Notices by Gwen Nelson (gwennelsonuk@mastodon.sdf.org)

@libreleah

I just found it hilarious how they refer to it as an illegal hacking tool and pronounced SPI like "spy", making it look like it's a super secret spy tool

@libreleah

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X-Lzq7jAT8I

I found this hilarious

@libreleah

How much are you charging?

I recently got myself a P50s on eBay, it's nice having more modern power but I'm getting back into the territory of doing my daily computing on hardware which has that damned intel ME

@libreleah

Perhaps look into hacking the PS3 onwards, especially the PS4 should be easy to make run a libre bootloader.

The PS3 is a more complicated platform, but the 4 and 5 are basically just weird PCs.

The devkits actually use GRUB!

I often wonder why Sony didn't use their own bootloader or the FreeBSD bootloader for the devkits.

@libreleah

Actually, I also remember getting Linux to boot from the harddrive after they removed OtherOS support back in the day - a lot of PS3 hackers took years to do that and then took all the credit cos I didn't announce my work.

I thought it was too obvious.

Basically you just need to set the root device when booting the kernel, you can't decrypt the OtherOS side while GameOS is booted, but you can just overwrite it.

I used a kernel with internal initrd and busybox (cont)

@libreleah

The PS3 would take a lot more work from scratch, but the hardware signing keys have been leaked so it's possible to run modded firmware.

I have some in my shed somewhere hacked to run the devkit and debug firmware on a retail console - I also fixed a couple of trivial bugs in the Linux SDK that was leaked, and thought about cheekily submitting patches to Sony.

@libreleah

Makes for a nicer way to run a quality ftpd, or even just compiling GameOS code using the leaked SDK on the PS3 itself, then write to the GameOS partition and reboot.

@libreleah

Then I just reformatted the harddrive device and installed a Debian PPC base system to it, and then changed the kernel again to one without the busybox united, just normal Debian initrd.

The original hack booted the kernel but had nothing to do except possibly NFS root, nobody thought to do the obvious.

The advantage is you can mount the GameOS root too, it's just UFS.

@libreleah

PS2 has modchips that have their own firmware already, so I wonder if one could be used to support a totally libre way to run both PS2 games and the Linux bootloader.

PS5 I'm not sure about, but I'd guess it's very very similar to the PS4 because it's just another glorified custom PC. If the GPU drivers work or only need slight modification, it'd be amazing to use with libre firmware cos it's a pretty powerful machine compared to the previous playstation consoles.

@libreleah

On the PS4 it's so similar to a normal PC that people installed Steam and the proprietary Nvidia drivers!

They're not as tightly optimised as PSGL (Sony's answer to OpenGL), but it worked for running Portal on the PS4.

@libreleah wait what

@libreleah

I read that and thought "surely you mean the PS4 and PS5, maybe the PS3 cos we have the firmware signing keys".

But the PSX?

That's crazy but really cool - kinda silly if you would then use it to run only proprietary games though.

@psyhackological @libreleah

Leah tends to add in stuff on top of coreboot, only removing nonfree blobs

@libreleah

It's also dinosaur day!

@libreleah

And the 30th anniversary of the playstation too

@libreleah

BREADY