PS Dev just released a useful little script for those of you investigating the PS Vita PUP files (Playstation Update Package). This script will give you some basic information about the package header, as well as extract the license file.

Magic Reader is a simple script, but it might be useful for those of you who are too lazy to understand the information from the psvitadev wiki (all the offsets, headers, etc.. are documented there).

Obligatory hint: if you have no clue what this does, you are probably not the intended audience. This will not magically hack your vita or let you play pirated games.

Download

Download here.

Extract, and to run, just type ./magic.sh PSP2UPDAT.PUP (assuming the PUP file you want to analyze is called PSP2UPDAT.PUP) . I confirmed this will run on cygwin as well, if you don’t have linux.

Alternatively, follow the instruction on PsDev’s thread here

A sample of the ouput:

____________________________
 PsDev 
 PUP READER 
____________________________ 

____________________________ 
 Magic
____________________________ 
offset= 0x0 
length= 0x8 
0
8+0 records in
8+0 records out
8 bytes (8 B) copied, 0.0153084 s, 0.5 kB/s
____________________________ 
 PUP_Version
____________________________ 
offset= 0x9FF
length= 0x10
1
16+0 records in
16+0 records out
16 bytes (16 B) copied, 0.0528894 s, 0.3 kB/s
____________________________ 
 license.xml
____________________________ 
offset= 0xC00
length= 0x724B4
2

Where to get the PUP files?

Sony is on a witch hunt against every single site that tries to distribute their firmware updates. For those of you interested in getting older firmwares, etc… the best advice I can give you is to download these PUP files directly from Sony’s website whenever they are released, and store them somewhere on your hard drive. In the past, Sony’s official firmwares have been used for reverse engineering, but also to install Custom firmwares, etc…

The most recent Vita firmwares can be found in the following index files:

• Japan
• US
• Europe

A complete list, including older firmwares, can be found here. Note that there is no guarantee Sony will keep older firmware revisions online forever

Source PsDev on /talk