Archive for October, 2008

Update (or lack thereof)

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

For those who are wondering, I’m not dead – just swamped with work and an unhealthy obsession with Fable II. Which is unusual for me, considering that I’m really not much of an RPG buff.

Some great news in the PSP-3000 hacking front came and went, the most promising one being the motherboard of the new system — it’s a TA-90, hence “pandorizable”, though currently with some sort of protection. Let’s hope not for too long.

In other news, I’ve noticed that while Atari800 has not seen any releases since mid-last year, work on it has been ongoing. While the changes are mostly structural (code reshuffling, etc…), they have made me consider an intermediate, possibly beta release of Atari800 PSP, based on code in the CVS repository. If that happens, I’ll most likely post a build in the forum for those interested to test (I’ll post an update here as well).

For the Fuse fans, here’s the situation on future releases: Philip Kendall, the principal developer of Fuse, commented earlier about changes coming to a future release; these changes will be substantial (from the sound of it, and at least from a structural standpoint), going so far as to change how extended disk support functions. Fuse PSP is being actively developed, and will be updated when the next version of Fuse is released, or shortly before.

There are other things being worked on at the moment, but as I’m not certain of their status, I’m going to keep any comments to myself, until I know for sure.

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Posted in Atari800, Custom Firmware, Fuse, Update | 1 Comment »

RACE! PSP version 2.15 released

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008

This is a small release that mainly fixes a few bugs and introduces several features that are likely to make it into other emulators as well:

  • Fixed state auto-selection bug; when switching games, the latest save state will now be highlighted
  • Added support for NGC and NGPC file extensions
  • To improve menu entrance/exit time, reduced the number of times the game will save flash RAM data. Flash data will now be saved when resetting a game, loading a new game, and exiting emulator
  • Rapid fire support – map any button to A or B autofire (‘Controls’ tab). You can also change the rate of autofire (‘Options’ tab)
  • Snapshots are now saved into PSP’s own PHOTO directory (/PSP/PHOTO), and can be viewed in PSP’s image viewer
  • File selector now has snapshot support – while browsing for games with the file selector, pause momentarily to display the first snapshot for the game

Thanks to those of you who submitted suggestions for some of the new features.

Download

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Posted in RACE!, Release | 3 Comments »

Spam, and spam other spam updates

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008

The forum has started to get bombarded by spam from China; this has led me to block a number of IP ranges, as well as add spam protection – full details here. I’ve also added a new forum for posting bug reports — if you have any bugs to report, please do so here.

In the upcoming month or so, expect to see updates to a number of existing emulators – Fuse and fMSX are likely to be some of those updated. Updates are likely to range from very small fixes, to new (and hopefully interesting) features.

If you also own a GP2X, good news — I’ve been contacted by the author of the GP2X port of RACE!, who plans to use RACE! PSP’s state saving code his port. Speaking of which, all signs indicate that state saving works without a hitch — if you’re interested in details, here’s a list of tested games.

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Posted in fMSX, Fuse, Update | Comments Off

Why newer PSP’s cannot currently be hacked

Monday, October 6th, 2008

You’ve probably heard about this elsewhere already, but Dark_AleX has recently posted information on why the newer PSP models (later-model Slim, and likely Brite) cannot currently be hacked.

The upshot of the story is that 32 bytes of data that were previously unused space used for padding, are now actually used for storing two cryptographic hashes. The hashes are assumed to be (and in all likelihood are) based on the decrypted copy of the encrypted information, and are used to authenticate the validity of the encrypted data. If a computed hash doesn’t match the supplied hash, the CPU will refuse to run the firmware.

The new implementation is not very different from the implementation of the SSL/TLS protocol, as well as many other common encryption protocols — in fact, it’s rather strange (though perhaps fortuitous for us) that it wasn’t implemented until now. It does, however, significantly complicate the initial bootstrapping process (if only in terms of cryptography), which simply required valid decrypted data (according to the same article, original encryption was destroyed by employing a timing attack).

If there is a silver lining here, it’s in the potential weakness of the human element. For those of you who recall, Pandora came about when a Sony repairman left specially-formatted memory stick in a repaired PSP sent back to a customer. Let’s hope that some lucky soul somewhere finds a bunch of unencrypted boot IPL’s in his/her memory stick (and that he/she knows who to send them to).

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Posted in Custom Firmware | Comments Off

Pandora and the state of PSP development

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008

There’s a new strangely sycophantic article on Slashdot, regarding the start of pre-orders for Pandora, a new open-source handheld console that a number of gaming sites have already mentioned. The article spawned a number of comments regarding the other handhelds currently available (such as the PSP and the GP2X), and the “openness” of those systems to “homebrew” development. I left the following comment, which I feel fairly well summarizes the state of development on the PSP:

I’m a PSP developer, and I must admit that while getting documentation for the SDK is tough, there are more than enough examples around for anyone with common sense to pick up on the API fairly quickly. Plus, the folks at the ps2dev.org forum are exceptionally helpful (as long as your question isn’t along the lines of ‘what’s a for loop?’)

PSP development at this point (and probably forever) is very much an exercise in reverse engineering, even for the client C/C++ developer (as opposed to the brilliant minds who reverse-engineered the SDK). This explains the handful of applications/emulators that actually make use of WiFi and/or the ME processor. That said, PSP development is highly rewarding, if only in a personal sense.

That said, I wish the Pandora folks good luck. I’m a huge proponent of open-source software, and if Pandora succeeds, perhaps Sony will be persuaded to make the PSP more open to development, and maybe release an SDK.

Comments are welcome.

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Posted in Development, Rant | Comments Off