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Hacking the PS4 / PS5 Through the PS2 Emulator

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Re: Hacking the PS4 / PS5 Through the PS2 Emulator

#21

Post by toast0 »

babypuncher wrote: post #13
lostgame wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 ma…

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.

Re: Hacking the PS4 / PS5 Through the PS2 Emulator

#22

Post by telotortium »

babypuncher wrote: post #13
lostgame wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 ma…

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.

Re: Hacking the PS4 / PS5 Through the PS2 Emulator

#23

Post by bitwize »

jonny_eh wrote: post #20
EMIRELADERO wrote: post #12

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.

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).

If you want a device you can hack, don't play games on it. Within a few years, Pluton will give us airtight anticheat.

Re: Hacking the PS4 / PS5 Through the PS2 Emulator

#24

Post by bitwize »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #5
speeder wrote: post #2

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.

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.

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.

Re: Hacking the PS4 / PS5 Through the PS2 Emulator

#25

Post by asdff »

yamtaddle wrote: post #19
asdff wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 .

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.

Re: Hacking the PS4 / PS5 Through the PS2 Emulator

#26

Post by landr0id »

EMIRELADERO wrote: post #12

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.

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.

Re: Hacking the PS4 / PS5 Through the PS2 Emulator

#27

Post by worg »

babypuncher wrote: post #16
sudosysgen wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're in the Western world. In the third world you'd be buying your PS2 pre-chipped, lol.

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…

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

Re: Hacking the PS4 / PS5 Through the PS2 Emulator

#28

Post by bigiain »

EMIRELADERO wrote: post #12

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.

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.

Re: Hacking the PS4 / PS5 Through the PS2 Emulator

#29

Post by yamtaddle »

babypuncher wrote: post #13
lostgame wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 ma…

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.

Re: Hacking the PS4 / PS5 Through the PS2 Emulator

#30

Post by EMIRELADERO »

jonny_eh wrote: post #20
EMIRELADERO wrote: post #12

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.

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).

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...

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