Well, I've always been of the opinion that pirated games make up a fixed percentage of a game's target audience.

No matter how famous or obscure the game is, the ratio of games pirated to those sold remains more or less the same.

What this in turn means is that only very uninformed people in the game development or publishing worlds will ever actively promote anti-piracy measures.

By defenition, anti-piracy measures exist only in the original unadultered product, because the CDs being sold "on the corner" already have all anti-piracy measures taken off or circumvented.

What I feel is that the kind of crow that made the iPOD famous is being held back on the PSP. They wanna explore the machine's possibilities, but Sony isn't leting them. They are consumers, they buy the products, many of these guys aren't hacking the PSP's firmware to play original games, but to develop their own instead.

Also there is that sense of frustration of knowing that the guy next to you is using his PSP for far more things than you are, and he isnt breaking any copyright law... I've been visiting some of these sites regularly, and I've seen awsome apps, from full screen clocks to personal organizers, to diet planners...


Still regarding the PSP 2.0 to 1.5 firmware downgrader, here is a pic of it working:

This Article from Techdirt only reinforces our views here:

Source

Quote:A few months ago we wrote about Sony's damaging decision to try to block out developers from hacking the PSP in order to add more useful features to it. How hard is it, honestly, for a company like Sony to look back at any recent computing history and realize that becoming "the platform" is a guaranteed way to be a huge success. These independent developers/hackers are making their platform much more valuable. With that in mind, the absolute worst thing that Sony should want to hear are people pointing out that Sony is fighting against developers in a constant back and forth over the hackability of the PSP. What that suggests is that Sony is actively trying to make their platform less useful. And we thought Sony had learned its lesson from years of similar mistakes. Sure, the PSP has been selling well (though, perhaps not as well as they'd like you to believe) but there's still plenty of competition on the way. Letting developers and hackers add more value to the platform should be encouraged. It's free labor making their product more enticing. Yet, it seems they positively hate that idea.

Please explain how your putting a .png file to your background, and then installing code from a memory card, can allow you to play homemade PSP games.

Quote:Original post by Sluginator
Please explain how your putting a .png file to your background, and then installing code from a memory card, can allow you to play homemade PSP games.

look at the first post. AFAIK, the png file creates a buffer overflow and while that happens the copy protection is not running, letting you to run custom executable code.

So unsecure code in the .png loader allows you to cram your code into an execution space?

Back in my days, we didn't have time to exploit a buffer overrun. We were too busy churning butter!


[edit] Removed a frivolous and misused word

[Edited by - Sluginator on September 29, 2005 7:42:24 PM]

Quote:Original post by Sluginator
So a coding malapropos in the .png loader allows you to cram your code into an execution space?

Back in my days, we didn't have time to exploit a buffer overrun. We were too busy churning butter!

Yep, it's more or less that. I don't know exactly how the buffer overflow is calculated by the programmer to actually overflow into a code area that will be run.

I guess the coder just filled the .tif image with "nop" (no-operand, or a null instruction), and when the PSP jumps to a memory address that contained original code, it instead falls on the "nop" code of the image.

It keeps running those "nop" instructions till it reaches the end of the buffer, where the programmer's code is.

Once there the programmer can discover the address the program came from, and re-adjust his oflerflow technique.

I'm knowledgeable with x86 assembly, but I have zero experience with the PSP, but I guess what I said translates well to that system.