Patching the PS4 Syscon For firmware revert and repair: Guide by BwE + upcoming syscon flasher
PS4 hardware hacker BetterWayElectronics has published a full guide on how to use his PS4 NOR Validator tool to help with Syscon patch. Using PS4 Nor Validator simplifies the “Downgrade” method described by Modded Warfare a few days ago, but what BwE describes in particular is the “swapping” technique we mentioned here, which lets you in revert to one previous firmware. His guide also allows you to enter service mode for the syscon chip.
Last but not least, BwE announced he will also soon be selling some specialized hardware that lets people read and write directly from the syscon without desoldering it. This syscon flasher will make this OS swapping even easier, but is mostly targeted at professional PS4 repair shops, and is not what we we’ll be discussing below. It’s worth mentioning that in order to achieve this, BwE is using an undisclosed RL78 (Syscon chip) exploit 🙂
A bit of context on PS4 “downgrades”
It is not possible to downgrade a PS4 in general, but there are two significant exceptions: The first one is if you happen to have prepared a backup (of your hard drive, sflash0, and syscon) ahead of time, as described in this article. The second one is that the PS4 always keeps a backup of its previously installed firmware, and you can revert to that firmware, as explained in this article. BwE’s guide focuses mostly on the latter (but his tool PS4 NOR Validator can definitely be leveraged to simplify the other process as well).
Important Disclaimer: As we’ve mentioned before, for the vast majority of people reading this, this will not be useful: the technique is fairly complicated, requires very good hardware/soldering skills, and the cost is not trivial if you don’t already have the required tools already. Your best, cheapest, easiest way to get a Jailbroken PS4 is to buy one, rather than to try to downgrade your current PS4.
With that being said, it’s great to see significant progress being made on these hardware modifications, which ultimately will lower the entry threshold for hardware hacks to more and more PS4 users.
PS4 Syscon Patch with BwE’s technique
As far as the guide is concerned, this is now a “well known” process: you need to swap content on your sflash0 and on your syscon to point to your previously installed system, rather than the new one, and it could help someone go back in particular from 9.03 to 9.00
Where BwE’s technique is novel is that he is giving very precise soldering and manipulation recommendations, as well as using his PS4 NOR Validator to help with the process. This removes in particular the need to manually patch the syscon dump after acquiring it, with PS4 NOR Validator doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
You can read the guide here.
Source: BwE
There must be a way to execute a “panic” trigger for the SysCon chip to revert to previous firmware without this electronic work, as there must be a way that PS4 “knows” when the firmware upgrade has not been executed correctly, and thus triggers a “Firmware revert”
I’m assuming that in most cases, such a “panic” would trigger a database rebuild at best… ? But There might be ways, yes.
My method enables debug mode on the syscon chip. Meaning you can set breakpoints, jumps and start stop commands. So yeah maybe we can use this to manipulate how it handles updates.
What would be really cool is a chip that let’s you select which firmware boot at startup
Dual onboard syscon chip
Dual onboard sflash chip
Dual sata port
Everything soldered to the ps4 replacing the original chips, an hardware switch to select wich system to boot up
I don’t know if it would be cost effective, but sure as heck it would be very cool
yeah! 🙂
I hope u get brick on ps5
r8c or r32c ? with crystal …