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I’ve been getting a lot of complaints about my last article from the 10 Days of Hacking due to the sudden decrease of quality, and I want to apologize by creating a bonus day where I want to talk about some interesting hacks and developments.
Consider this the real Day 6 if you may.
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A few days ago I published an article where I criticized the Gateway3DS team for having intentionally injected malware in their flashcart for the Nintendo 3DS. One of the thing that annoyed me is how most of the people buying the Gateway 3DS products almost described the Gateway team as “white knights” or “devs dedicated to the scene”. Set aside the flamewar-inducing tone of my article, I mostly wanted to open people’s eyes on the huge market and margin that the flashcart business is. As I mentioned, the Gateway team are looking at a potential benefit of millions of dollars, they are clearly in the business for money and not to “help the scene”. Good for them, but I just wanted to stop the myth that these guys are here for “the community”.
Now, when I mentioned millions of dollars, some people rolled eyes and said I basically pulled the numbers out of thin air. I’ve gone back to my research and came back with more precise numbers to prove my claims.
It didn’t take long for Yifan Lu’s investigations to become useful for other hardware hackers! Our community member katsu, guided by Yifan’s precise description of the Vita’s NAND pinouts, was able to hack his PS Vita in order to boot from a previous firmware, technically performing something very similar to a downgrade. Check the video below, it’s cool and full of “electronics porn”, like your favorite cyberpunk movie.
The Xbox 360 was Microsoft’s second home console, and the first one to be widely acceptable, but there’s probably nothing about its background story that you don’t already know, so lets cut to the point.
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After Sega’s strong competition in the 16-bit era of gaming and later Sony overshadowing Nintendo with the PS1, Nintendo had been struggling to regain dominance in the gaming industry, but all that ended with the huge popularity and momentum Nintendo’s Wii got, but I’m not here to discuss console history, there’s another 8 Days feature for that, I’m here to discuss why some of the design choices for the Wii led to an early full blown hack of the system.
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If you own a 3DS you might have heard of the “Gateway 3DS” card. It is basically a flashcart for the Nintendo 3DS that will let people run roms (read: pirated 3DS games). That device was recently in the middle of a storm for embedding code that intentionally bricks some users 3DS, if used on competitors’ hardware.
Lets dive directly into what I consider some of the best hacks in the modern Scene of the PSP.
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We all know this machine, we have been studying its interior for years now, but I am here to disclose the early hacks and mistakes that gave us initial access to all we have today.
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The PS2 still remains as the best selling console of all times, only almost surpassed by the DS, almost. With the PS2 we get to see once again modchips and disc swap, only more advanced, and the introduction of software-based hacks.
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The PS1 was not only a very successful console, it also marked the the first mainstream hacked console that led to the creation of hombrews and downloadable pirated games. But how did the security work and which methods were used to hack it?
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Over the Christmas holiday I had the opportunity to watch fail0verflow’s presentation on how they hacked the Wii U in 30 days (I didn’t have a working internet connection while I was away, but had managed to download a copy of their video before leaving). The video of their presentation (below) is interesting in itself, and I strongly recommend you watch it (and the accompanying blog post) if you have an interest in hacking in general, and console hacking in particular.
But you’ve probably read everything there is to know about Fail0verflow’s presentation by now, especially if you’re in the Wii U scene. After all, their presentation was 2 weeks ago, that’s aeons ago in the hacking community. But I’d like to discuss some of the points they made, that I think can easily relate to Vita hacking.
We all know how much the NES revolutionized the market and even saved it from the crash generated from all the shovelware titles in the Atari 2600, but what most of us don’t know is that it was also the first console to be hacked if we rely on the modern term of console hacking: bypassing the security inflicted on games to prevent unauthorized game copies to be played.
You did it again! December 2012′s best selling PSP game was UNO, a game which had been used as a vector to Total_Noob’s TNV (more known as CEF at the time) through Frostegater’s exploit. And this year, you’ve beaten that record with not only one, but two exploited games in Sony’s best sellers for December 2013.
I’ve mentioned a few weeks ago Yifan Lu’s ongoing experiment/attempt at looking at the vita’s hardware. Yifan’s been busy over the Christmas period, looking at the bowels of our favorite portable console. Earlier today he announced he was able to dump the Vita’s NAND.
Due to the popularity of my 7 Days of Metal Gear, I decided to make two more of these features: 8 Days of Gaming and 10 Days of Hacking.
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