Hacking consoles: a learning journey (part 5)
(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!
Everything was pretty cool though. Thanks!
No, thank you! It’s heartwarming to see that even on an article such as this one, people are supportive.
Thank’s THEOCTO for all your hacking writeups!
I’m waiting for upcoming ones regarding PS Vita.
Cheers!
Thank you very much! I can’t wait to publish the next one, and to get back on track with all of this 🙂
Thanks for your continued support, it’s great to see you under every post I make 🙂
Don’t hesitate to come on Twitter if you want to chat with me, I think my DMs should be open.
In any case, see you under the next one!
Hopefully more people who shout for jailbreaks and exploits appreciate the hard work and value the amount of knowledge you need to have to actually break a system. Big mouth yelling and actually doing it are two very different things.
Yeah, that was a very real wall that I hit there. There’s a reason it’s called “Learning Journey” though, and apart from showcasing already existing hacks, I hope to show more people how much work and learning goes into this kind of things. And I also hope to get further into it myself, all while enabling others to have an “easier” way into hacking!
If you are learning from your experience by gaining knowledge of programming and how to hack, it was a success. With defeat it makes people stronger and more determined. keep posting great articles and don’t’ ever give up on something that you enjoy. We all have to start somewhere.
Thanks a lot for your support! I’m trying to take this as an incentive to learn more, rather than a dead end 🙂
Really enjoyed the summaries of your exploits! Like what previous comments said, hopefully people can understand that the process of exploiting technology is not as easy as they think and will respect and appreciate the efforts that hackers put into them. I look forward to your next summary.
Yeah, I didn’t expect it to be easy in the slightest, but it looks like I sorely underestimated it anyways. Here’s to getting better!
Thumb up for your resilience!
Thanks a lot 🙂
So that’s where Wololo’s team went back to (that level)? Lan.ST would chew and spit you out,
HoS
The idea behind this series is to follow a complete beginner (me) on his journey to learn console hacking.
I’m not on “Wololo’s team”, he’s just kindly giving me a platform to post this.
I understand that it might not be interesting for everyone to read about a newcomer and their struggle to get to a decent level, but I believe that this could be an interesting resource for anyone interested in following that same path. I’m just trying to learn, and to give other beginners an easier way into this world.
I enjoyed the series, A failure is just a learning opportunity. It would be cool if you could write one final writeup on how you would approach it differently if you were to do it again knowing what you know now and what other tools / tech you would arm yourself with :).
Thanks for the suggestion! I’ll add a small section in my next post covering what I’d do differently if I had to try again, that sounds like a great idea 🙂
Your next post, is the one where you succeed, otherwise refrain from doing anything at all within this topic, That time could be used speaking to forum members and solving the solution.
I really liked these articles, my reason to check this site regularly. Thank you for sharing!
Well, I’m very glad to hear that! Thank you for reading!