscard to apply for the card and upon receipt of the card, use it at any authorized PlayStation retailer to purchase a PS3. Th... More »  


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Many people have been wondering exactly what the differences are between Development and Retail PlayStation 3 Systems, and we figured now would be a great time to clarify these along with reporting some new findings.

Aside from the different hardware revisions of the PS3's motherboard, the systems are virtually the same as mentioned in previous posts. We have examined multiple PS3 TEST's, Retail PS3's, Demo Unit PS3's, and even Factory Mode PS3's, and found that there are no hardware differences between them at all.

Mind you, there are differences, but they are due to the hardware revision, not due to the systems themselves. To make that more clear, the units are identical to their counterparts of the same hardware revision.

So, the question is- what's the difference? Software!

We all know the difference is in the software, and after examining countless dumps from these systems, on top of flash dumps given to us by you, our loyal re... More »  


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Over the months there has been a lot of inaccurate information circulating in regards to how exactly the PlayStation 3's Service Mode works, and as promised in our previous Dev updates here are some of the facts to help separate the rumors and speculation.

It is a fairly simple process as follows.. For starters, the PS3 is powered off, and a special USB dongle, known as the Jig, is connected. The PS3 is then turned on, and then off, once it has detected the Jig.

After this occurs, the PS3 is then turned back on, into "Service" Mode. From here, the PS3 is re-flashed using a Firmware Update on a USB stick, specifically designed to only install from the Service Mode. Once the PS3 is re-flashed with the software, it is then used in conjunction with a PC running customized software, specifically the DEX.exe and CEX.exe's.

There are a multitude of special PS3 firmwares, basically three major ones. The first is a Core System, followed by the Service Sys... More »  


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We recently purchased a new 80GB PlayStation 3 console, and our very own PS3 Dev Courier dissected his new system.

The item that peaked his interest the most was that it had one single 56-pin Flash chip, the S29GL128N90TFIR2, and was 128MB in size in contrast to older PS3 consoles utilizing dual (2x256MB) 48-pin chips totaling 512MB. So, he bought a new adapter, and some blank chips and proceeded to pull the 56-pin flash, and dumped it.

To our surprise, he was unable to dump more than 16MB of it! At first, we believed that the other blocks in the flash were protected via password, however there was something else brewing.

He took the 16MB dump that was made and flashed it onto a completly blank chip, and reinstalled it in the PS3.

To our surprise, it worked!

Now, if you recall, newer version PS3 Firmwares have ask... More »  


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Update: A brief guide and F.A.Q. are available HERE and NDT posted a more detailed walkthrough.

Guys,

I need a little help from the community, if possible i'd like to have from all of you uploaded somewhere (example: rapidshare) the first 2048KB of the HDD partition. Specifically i need a test conducted this way:

Power up the ps3, go to the formatting utility, and format the ps3 HDD with the option of 10GB for the ps3 system.

Power off the ps3, remove the hard disk, attach it to the PC and dump the first 2048KB.

Compress the 2048 with the program you actually prefer (rar, zip whatever) and upload and post a link here.

For the dumping part winhex (for windows) or dd (unix and windows), if any problem or question rise, feel free to contact me or other devs, thanks a... More »  


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Well this week we have some exciting news that we hinted about last week.

First, a small technical explanation. We were not able to modify any data on the PS3's flash chips due to the ECC. The ECC is a checksum basically, that ensures whatever data is in the block is not changed or corrupted, and if it is it errors.

So, the problem was since when we tried to alter data, the ECC would then in turn be invalid, causing errors, making the system not boot.

We did develop a way around this, however, it was time consuming and quite slow. We used the PS3 to write data to the flash, then dump it, with its proper ECC, then rewrite to where we needed it. This would take hours on end! We were not able to regenerate the ECC since we did not know the proper algorithm.

But now, we can!!

After multiple tests done by NDT to see what the ECC... More »  


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