[HN Gopher] Hacking the PS4 / PS5 Through the PS2 Emulator
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Hacking the PS4 / PS5 Through the PS2 Emulator
Author : phant0mas
Score : 68 points
Date : 2022-09-15 17:28 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cturt.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (cturt.github.io)
| speeder wrote:
| If someone actually makes PS5 accept pirated games, I expect a
| boom to PS5 sales.
|
| I believe a good reason why the PS2 was so dominant was because
| of how widespread PS2 piracy was.
| walrus01 wrote:
| I would rate this as a very low likelihood, because even if
| someone did come up with a way to pirate single player games
| (such as Horizon Zero Dawn/Forbidden West), the number of games
| now that are persistently online-only means that most people
| will be unwilling to give up that functionality.
|
| Any theoretical PS5 piracy would almost certainly require it to
| be completely disconnected from the Internet so that the
| firmware and operating system could not be updated (or verified
| by Sony).
| lostgame wrote:
| The reason the PS2 succeeded so massively is that it was an
| affordable DVD player _alone_ , IIRC at the time you could
| buy a DVD player for like $199 or a PS2 for $299. It was a no
| brainer for any family looking to either replace their
| console _or_ seek to upgrade to DVD - something which was a
| way bigger deal than the transition from DVD to Blu-Ray.
| babypuncher wrote:
| > something which was a way bigger deal than the transition
| from DVD to Blu-Ray.
|
| I always find that interesting, because to my eyes the
| quality jump from DVD to Blu-Ray is the biggest we've ever
| seen (and likely ever will see) in home video formats, way
| bigger than the move from VHS to DVD. I don't think DVD has
| aged particularly well, especially in a world of non-
| interlaced digital flat panel displays. A properly mastered
| Blu-Ray disc still looks considerably better than the HD
| streams being offered by just about any modern streaming
| service, but DVD generally looks worse than your typical
| 480p stream.
| toast0 wrote:
| Blu-Ray may be a bigger leap in quality, but it's kind of
| DVD but better. DVD vs VHS gives repeatable high quality
| video and audio, no adjustment or cleaning, chapter
| seeking, mailability (which enabled netflix and others to
| offer a huge rent by mail catalog), durability in a
| reasonable size. Laserdisc had some or that, but the size
| was cumbersome and the capacity was too small.
|
| Some DVDs are poorly mastered, and modern encodings are
| better than mpeg2 at the same bitrate, but 480p DVD
| should compare well to bandwidth limited 480p streaming.
| babypuncher wrote:
| That is fair. DVD was built to support the same analog
| video standards as VHS, so there was only so much that
| could feasibly be done to improve the picture quality.
| DVDs popularity was all about how much more convenient
| and feature-rich the experience was.
| telotortium wrote:
| Yes, but VHS resolution was not necessarily that great in
| practice, due to it's analog nature. And, of course,
| tapes are much larger and you have to rewind them. DVD is
| much more ergonomic, not even counting extra features,
| multiple languages, higher quality and more channels of
| sound, etc.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| The difference between blu-ray and dvd was barely
| perceptible--if at all--on most people's TVs, when they
| came out, while DVDs were plainly much better than VHS on
| any non-tiny TV manufactured in the 10+ years before they
| came out, is part of why DVDs made a bigger splash, I
| think.
|
| Also, DVDs were fundamentally very different from VHS,
| while Blu-Ray is just the same thing but incrementally
| better (yes, I know it's pretty different in a lot of
| important ways, but it _looks_ very nearly the same, and
| you use it the same way).
|
| DVDs introduced or normalized:
|
| 1) Surround sound on home media.
|
| 2) Widescreen picture (widescreen VHS existed, as did
| pan-n-scan DVD, but DVD popularized home widescreen video
| sources)
|
| 3) "Extras"--sure, you'd see the odd making-of feature on
| a second tape with some VHS releases, or available
| separately, but nothing like e.g. commentary tracks.
|
| 4) Multiple audio options from one piece of media
| (original audio _plus_ dubs on foreign media)
|
| 5) Nice-looking captioning, potentially in multiple
| languages, not like ugly VHS/TV CC managed by the TV.
|
| 6) No rewinding.
|
| 7) Chapters & menus.
|
| 8) ... probably more that I'm forgetting about.
|
| Plus they didn't degrade every time you played them
| (provided you didn't scratch them when handling the disk)
| and pretty much never self-destructed in the player.
|
| Granted, Laserdisc did some of this too, but it was too
| expensive and too bulky and ~nobody had one. I'm not even
| sure more than half the population of the US knew
| laserdisc existed.
|
| Meanwhile, Blu-Ray brought us... more pixels. And the
| disks are more durable. A few other features, sure, but
| only nerds know about those, really. That's about it. The
| pixel-count increase was big, but it wasn't a _whole new
| thing_.
|
| In short: DVD was a _new thing_ ; Blu-Ray was "just"
| better DVD. Consider: almost nobody called a DVD a tape.
| Tons of people _still_ call Blu-Rays "DVDs".
|
| Whatever the technical merits of Blu-Ray over DVD, it
| simply didn't make as big a splash. Probably didn't help
| that streaming services were starting to make non-film-
| geeks reconsider having a home video library at all,
| early in Blu-Ray's lifespan.
|
| > A properly mastered Blu-Ray disc still looks
| considerably better than the HD streams being offered by
| just about any modern streaming service,
|
| Heh, especially Netflix. Encoding artifacts _everywhere_.
| Every dark scene is a bunch of big squares. Terrible,
| terrible picture. I can get 2GB(!) h.265 blu-ray rips @
| 1080p that look way better than Netflix 's 1080p. The
| problem is they're (streaming services generally, that
| is) incentivized to make the stream as bad as they
| possibly can, without driving away _too many_ customers,
| because storage and data transfer costs are major
| expenses for them.
| marinhero wrote:
| I don't think it's like that anymore. There are many servicies
| tied to a console nowadays and they solely function as just
| game machines. If Sony decides to prevent hacked consoles from
| having a PSN account or even going further into banning those
| accounts the incentive for piracy is very low. You'd also
| potentially lose future system updates making some games
| unplayable.
|
| In the old days, all you wanted and could do was play games so
| stakes were low. Now you have Netflix, NFL, and years of
| digital "goods" tied in there.
|
| I do agree with you that piracy played a big part on PS1, and
| PS2 success but the role of it in the modern day won't be as
| important as in the past.
| witheld wrote:
| PS5's are still persistently sold out, it's impossible for them
| to have an increase in sales
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| PS2 was dominant because it had great games, backward
| compatibility (for awhile) and was also a DVD player. The
| piracy angle didn't affect sales, despite what Sony says.
| bitwize wrote:
| PS2 was always backward compatible with PS1.
|
| PS3 was originally PS2 backward compatible, then they removed
| that feature to shave a few bucks off the BOM.
| GGO wrote:
| It only helped sales in third world countries which to start
| with is not a big chunk of total sales, so doubt that it had
| any significant effect.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| The same week that Sony launched the PS2 they also launched a
| 100-disc carousel CD/DVD changer as part of their home
| theatre kit. There might also have been a 200-disc changer,
| but I know the shop I worked in stocked one of the 100-disc
| changers.
|
| Just think! All your CDs and movies in one machine, that you
| can play on your big rear projection TV over your 5.1
| surround speakers!
|
| Just think! They had absolutely no intention of releasing a
| version that was actually a PS2 with wireless controllers,
| and indeed thought the very idea that anyone would buy such a
| thing was laughable.
|
| That would have blown the market to pieces.
| asdff wrote:
| It was also out for so long that it gave it plenty of time to
| end up used for cheap. It seemed like everyone had one laying
| around or in the closet at home by the end of its run,
| usually a slim one honestly.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| DVD playback was huge when it came out. DVD players were
| still expensive so if you wanted one, it barely cost any
| more to get a DVD player that was also a PlayStation.
| Between that and PS1 backwards-compat, the PS2 was a
| _bargain_.
| asdff wrote:
| That's true with the latest consoles too, honestly. They
| are even better deals in terms of what you get. My Xbox
| one is nearing 10 years old and it still plays new games,
| it plays a lot of the older games if they've been ported
| at least (bone of contention I know it not being proper
| backwards compatibility), performantly runs all streaming
| services (can't be said about modern smart TVs), its a
| blu ray player, I have 5.5 tb of local storage on it, and
| I got it used for about the price of a modern game.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Not true entirely. Yes all those features helped, but in
| developing markets, the ability to easily mod chip them to
| play pirated games was the real seller.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| you already can't find a PS5 in stock anywhere, so sales can't
| increase any more at this point
| babypuncher wrote:
| I don't know about that, piracy on the Xbox was a lot easier
| than the PS2. It wasn't until FreeMcBoot came along around 2007
| or 2008 that PS2 piracy really became accessible to the lay
| person, and that was _after_ the 7th generation of consoles
| launched.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| You're in the Western world. In the third world you'd be
| buying your PS2 pre-chipped, lol.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Well when I look at a sales breakdown by region, the lions
| share of PS2s were sold in North America (54m), Europe
| (55m), and Japan (23m). That leaves 27m units divided
| amongst the rest of the world, notably including South
| America [1].
|
| I have no doubt that viable piracy improves hardware sales
| in less fortunate economies, I just don't think it's enough
| of an effect to have the dramatic impact on global sales
| that was implied above.
|
| If you want a console whose global sales I think were
| driven in large part by piracy, look no further than the
| PSP.
|
| 1: https://www.vgchartz.com/charts/platform_totals/Hardware
| .php...
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Almost all of the consoles in the third world country I
| was in were originally bought from Europe.
| worg wrote:
| a nitpick, North America includes Mexico in those charts
| and as a mexican I can attest a lot of piracy went on in
| the PS2 / Xbox consoles back in the day
| speeder wrote:
| Also I doubt the charts include the most popular way of
| buying a console in Brazil:
|
| Buying one from USA.
|
| Sometimes even flying to USA, buying the console and
| flying back is cheaper than buying local.
|
| And during the PS2 era, everyone I knew that owned a PS2,
| bought it from a shop that sold modchipped PS2 that they
| bought from smugglers that got it from USA.
|
| Currently I see that with the Switch, of the people I
| know that own a game console, most of the time is a
| Switch, and most of the time is a pre-modded Switch
| imported from USA, usually an old hardware version with
| Atmosphere installed, because modchipped Switches are
| buggy.
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| Question: why would someone believe that responsibly disclosing
| vulnerabilities that only affect local devices and mostly enable
| the owner of a device to gain root access to it is the best thing
| to do, instead of just publishing them outright? I understand
| responsible disclosure for server vulns that could cause harm to
| third party's plattforms or devices, but it seems unnecessary for
| this case.
| landr0id wrote:
| There's some professionalism involved with not just dropping
| 0day against someone's consumer product when it enables piracy
| or bypasses security functions, especially when you're employed
| in industry. PlayStation also accepted these through their
| bounty program, so there's a monetary incentive as well.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Cheating hurts innocent online gamers. Piracy hurts game
| developers/publishers. If you want a device you can hack, buy a
| PC (or a Steam Deck).
| bitwize wrote:
| If you want a device you can hack, don't play games on it.
| Within a few years, Pluton will give us airtight anticheat.
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| Is it _really_ true that piracy hurts game developers? All I
| 've seen is evidence for the contrary[1]
|
| As for your end statement, I believe having root access, or
| just the same level of control over the individual device as
| the manufacturer does after the sale, is a matter of consumer
| rights/protections ripe for legislation, not about
| "features".
|
| [1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/eu-study-finds-
| piracy...
| bigiain wrote:
| The article says in its intro
|
| " but with the release of the PS5 and the introduction of
| PlayStation's bug bounty program, I was motivated to attempt
| some kind of exploit chain that would work on the PS5."
|
| Money is a perfectly reasonable reason to jump through the
| "responsible disclosure" hoops. If you want to do work like
| this for purely altruistic reasons, go ahead, I'll cheer you
| all the way. If someone else does it for money or reputation
| instead, I'll still read their fascinating write up of it.
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| I had missed the bug bounty part! That's on me :)
|
| Money is definitely a valid motivator.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| There are so many ways for people to cheat in online games when
| they can manipulate the local state of their gameplay. I've
| personally completely stopped playing CoD online because
| cheating is so ridiculously out of control.
|
| I just want to play the game like a normal person. But it's no
| fun anymore.
| mixedCase wrote:
| Chilling effects, I would guess:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment_Am...
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