Sony just announced PSP2. Dubbed the Next Generation PlayStation Portable (NGP), it looks like a slightly-tweaked version of the original PSP design. The most obvious change is the inclusion of two analogue sticks — actual analogue sticks similar to the DualShock’s and not whatever nub thingy the original PSP had.

Additional specifications include 960×544 5-inch OLED (4 times the resolution of the PSP), 3G, Wi-Fi, GPS, front and rear cameras, front and rear touch pads, and accelerometers and gyroscopic sensors based on the PS3 Move. Games will be sold on flash-based storage cards and UMD is gone forever. RIP.

The rear touch pad is basically a touch screen behind the NGP but without the screen part. I can’t really imagine what that is good for. Maybe I am just not a huge fan of touch-based gaming.

Rear touch pad

The hardware sounds like it is basically capable of all the augmented reality, location-based, motion-controlled, social, networked multiplayer, touchscreen gaming any developer can ever come up with. Sounds quite insane frankly. Detailed specs here.

I wonder if the NGP will be breaking any new grounds for console launch prices…

Also, this crazy fusion of human interface technology will certainly make the NGP an enticing target for hardware hackers and homebrew developers.

According to MGS-creator Kojima, the NGP’s graphics are just as good as the PS3’s. Given that the screen size is smaller, I find this entirely plausible. He showcased MGS4 (which at the time was supposed to be the pinnacle of PS3’s HD graphics) running on the NGP.

Sony also brought in Capcom and Sega to show off NGP running Lost Planet 2 and Yakuza: Of The End that were originally developed for PS3. Joystiq quotes Capcom representation saying that the NGP can handle the “full specification” of the PS3, whatever that really means.

The game showcases demonstrating PS3 ports running on the NGP seem somewhat ambiguous as to whether they are merely demonstrating the fact that the NGP is capable of running PS3 games with minimum tweaking, or whether those ports represent actual commercial NGP releases that are in development.

Kojima sounds like he wants to make games that run exactly the same on the PS3 and NGP and can be played on either, but this does not appear to be the official purpose of the NGP. I suppose more will be revealed in the near future.

The NGP is only coming out at the end of the year, so it’s quite clear that Sony chose to unveil it now to steal some thunder from Nintendo 3DS’ impending release, as it had done in the past against the Dreamcast and the Xbox 360.

Frankly, I’ll buy whatever next/this-gen console that gets Valkyria Chronicles 4. Let’s just hope it’s not the original PSP. Come on Sega WOW!

And oh. Official PlayStation emulation is coming for Android. The PlayStation Suite support many mobile platforms, no doubt with the leaked Xperia Play as the flagship device.

It’s not clear what exactly are the titles supported. PS1 is a given, but apparently there will be PSP titles too. Is PS2 too much to hope for?

Lots of exciting things happened in the PS3 scene the past few days. The aftermath is that the entire PS3 encryption scheme has been irrevocably cracked and broken, with no possibility of a firmware fix, due to a rookie cryptography mistake made by Sony who is now crying in a corner.

Let’s take a look at the itinerary of events.

The Story

First, a little background.

Sony excluded Other OS (Linux) support from its new PS3 Slim models for unknown reasons. This annoyed some people but did not cause too much stir because hackers who wanted Linux still had their old PS3s.

In his attempt to restore Other OS functionality to the PS3 Slim, George Hotz, a famed iPhone hacker who has a slight ego issue, discovered an exploit in the PS3’s Other OS system that may lead to enabling of piracy. Sony made some legal noise and took the drastic measure of removing Linux support from all PS3 consoles through the 3.21 firmware update. This is illegal in Europe and probably other countries with decent consumer protection laws, but no substantial legal challenges have succeeded thus far. This move also pissed off a lot of hackers who previously ignored the PS3 due to its existing Linux support. George Hotz disappeared like a little girl without releasing his claimed exploit because he was afraid of law suits.

Months later when the uproar had died down, the PS3 was suddenly cracked using a USB exploit by a (presumed-to-be) Chinese hacker group who released the hack commercially as the PSJailbreak. Out of the blue, PS3 homebrew and piracy communities sprung to life. The technique was refined and made open source by various individual and community efforts such as PSGroove and PSFreedom and ported to numerous devices.

However, Sony released the 3.50 and 3.55 firmware to block the exploit. The community remained on 3.41 and no real breakthrough was made after that, with the small exception of a “downgrader” released by the same mysterious PSJailbreak team, which was also subsequently cloned by other jailbreak manufacturers and open sourced. While the downgrader allowed 3.50 and 3.55 firmwares to revert to 3.41 using USB protocols copied from Sony’s official maintenance tools, it does nothing to allow 3.41 firmwares to run new games such as Gran Turismo 5 which are signed by a new encryption key present only in 3.50 and newer firmwares.

The Breakthrough

On 29th Dec 2010, a collaboration of hackers called fail0verflow unveiled a groundbreaking discovery at the 27th Chaos Communication Congress (27C3) hacking conference held in Berlin. By observing files and runtimes in the PS3 using processes made possible by the PSJailbreak exploit, the team discovered that Sony had made numerous mistakes in the design of the PS3’s much-hyped security architecture. You can watch their presentation on YouTube and download their slides here.

Towards the end of their presentation, they revealed the most fatal flaw in the system: Sony had failed to correctly implement the cryptography scheme they used to sign their ELF executables (PS3’s equivalent of an EXE). The encryption scheme required the generation of a new random number each time a signature is created, but Sony’s implementation uses the same “random” number every time. This made it a constant instead of an unknown variable, reducing the number of unknowns from two (private key and random number) to one and making it mathematically possible to derive the encryption keys via algebra, which is what fail0verfow did. They published their method but not the actual keys they obtained through it.

The Keys

Almost immediately after fail0verflow’s disclosure, George Hotz made a sudden grand entrance back into the scene and released the PS3’s metldr keys he discovered by using an undisclosed exploit to dump the “metldr”, which fail0verflow did not achieve, and then applying fail0verflow’s method to recover the private encryption key. I am not completely clear on this part, but I gather that the metldr is some kind of bootloader the PS3 uses to call up the higher-level functions like the Game OS.

The metldr key is a very low level encryption key embedded in the PS3 hardware that can then be used to decrypt higher level keys found in the Game OS firmware that are used to sign actual games. Immediately following this announcement, community members of the PS3 scene used the metldr key to decrypt and post every single encryption keys used in every PS3 firmware version.

The Aftermath

With these keys, it is now possible for anyone to sign any PS3 ELF executable as if he were Sony and there is no reason for any PS3, modded or otherwise, to reject the signed files.

The immediate effect is of course homebrew. Anyone can now create applications for the PS3 and run them without using PSJailbreak.

The next obvious outcome is of course piracy. Since all PS3 games can now be decrypted, it is trivial to decrypt new games such as Gran Turismo 5 using the 3.55 key and re-encrypt them with the 3.41 key so that they can be played on an exploited PS3 running older firmware. Indeed, fixed EBOOT.BIN for the frequently-requested Gran Turismo 5 was one of the first scene releases following the breakthrough.

Going forward, it is likely that the current piracy methods will be greatly streamlined and such manual patching processes will no longer be necessary. This is because the keys allow hackers to decrypt all official Sony firmware updates and use them as the basis for creating custom firmwares similar to those prevalent in the PSP piracy scene. Since these custom updates will be signed with Sony’s official keys, even non-modded PS3s will accept them without complaints. The first custom firmware for the PS3 came out just days later and allows users to install homebrew without using the PSJailbreak exploit.

In the next few months, there will likely be non-stop releases and refinements of PS3 custom firmwares, amazing homebrews (an XMBC port maybe?) and streamlined piracy tools.

An amusing side effect of all these is that PSP’s private encryption keys are also completely exposed and they have been used to implement the HEN exploit on the newest 3000-series and PSP Go hardware running 6.31/6.35 firmware. The keys were presumably being used by the PS3 to play PSP Minis games. Apparently, Sony was very confident of the PS3’s protection scheme.

The Conclusion

For Sony, there is no way to put the genie back into the bottle. The metldr key cannot be revoked through a firmware update and changing it will require new hardware. But a new hardware revision is utterly meaningless, since current PS3 consoles (with their metldr key exposed) must presumably be able to run all future PS3 games and firmwares. As a result, future game- and OS-level encryption keys will forever remain vulnerable to reverse engineering, unless Sony takes the extremely drastic action of breaking games compatibility with current PS3s.

The conventional wisdom has always been that console-hacking is motivated mainly by piracy. This idea is being challenged by the case study of the PS3, a console which remained secured for years despite what we now know is a utterly broken security architecture. The piracy motivation has always been there, but the pirates apparently did not possess the technical expertise needed to make the breakthrough.

The explanation proposed by fail0verflow, which they say apply to themselves, is that highly motivated and technically competent hackers were initially not interested in cracking the PS3 protection scheme because it ran Linux out of the box. Efforts to crack it by capable individuals only began after Sony excluded Other OS from the PS3 Slim and subsequently removed it from all existing PS3s through a firmware update.

Looking at the flurry of activities in recent months, less than a year after Other OS was removed, there appears to be some truth in that explanation.

Sony has completely lost the battle. The war will continue with the PS4.

All you have to do is to upgrade your firmware 1.5 to the hacked 3.02 OE-B firmware and convert the ISO image of your PS1 game into a PSP-bootable EBOOT.PBP file using the bundled tool.

3.02 OE-B also allows you to boot UMD ISOs directly from the Memory Stick folder under Games, bypassing the need for Devhook. And of course, it also identifies itself as 3.02 and thus supports all PSP games that are currently on the market.

The first game I tried out was FFVIII because I happened to have it lying around.

Basically the official 3.00 firmware introduced the Playstation Network feature that allows you to download emulated PS1 games through your PS3 and play them on your PSP. The catch is that the selection is very tiny right now and the games cost 5.99 USD each.

Someone realized that the official PS1 downloads are actually the compressed ISO images wrapped with a fully functional emulator and cracked a copy of Hot Shots 2 to accept other ISO images. And It worked.

So now you can emulate any PS1 games on your PSP with the hacked firmware. Of course you need the downloaded copy of Hot Shots 2 from the Playstation Network in order to extract the required emulation files, but there are ways…

Basically what this means is that, licensing issues aside, Sony is trying to charge people 5.99 USD for every single PS1 game downloaded, even though no extra work is required on their part to release more emulated PS1 games for the PSP since they have already created a fully functional PS1 emulator that works with all games.

Free money?

But of course we are all dirty pirates with no PS3s so it doesn’t matter. Ironically, I probably own more original UMD games than most PSP owners in this pirate-happy country. (The average being close to zero…)

To Sony’s credit, the emulator works very well. (Well duh, they were the ones who made both consoles…) R2 and L2 functions are assigned to either the d-pad or the analogue stick depending on your preference, which is sufficient for most games but not all. (e.g. fighting and maybe FPS?) Can’t be helped I guess.

Screen size is of course not ideal. You can choose to play at the original 320 x 240 resolution (leaving lots of ugly black space), stretch to maximum while maintaining aspect ratio (leaving two ugly black bars) or stretch to fill (ugly distorted graphics). Then again, so many PSP games are ports from other consoles that I’m sure that PSP gamers are all used to this dilemma by now.

Here’s a video of the emulator in action.

Why wait for Sony to release PSP ports at full retail price when you can play your old PS1 games on the go for free?

PSP-Hacks has everything you need.

I need to get myself a 4gb MS DUO so that I can carry all four discs of FFVIII and four discs of Tokimeki Memorial 2 around with me.

PS3 launched some hours ago in Japan and, surprise! Thousands of people queued up for it. If you follow any gaming blogs at all, you’d think that everyone in the world hates PS3 and can’t wait to fap (to) their Wii. But judging by the turnout today, I think we can safely say that the bad publicity Sony has been getting is not going to determine the success (or failure) of the PS3. The product is.

Sony screwed up quite a lot of things, such as the mass production of blue diodes needed for Blu-ray drives, leading to a massive shortage of PS3. Then again, it happened with PS2 too. Europe got shafted as usual.

Crazy Brits who paid £750 to queue up in Tokyo for a PS3. From Akiba-blog.

It also took quite long for Sony to finalize the PS3, delaying its release from spring to end of the year and giving 360 a one-year head start. Then again, it happened with PS2 too. How many of you own(ed) a Dreamcast? (I do, BTW.)

People are complaining that PS3 and 360 offer no innovation compared to Wii. Then again, there were plenty of innovative games for the PS2 without having to revamp the whole control scheme. It’s a console and what I want for a console is to be a able to lie down on a couch while playing it. If I wanted to play games that required cursor movement and targeting, I’d be playing it on my PC.

Japanese people love to queue, it’s in their blood. From Akiba-blog.

The graphics on PS3 and 360 look good. Metal Gear Solid 4 and Gears of War look like sex. Wii’s graphics are NOT good. “But graphics are not important! Gameplay is!” – Bullshit. Graphics are not as important, but that doesn’t mean they are unimportant. There is absolutely no reason why you have to sacrifice good graphics for gameplay. You can have them both!

Now, assuming that Wii, PS3 and 360 end up splitting the market three-way and they want to find ways to gain an edge over one another, will it be easier for Sony/Microsoft to copy Wii’s gameplay by releasing a remote control add-on, or will it be easier for Nintendo to magically upgrade Wii’s graphics? I think the answer is obvious.

Queues at Yodabashi-Akiba hit 1,400 people. From Akiba-blog.

Sony’s controller already has motion sensing. Clearly, Sony is hedging its bets. On the other hand, Nintendo is placing all its chips on one gimmicky feature alone. I’m not sure if third-party game developers can really utilize such a feature in the way Nintendo intended. Just look at Battalion Wars 2, it’s using the Wii-mote for nothing more than a mouse pointer.

It’s tempting to compare PS3 and Wii to PSP and NDS. Nintendo DS is outselling PSP by at least three to one, even though PSP has the better graphics. But there is a huge difference between the PSP and the PS3 that this comparison fails to account for. The reason why PSP failed (relatively speaking) was because of its lack of good games. PSP is a dumping ground for full-priced PS1 and PS2 ports that people have already played 100 times before. PS3 is not. It makes a huge difference.

Danny Choo, his PS3 preorder secured, terrorizes the queue.

Of course, the high price point of the PS3 can very well be its undoing. If Blu-ray manages to take off like DVD did, then PS3’s selling price will be justified. But I doubt it. DVD offered significant improvements over VHS while Blu-ray doesn’t look all that different without a HDTV. Most people do not own a HDTV. I’m sure either Blu-ray or HD-DVD will eventually replace DVD as the de facto format for movies, but whether that happens soon enough to make the Blu-ray drive in the PS3 worth the money remains to be seen.

If Blu-ray flops, then Sony would’ve done better to use dual-layered DVDs for PS3 games, especially if the supply bottleneck and the high cost price are really caused by the Blu-ray drive. Then again, if Sony did that, it would be the same as burying Blu-ray alive. Sony chose to take the risk with PS3, a risk that Microsoft avoided by choosing conventional DVD over HD-DVD for 360 games. Again, it’s still too early to say who was right.

Metal Gear Solid 4

No matter what the Digg and Joystiq crowds are saying, Sony still has plenty of fight left. Just ask those people who spent last night queuing.

Here is some Christmas Day good news for you! IT Media has announced some details on the Blu-Ray region coding and it holds a nice surprise. Japan, North America, and East Asia will all be sharing one region code. This potentially means that American gamers will be able to import Japanese PS3 Blu-Ray games, and will definately be able to import Japanese Blu-Ray Anime/Movie titles without any hassle. Europe unfortunately will be sharing a region code with Africa so likely not much cross-gaming there. Sorry Europe, looks like you will be getting the gaming bone again. Oh and Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all from all of us here at GR!

Depending on their definition of “East Asia”, this could be a good thing for Singapore. ^^ No need for modchips for play any import PS3 games that matter. Europe, which has the same DVD region code as Japan, has been shafted this time round.

I can’t seem to find the original source article on IT Media, but if this is true, it could seal the deal for PS3. (Well, except in Europe…)