Console Hacking

Why has console hacking become so popular?
What has made console hacking such a popular hobby/event for console-lovers the world over? To many people, personal finances and restrictive laws have contributed to their willingness to rip apart their devices and tinker. To others, there are too many constraints on their gaming experience, or too few titles released in their homeland... or even not enough vendor support to keep a system alive. This was best illustrated by the now ‘undead’ console, the Sega Dreamcast, which enjoyed an unnaturally long life thanks to modders and homebrew hackers, if only to allow imported titles and free development to keep their overseas cousins bathed in the glow of the wonderful PowerVR chipset.

Here in the Asia/Pacific region we have an odd situation with our consoles. We not only have two distinct standards of television output/broadcast, but we have two separated gaming markets, as a direct result. The PAL and NTSC war rages on. Let us count the ways.

1. At the time of writing, one of Nintendo’s largest titles of the year, Super Smash Brothers: Brawl still hasn’t been released in our PAL territory. The NTSC market has been enjoying it for several months. The situation has become so bad that retail outlets are now selling the NTSC version of the software with the Datel Freeloader region bypass product for Wii.

2. Our version of Grand Theft Auto 4 has been altered significantly from the other region versions. Some argue that the censorship has gone too far (though others argue that the censorship – however bad the idea is – is actually rather light –ed).

3. In extreme cases, our titles have entire functions removed or are degraded in capabilities. This is most evident in titles where screen sampling speed is changed and as a direct result, our gameplay speed is actually altered by a number of frames per second, due to the difference between the PAL and NTSC scanline rendering specification

To deal with these inequities in distribution, and preserve gamers’ rights to an untainted gameplay experience and in extreme cases, functionality, people are forced down the path of either console importation, or modding (or both!).


Imports and the games market
Many a company has tried to act as a source for import titles/accessories/consoles over the years. Probably the most famous of these is the now legendary (and deceased!) Lik-Sang. As of October 24th, 2006, Lik-Sang was suspended from all business at the threat of multiple lawsuits from Sony Inc. Sony’s reasoning was that Lik-Sang were providing potentially harmful products to regions/zones that should never have had access to them, not the least of which included power adapters and Blu-ray movies for the PS3.

Despite some people suggesting this was more a profit concentration tactic on Sony’s behalf, another service merchant trying to spread equal opportunity was successfully closed down. The current replacement, play-asia.com, has not come under fire as yet. Whether Sony’s actions were justified (or even legitimate) in closing down another importer/games dispersal mechanism is and always will be hotly debated.

The fact of the matter is, when a company as large as this exerts its power upon a smaller entity, it is hard not to fall in line. The community suffers either way and we are forced to derail the corporate vision using our own intelligence and resources.

Anatomy of a console hack
Console hacks fall into three categories. Figure 1 shows the console hacks hierarchy.



Software-level console hacking can be broken down at the OS level or the BIOS exploit level. It has, however, taken several years for each generation of console to evolve to a point where pure software-level hacks are attainable. Notably, it has taken the lifetime of the console to get to a point of a pure software hack for the Playstation 2 (Memor32 VAST), allowing external boot loaders/chain loader code to be plugged in via a boot disc that dumps the user into a state that will run any code from any media. Similarly, the original Xbox ‘softmods’, as they were known, took some three years to fully develop.

Hardware level hacks are generalised into either drive hacks or bypass chips. Drive hacks tell the optical drive in a current generation console to ignore the vendor’s MMC/SCSI instruction set (which often contains explicit/specific regions stating that it will ignore burnt/recordable media). This allows the end user to boot any form of media or any code they like. By far the most simplistic of all console modification techniques and the most widespread, it is also the least simple to lock down from the vendors’ perspective. Global bypass chips are somewhat more complex in their methods. They tell the hardware that despite the fact that there are foreign objects in memory, or segments of unsigned code running, that the overall sum/checksum of the operating environment is ‘sane’.

Then we come to a dark, strange place. The hypervisor is essentially a layer of glue sticking hardware and software together. This adhesive between hardware and ‘user land’ is elusive and difficult to escape. A hypervisor essentially presents hardware resources to a software environment. The trickiest part about this is that without the hypervisor, the hardware is seemingly incommunicable. Efforts are being made to launch the hypervisor, break out of the hypervisor, then utilise the hardware underneath, as if it were running through this adhesive conduit. This is as advanced as console hacking gets.


Want a brew?
Beer is good. It’s better when you can get it for free though. Using homebrew (unofficial/not for profit software engineering efforts) on a console is currently a major incentive to ‘mod’ your hardware. Some of the best brew for current generation consoles exists on the Nintendo DS, Sony’s PSP and the Wii. The PS3 and Xbox 360 remain less hacked for reasons explained later in the article.