June 2009

Ingredients:

Take an unknown random guy, registered on the forums of a relatively well known german site for less than 2 months. This ensures a maximum lack of credibility, which is important. People don’t trust hackers who have been on the scene for years, but they will trust a perfect unknown guy: the white knight coming from nowhere.

Use a savegame from a random game (Monster Hunter JP Version), and mix with the binary of the chikHEN. Put all of this in a zip archive, and wait for a few hours.

If everything goes well, your fake is ready to be baked. After the information gets lost in translation, several sites that people tend to believe will do the work for you, changing what was probably a simple joke (or, who knows, a real crash ?) into a magical gamesave exploit that works on all games (yeah, right…)

In a matter of hours, your name will be on top of all PSP news sites: your fake is ready. Unfortunately, like most soufflés, it will probably lose its shape in a matter of seconds, as soon as it’s out of the oven and people start realizing this was just a prank.

But don’t be worried, the scene is very forgiveable. In a few weeks, you can come again with the same receipe and trick them again. Have fun!

There is probably no exploit in Monster hunter or Need for speed, but these are good games, so it’s still good to get them

No. it’s not out. If the PSP was an important target for WotC, they would have had created the game a long time ago. I started coding Wagic because I knew there would never be an official Magic the Gathering Game on the PSP…

But have you seen the screenshots of the new XBox 360 game (planned to be released in the hours to come)? Seriously, do you see anything here that would prevent it to be ported to the PSP?

Look at them, the same ratio, and even with such small pictures (600×333, the PSP is 480×272), it looks like it would be doable and actually easy to port (just remove a few special effects, reduce the resolution, and you’re done!)… Well of course PSP is probably not where the money is right now, but…

Oh well, at least we have Wagic…which does have a manapool, ha! I wonder how many cards Duels will handle, by the way 

I spoke too soon. The PSP Firmware 5.51 has been released, and, although this hasn’t been confirmed yet, it probably fixes the Kernel exploit of the Chikhen. Actually, it’s probably the only thing it does. What took you so long, Sony?

I now it won’t prevent noobs from doing the mistake, but if you like homebrews, don’t upgrade.

source
EBOOT

The new Sony hardware revision is not publicly available yet, however reports from the E3 convention tend to confirm that it runs on the same firmware base as the PSP 1000/2000/3000. Namely, firmware 5.50.

The PSP Go will probably ship with a different revision, though. Unless firmware 5.50 already has a bluetooth driver integrated, which I doubt (but I haven’t looked at the firmware, so I can’t really tell).

Anyways, knowing the costs of developing an entire firmware from scratch, it is obvious that the PSP Go will share some code with its older sisters, since the hardware is pretty much the same. And if they share the code, they will share the bugs.

Assuming some hackers find exploits in the new firmwares, how easy would it be to adapt these exploits to the PSP Go? It’s hard to tell, but it will be easy to check when/if this happens. We’Ve seen with the Eggsploit that the vulnerabilty is a bit different between the PSP Phat and the PSP Slim. The difference was analyzed with PSPLink, and one file for each model was created. The PSP community was extremely lucky at that time, that the exploit for the slims(2000) worked on the lites(3000) as well. If it hadn’t been the case, there would have been no easy way to investigate the crash on a PSP3000 (it is not entirely true actually, help from people who had access to homebrew on the PSP3000 at that time – such as DAX or Miriam – would have solved the issue)

In other words, what led to the hack of the PSP3000 was the fact that we have access to debbuging tools on previous versions of the console, in addition to the similarities with the new model.
We can think it will be the same for the PSP Go: it would be financially bad for Sony to maintain different software on two revisions of the same console, especially one that has been out for 5 years.

So if an exploit is found on new firmwares, I believe it will be likely to work on the PSP Go as well. Even better, we know there are a few kernel exploits available in the PSP firmware, that were never publicly revealed, and therefore never patched (for example, joek’s exploit, that led to PSPGen’s Gripshift-CFW earlier this year). So If I wanted to play with words, I’d say the PSP Go has already been hacked

But I wouldn’t hold my breath. If I were to buy a PSP today, I would probably get a Slim. I believe it’s the best bet nowadays (The Daxter packs are hackable with Pandora batteries), especially since all models run CFW now. But I think the PSP Go’s sexy… when it gets hacked, I can picture myself selling my PSP3000 and getting a PSP Go.

Oh, and for people expecting a hack of firmware 5.50. I personally hope, if such a hack is found, that it won’t be revealed before the PSP Go is out in stores