
FreeDVDBoot – Hacking the Playstation 2 through its DVD player - farmerbb
https://cturt.github.io/freedvdboot.html
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Hamuko
Apparently you can use FreeDVDBoot in order to install Free MCBoot, which
helps a lot since you would no longer have to find a friend with a Free MCBoot
memory card or buy one off of Ebay.

[https://www.psx-place.com/threads/tutorial-fmcb-
installation...](https://www.psx-place.com/threads/tutorial-fmcb-installation-
with-free-dvd-boot.30211/)

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user_50123890
Isn't it interesting how these sort of exploits exist for probably every
hardware/software out there, just that they are never discovered? Since the
amount of people with the knowhow for reverse engineering, discovering, and
actually building something out of the exploit is so miniscule.

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Topgamer7
The tooling for this is now free and better than it was when the PS2 was
released. Programming is hard, there are so many problems we try to solve,
it's nigh impossible to hit all the marks when time is short and the money
isn't there to keep testing.

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d33
I'm curious how much manual effort it takes for an individual to break this
kind of protections. I understand that you basically try one exploit after
another, but is there a smart way to automate this? For example, AFL can give
you a lot of test samples, but burning and testing tens of thousands of DVDs
for potential code path doesn't seem to be feasible, so ideally one would put
many cases - but that can't apply to e.g. DVD headers and crafting the test
cases sound like a total pain. On the other hand, if one achieved that, they
could do some sort of binary search to figure out which exploits work. Perhaps
the trick is to plug in a modified DVD reader in order to automate the
process?

I guess that my question is: is there something like AFL, but instead of
generating many test cases, tries to create a big one containing as many
potential crashes as possible?

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jowsie
They say on the page they they used an emulator for testing. No DVD burns
required.

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Topgamer7
Well when the PS2 came it out the binary dumps and fully blown emulators
weren't available. There are many developments that got this to the state
where they could run this on an emulator to debug without running/modding
hardware.

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nikanj
I find it likely that similar exploits can be found in other dvd-playback-
enabled consoles

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realusername
The Xbox 360's DVD drive was basically its downfall, people found a way to
replace the original firmware by a custom one, Microsoft tried to do a cat &
mouse game to detect the custom firmware but they lost.

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Google234
They lost the 360, all the follow up consoles on the other hand...

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libreverything
This is a great article and exploit. Good job and thanks for the learning
experience.

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MintelIE
This is great news. The PS2 was the last console I ever bought.

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flatiron
Mine was the PS3 which is surprisingly easy to modify and their ps1 and 2
emulation works really well. It’s a nice little box if you can pick one up.

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MintelIE
I've been looking for one which can play SACD's and has the hardware
emulation, they're actually a bit rare.

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musicale
The launch model PS3 is a beautiful thing. Four USB ports, lots of card slots,
hardware PS2 compatibility, plays Blu-Ray/DVD/CD/SACD... and that cool Spider-
Man 3 typeface.

