This month, we’re celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the Playstation. A good time for the scene to reflect about how hacking has evolved on Sony’s devices, in the past 20 years.

PS Anniversary, the official event

Sony have some ongoing Anniversary sale, with discounts on games such as Knack, Dark Souls II, Metro Last Light, Diablo III, Red Dead Redemption, Ni No Kuni,  Max Payne 3, and a bunch of PSOne classics. (Consider using our affiliate link to buy your PSN Codes, thanks for your support!)

They’ve also been doing a few fun events, such as the unboxing of the original Playstation we mentioned not so long ago.

To celebrate, they’re even releasing 20th anniversary special versions of the Dualshock4, as well as a Wireless Stereo Headset. Although these are preorders, the Controller is already out of stock at the time of this writing. The headphones are still available though.

PS Anniversary, the hacker’s perspective

From the hacking scene perspective, this is a good time to reflect on the evolution of homebrews and hacking on Sony’s devices.

Those of you interested in the PS1 security will want to read these 2 great articles by our very own Acid_Snake: How PS1’s Security works, and his PS1 Article in the 10 Days of hacking series.

Extract:

Swap Trick:

This method took advantage of the system’s disc read error tolerance policy, this means that when the ps1 can’t read a disc it keeps retrying until a decent amount of time. This is why it takes time for the ps1 to “detect” a burned game or why scratched games can take longer to load.

Read more

You might want to take it further, and follow up with his article on PS2 hacking.

Sony have gone a long way when it comes to the security of their consoles. Today on the PS vita, we’re dealing with NX Bit, ASLR, and a bunch of modern protections against hacking and piracy. Interestingly, it seems the PS4 might be less secure than the Vita.

For those of you specifically interested in indie development and homebrew, I suggest you read my article “Sony and Indie devs: a story of love and hate“. Extract:

Back in 1997, Sony started selling an official development kit for hobbyists on its Playstation 1, called Net Yaroze. For the “reasonable” price of $750, you’d get a PS1, 2 controllers, and the necessary development kit.

Read more

We’ve surely gone a long way since the release of the original Playstation, both in terms of gaming and from a hacking perspective as well. What’s your Playstation story?