This will be great for preservation of PS2 games. Well done!
It seems like preservation of games for later consoles is a lost cause. If I pull out my PS5 30 years from now and pop in my Cyberpunk 2077 disk to play, I'm going to have a barely playable game.
It's better than nothing, I suppose, but I won't be able to re-play the excellent version that I played through last year.
In 30 years you may need to modify your PS5 just to get it booting. A lot of retro consoles have to be recapped.
Also the plastic gets brittle. I was replacing a fuse on a PS2 motherboard and some of the ribbon connector pieces just shattered on reassembly. There are many challenges to preservation. Eventually all that old hardware will be all gone.
I think what’s worse is flash lifespan. You can recap, but can you find replacements for failed flash? Can you reimage it with the correct data? Can you even access the flash, which may be buried inside a chip somewhere?
Plastic may get brittle but I think modern plastics do this less than 90s plastics.
I was surprised that the “fix” for the failed storage module in my slim 4GB Xbox 360 was to tear it down and remove the storage module. It isn’t usually that easy.
I am also impressed they managed to use worse flash than the 15 year old $10 USB 2.0 drive I plugged in as a replacement.
Yes, it was one of those projects you see what you still have in the bin. Hey, this one is period correct!
It's only a matter of time until most of these games get vibe-coded back end clones. Still not as good as a full ROM but at least and improvement over complete unplayability.
I have no doubt it'll be attempted, but they won't be clones, they'll be clowns.
Even if they were pixel perfect clones with exactly the same play. As a person who vibe codes like there's no tomorrow to have custom software, I still find the color of the bytes important for something like a retrogame.
Otherwise it's like color photocopy of an art piece.
IIRC, the PS2 did not download game updates or patches from the internet. The game on the disk was what you played. As long as you had a PS2 and the disk, you could play the exact game you played so many years ago.
With the PS5, the disk is more or less a key that lets the console download the game. Having the console and the disk is a guarantee of nothing in the future other than you can probably play the buggy mess that they packaged up way before the game was done.
Honest question, not a challenge: In what way will this improve preservation of PS2 games? My impression was that PS2 emulation was already solved, which I mention precisely to invoke Cunningham's Law. What PS2 things don't work right now because this chip hadn't been cracked?
I think this might allow doing more things with the disc drive on all(?) ps2 models like running copied/homebrew ps1 discs (currently requires a modchip afaik), or potentially developing replacement optical drives/hardware emulators
PS2 emulation leaves a lot to be desired in terms of accuracy and authenticity, and current original hardware backup solutions are not ideal or extremely cumbersome, including caveats like relying on homebrew software which alters the memory layout of games as they run, leading to inaccuracies and broken games, and needing to have multiple copies of backup loading software on your console, as some loaders will work with some games, but not with others. It's a right mess. Some solutions, such as MechaPwn, are more transparent, allowing you to burn so-called "master discs" of your game backups to DVD-R. As far as I can tell, compatibility is 100%, but if I recall correctly, this only works on specific models of console, and the process of burning a master disc can be unintuitive and relies on specific, deprecated, commercial DVD burning software.
From what I can tell, this opens the door to things like optical drive emulators, which replace the disc laser with an SD card slot, allowing the console to read game disc images no differently than the console would read a retail game.
My guess (not involved with PS2 emulation specifically at all) is that this will improve low-level emulation.
So things like making a clone of the hardware with an FPGA, making emulators cycle-accurate, removing game-specific hacks that are no longer needed due to more accurate emulation, and achieving 100% bug-for-bug compatibility with original hardware.
Back in the day my jailbroken PS2 would run all sorts of CDs with pirated games. It was such a magical time, I would download all sorts of games and spend the evening discovering gems.
Everything gets broken eventually. Every Nintendo console except the switch 2 is wide open. Even the "unbreakable" Xbox consoles were broken with Damage Control. Anything worth breaking will be broken, eventually, whether in software or by a mod chip.
If I pull out my PS5 30 years from now and pop in my Cyberpunk 2077 disk to play, I'm going to have a barely playable game.
If we're lucky, it won't be playable at all. Then they'll have the option of selling it to you again, and some shareholders (the only people who matter) will be happy.
With AI-driven hardware price spikes, I think there's a great opportunity to push for a transition to streaming, so users won't have any game files at all, and subscriptions can become the norm.
Some of the reverse engineering tricks utilized by DiscoStarslayer include chemically decapping the CXP102064 to expose the die, then using microscopes and optical dumping skills to analyze the silicon chip circuitry. In this case, a lucky break during the hacking apparently uncovered an exploit that provided a method whereby the chip’s data could be extracted through software.
This is next level commitment to the cause.
Also, I can totally imagine their reaction when they discovered the exploit and realized they could put down the ... chemicals. XD
There actually is a pretty large community of hardware reverse engineers decapping chips for fun, sometimes just to dump internal ROMs (like in this case) and other times going as far as to try reconstructing the original schematics and netlists in order to document the chip's internals and allow for more accurate emulation, in some cases all the way down to the transistor level [1][2]. If you want to learn more, Ken Shirriff has written a lot of blog posts on the subject [3] and Siliconprawn [4] hosts a huge collection of die shots from many contributors.
This will be great for preservation of PS2 games. Well done!
It seems like preservation of games for later consoles is a lost cause. If I pull out my PS5 30 years from now and pop in my Cyberpunk 2077 disk to play, I'm going to have a barely playable game.
It's better than nothing, I suppose, but I won't be able to re-play the excellent version that I played through last year.
If you pop in gta6 you'll have exactly no game at all!
It depends if you have a ps4 disk or a ps5 disk.
The ps5 disk is the "Ultimate Edition" version. It was released 3 years after launch and contains the 2.0 update
PS3 has been jailbroken since 2010 (remember geohot?)
The original fat PS3 and the first few years of slims are also completely “open” as well (with custom firmware that’s fairly easy to install).
If anything, the PS3 was easier to break its security on.
In 30 years you may need to modify your PS5 just to get it booting. A lot of retro consoles have to be recapped.
Also the plastic gets brittle. I was replacing a fuse on a PS2 motherboard and some of the ribbon connector pieces just shattered on reassembly. There are many challenges to preservation. Eventually all that old hardware will be all gone.
I think what’s worse is flash lifespan. You can recap, but can you find replacements for failed flash? Can you reimage it with the correct data? Can you even access the flash, which may be buried inside a chip somewhere?
Plastic may get brittle but I think modern plastics do this less than 90s plastics.
I was surprised that the “fix” for the failed storage module in my slim 4GB Xbox 360 was to tear it down and remove the storage module. It isn’t usually that easy.
I am also impressed they managed to use worse flash than the 15 year old $10 USB 2.0 drive I plugged in as a replacement.
Yes, it was one of those projects you see what you still have in the bin. Hey, this one is period correct!
It's only a matter of time until most of these games get vibe-coded back end clones. Still not as good as a full ROM but at least and improvement over complete unplayability.
Do you honestly believe that most of the thousands of PS2, PS3 and PS4 games will get vibe-coded backend clones?
I have no doubt it'll be attempted, but they won't be clones, they'll be clowns.
Even if they were pixel perfect clones with exactly the same play. As a person who vibe codes like there's no tomorrow to have custom software, I still find the color of the bytes important for something like a retrogame.
Otherwise it's like color photocopy of an art piece.
In the PS2 days people thought that about the PS2, too.
IIRC, the PS2 did not download game updates or patches from the internet. The game on the disk was what you played. As long as you had a PS2 and the disk, you could play the exact game you played so many years ago.
With the PS5, the disk is more or less a key that lets the console download the game. Having the console and the disk is a guarantee of nothing in the future other than you can probably play the buggy mess that they packaged up way before the game was done.
Honest question, not a challenge: In what way will this improve preservation of PS2 games? My impression was that PS2 emulation was already solved, which I mention precisely to invoke Cunningham's Law. What PS2 things don't work right now because this chip hadn't been cracked?
I think this might allow doing more things with the disc drive on all(?) ps2 models like running copied/homebrew ps1 discs (currently requires a modchip afaik), or potentially developing replacement optical drives/hardware emulators
PS2 emulation leaves a lot to be desired in terms of accuracy and authenticity, and current original hardware backup solutions are not ideal or extremely cumbersome, including caveats like relying on homebrew software which alters the memory layout of games as they run, leading to inaccuracies and broken games, and needing to have multiple copies of backup loading software on your console, as some loaders will work with some games, but not with others. It's a right mess. Some solutions, such as MechaPwn, are more transparent, allowing you to burn so-called "master discs" of your game backups to DVD-R. As far as I can tell, compatibility is 100%, but if I recall correctly, this only works on specific models of console, and the process of burning a master disc can be unintuitive and relies on specific, deprecated, commercial DVD burning software.
From what I can tell, this opens the door to things like optical drive emulators, which replace the disc laser with an SD card slot, allowing the console to read game disc images no differently than the console would read a retail game.
Ah, hardware disk drive replacements, that would make sense. I'm very software oriented so wasn't considering the hardware implications. Thank you.
My guess (not involved with PS2 emulation specifically at all) is that this will improve low-level emulation.
So things like making a clone of the hardware with an FPGA, making emulators cycle-accurate, removing game-specific hacks that are no longer needed due to more accurate emulation, and achieving 100% bug-for-bug compatibility with original hardware.
Back in the day my jailbroken PS2 would run all sorts of CDs with pirated games. It was such a magical time, I would download all sorts of games and spend the evening discovering gems.
Everything gets broken eventually. Every Nintendo console except the switch 2 is wide open. Even the "unbreakable" Xbox consoles were broken with Damage Control. Anything worth breaking will be broken, eventually, whether in software or by a mod chip.
If we're lucky, it won't be playable at all. Then they'll have the option of selling it to you again, and some shareholders (the only people who matter) will be happy.
With AI-driven hardware price spikes, I think there's a great opportunity to push for a transition to streaming, so users won't have any game files at all, and subscriptions can become the norm.
https://github.com/spc970-dumper-union/spc970-dumps-public
Yeah, and day-one patches only exist while the servers do. Archive the PKGs.
This is the one you can't mechapwn, right? Can we do anything with this information?
This is next level commitment to the cause.
Also, I can totally imagine their reaction when they discovered the exploit and realized they could put down the ... chemicals. XD
Byuu and McMaster decapped all the SNES ones with amazing write-ups a number of years ago.
There actually is a pretty large community of hardware reverse engineers decapping chips for fun, sometimes just to dump internal ROMs (like in this case) and other times going as far as to try reconstructing the original schematics and netlists in order to document the chip's internals and allow for more accurate emulation, in some cases all the way down to the transistor level [1] [2]. If you want to learn more, Ken Shirriff has written a lot of blog posts on the subject [3] and Siliconprawn [4] hosts a huge collection of die shots from many contributors.
[1] https://floooh.github.io/visual6502remix
[2] https://github.com/iaddis/metalnes
[3] https://www.righto.com/
[4] https://siliconprawn.org/
This article seems to be completely based on the X post by the reverse engineer DiscoStarSlayer : https://x.com/DiscoStarslayer/status/2099132300390744320.
That post reads "After 4 years of effort, I'm happy to announce that one of the final secrets of the PS2 has been broken wide open!
It's been a long process of decapping, optical dumping, and now at last a software solution.
Thank you Libby for finding the exploit from our dirty optical dumps!"
Yesterday DiscoStarSlayer also promised details are coming: "Will share full write-up on how we got here soon!"
Looks like they also wrote a Ghidra Decompiler for the ISA https://github.com/DiscoStarslayer/ghidra-spc970