PS3 Hacks - News, PS3 Hacks, Cracks, Mods.

Recently Slashdot had an article about how over 250,000 users have signed up for the Folding@Home project on the PlayStation 3. This success can also be scene by checking out our very own PS3-Hacks.com Folding@Home team. As of the date this article was written our team was pegged at:

Team Ranking (incl. aggregate) 893 of 63407

Keep up the great work guys!

Here is a cool video recently uploaded to youtube. It features a motion tracking robot controlled with a Sony PS3 Sixaxis controller. Finally something oddball and cool to strike back at the wiimote hackers.

In a similar fashion to what we saw over at PSP-Hacks a few weeks ago, Leif Erikson has decided to craft another Mac OS X dashboard widget specifically for PS3-Hacks! It utilizes our RSS feed, so you’ll receive only the news that matters — none of that nonsense, you know what I’m sayin’?

Excuse the crusty screenshot, it looks much better rendered by the OS X Dashboard.

Download: PS3-Hacks Mac OS X Widget

Sony is up to something… Those sly foxes, we gotta keep an eye on ‘em…

Earlier in the evening Sony released PSP firmware 3.40. Now, perhaps even at, or around the same time, PS3 firmware 1.70 hit Network Update via the PS3 console.

This news tidbit actually derives from Mr. Knockout, who was kind enough to enlighten me about the firmware update availability. After reading the email, I immediately exited Folding@Home and checked; lone and behold, an update is available — 1.70! Thanks for the tip, dude. :)

Of course the official PlayStation website is behind; however, the main revised 1.70 features are:

• Enabled PSOne download games to play on the PS3
• Enabled PSOne game saves to be used on the PSP
• Enabled rumble function on accessories for PS1 and PS2

As you can see for yourself, this is quite an update for any avid PlayStation gamer. The choice is yours — the blue pill, or the red pill — select wisely, my friend.

Download: PS3 1.70 FW Update

HanSooloo has shared some interesting results from a preliminary HDD analysis…

1. The HDD is encrypted with a (most probably) Sony proprietary format.
2. If Linux is setup on the machine, the HDD will contain the relevant ext2 or ext3 partitions, but it will NOT be visible to a regular OS. This is because, the HDD does NOT have a standard partition table. If one uses WinHex to scan the HDD, then the program will find the ext2/ext3/swap partitions at their respective offsets.
3. A program has been written to scan blocks of 16bytes for where contiguous data is on the HDD. This program has identified major blocks of data on a freshly formatted 60GB HDD.
4. Of major interest is that right around the 380MB marker, we start seeing blocks of 64KB data, and this repeats itself EVERY 183.72MBs. Why does a system need 64KB worth of markers every so often, is a mystery at the moment.
5. Each HDD is "individualized" the moment it is formatted on a particular PS3 unit. An individualized HDD CANNOT be used in another PS3 unit due to (in theory) a unit based signature being written to each HDD.
6. A project is underway to "individualize" 2 same make and model (Seagate Momentus 60GB 2.5" SATA) HDDs and perform a byte level diff to spot differences in the disk layouts.
7. This diff will also be analyzed by the data block scanning program mentioned in Item-3 above.

I wonder… Will the long overdue ISO loader be able to play backed up images off the HDD? Hrm…

- source: HanSooloo