(Previous post in this series: Hacking consoles: a learning journey, part 4)

Introduction:

Well, how do I put it…

Simply, I failed. When I started this series, I envisioned it as a weekly thing, but I knew very well that there would be some hardships I wouldn’t be able to overcome in a week. I don’t like to admit it, but I failed.

I know that failure is a part of the learning process, but it’s always hard to swallow, isn’t it? I knew I wasn’t good at coding in C or MIPS from the get-go, but I didn’t think it would become such an issue so early on in this journey.

I’d like to apologise for writing this over a month after it should have been published. The worst part is, I don’t even have anything interesting to write now! If only I could have gotten something to work, it would have been a glorious way to explain my late post, but no.

Today’s summary:

Today’s post will be a short one, sadly. I can only spend so much time explaining why I couldn’t get anything to work before the whole thing becomes boring.

The (hacking) failure:

The plan for today was to finalise a binary loader for the Patapon exploit, and to write something to actually load with it. As you might have read in my last post, I could get something to work from the crash we’d gotten, but I couldn’t go any further.

If you remember, the end result of last time’s post was that we could run the game’s exit instruction to get it to stop cleanly. That was quite an achievement for me, because I could finally control the game! So, I tried to write something that could load a file instead. After all, we can only write so much in the save file itself before we run out of space, so the next logical step would be to write a loader for a much bigger file that we’d have written separately

So, I did that. I followed various guides, writeups and explanatory posts to get there, but nothing did the trick. After trying to find out what the problem was, I got to a disheartening final conclusion… I’m the issue here. My lack of knowledge, expertise and experience in low-level programming finally bit me in the rear.

Now, I know you don’t know me personally, but I can tell you something about my way of thinking: I hate giving up. I hate admitting defeat, and even worse than that, I hate failing at something I started myself.

On the flip side, however, I try to learn from my mistakes instead of crying over them. I’m giving up on the binary loader now, but I’ll keep on pushing. And, when I’m ready, I’ll come back to it, and I’ll just achieve it bigger and better than I could have hoped to do it today. Here’s to a brighter future in hacking!

Conclusion:

I’m done with the PSP for now, but I’ll come back. With this series going on, I can’t afford to get stuck on something for too long. Plus, I haven’t really been interested in PSP hacking in my life, so maybe I just needed a subject with a better incentive to get started?

The next stop on this journey will be the PS Vita 3.60 exploit. It really does mean something to me, but I’ll be explaining that in the next post, so stay tuned! I promise that you’ll have this next post in a week. I’ll do my best to keep this interesting and on schedule!

I’m very sorry to drop such a short post so late, but I needed time not only to realise that I couldn’t overcome this hurdle right now, and to accept my defeat. I promise that, next time, you’ll have a report on what I tried and why it failed instead of a post complaining about how I couldn’t get it to work. Remember, I’m not just learning to hack, I’m also learning to manage and write this series as I’m going. Thank you very much for reading this entry, and until next time, farewell!