If you’re a PS2 hardware sicko, you may be aware of the floating point problem If you were sad that it’s not possible to play stuntman in pcsx2, or your grand turismo recordings were not working quite right Well, you can, today, with my soft-float recompiler build in the reply

20 years i've waited for this... props to jestero and everyone else involved in the project:

As Sony accurate float aficionado this nice to see

ppsspp.org/blog/vfpu-math-re… nice

CXD1869BQ die (D Chassis GH-013) at pin 35 (X_PEN). Pad exists but was left unbonded. Die shot from Libby (bsky.app/profile/libby.bsky.…)

Let's talk about the Xbox 360 softmod... piped.video/ftEuor1asBM

MechaPwn folks are at it again. "XPEN" (X-Protection Enable) pin of the error correction DSP chip was discovered to be the toggle selection to turn on/off the behavior of -1 DSPs used on DTL-H hardware. This pin is pulled up internally by a resistor. Left unbonded in retail ICs.

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From now on your too can dump your own SPC970 variant #ps2 #mechacon rom! github.com/Libbers/SPC970-Me…

RT @gezine_dev: Just dumped one of switch 2 game binary (userland bug) It was quite fun because I used HDMI capture card to dump the memor…

SPC970 Based MechaCon LIBeration testing is going well. Initially only V2 compatible, but now we have first V3 dump!! Still harsh on hardware, so careful dumping continues. Progress so far going well! Will share full write-up on how we got here soon!

We can now dump some SPC970-based PS2 MechaCon chips. This could lead to MechaPwn-like shenanigans for SCPH-1xxxx and SCPH-3xxxx PS2s, depending on what we find. No guarantees, though! =^-^=

Imagine the PlayStation 2 is a big toy box that only lets you play *real* games, not copies. Inside it lives a tiny secret guard chip called the MechaCon (the old fat-PS2 version is the CXP102064 chip in the photo). That chip holds all the secret passwords and rules: “Is this disc real? Is it from the right country? Can we decrypt the game?” For 26 years nobody had ever opened *this particular old version* of the guard chip and copied what was written inside. DiscoStarslayer and friends spent four years doing the hard way: - They carefully peeled the plastic lid off the chip (decapping). - They took super-zoom photos of the microscopic writing on the silicon (optical dumping). Those photos were messy and incomplete (“dirty dumps”). - A helper named Libby stared at the messy photos until they spotted a sneaky trick the chip would fall for. Now they have a software method that can read the whole secret book without smashing every chip. The second picture is a peek at the words they found inside — old programmer notes from the year 2000. Why it matters even if you’re five: people who make pretend-PS2s on computers (emulators) and people who want to keep every old game working forever now have the last missing piece. The guard’s secrets are no longer locked. That’s the “final secret of the PS2” they just opened.

Is it true the engineer who worked at SONY developing the PS2 SPC970 mechanics controller firmware was a big Dragon Quest fan? The later models ARM mechanics controller was codenamed "Dragon" by the way.

Finally, years of effort involving optically reading a mask rom, correcting errors, writing a disassembler, an IDA plugin.... All paid out! Congratulations to everyone involved! 🥳

This is the power of open source. Somebody added a new low latency audio mode to PCSX2: github.com/DiscoStarslayer/p… they referenced and thanks I PR I made years ago to lower the audio latency in Mozilla as source: github.com/mozilla/cubeb/pul… which for some reason was never merged, but at least did good elsewhere! [SELF PROMOTIONAL, YES!]