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NEWS FROM 60 DAYS | MUSEUM |
 | FreeDVDBoot [1096] | [powerzx], 2020-06-29 15:43:38 |
[Source: https://cturt.github.io/freedvdboot.html]FreeDVDBoot is a PlayStation 2 DVD Player Exploit. This allows you to burn your own PlayStation 2 homebrew discs and play them on an unmodified console as seen in the demo video. With uLaunchELF as the initial program, users can include multiple homebrew programs on the same disc.
Ultimately, I was successfully able to achieve my goal by exploiting the console`s DVD player functionality. This blog post will describe the technical details and process of reversing and exploiting the DVD player. Loading backups of commercial games is also possible. All of my code is available on GitHub.
Multi-file homebrew
Ideally, it would nice for the exploit to boot into a menu which would allow you to select a different homebrew program out of multiple stored on the same disc, and which could then in turn load further data from the disc (such as an emulator loading ROMs). Unfortunately, the PS2SDK filesystem code, and by extension all PS2 homebrew, does not support DVD videos. Since DVD videos are the only type of disc that unmodified consoles will accept which we can burn, I assume that everyone was previously satisfied with just loading data over USB.
I decided to show the exploit to some PS2 enthusiasts in the hope that it might inspire someone to take a look, and uyjulian was kind enough to spend some time adding support and submit a pull request. If you recompile the PS2SDK with this fix, and then recompile your homebrew application, it will have support for loading DVD video disc files from cdfs device.
This is not a perfect solution since we do not have source code for all PS2 homebrew produced over the last 20 years, but it is also possible to binary patch homebrew to manually replace the cdvd.irx IOP module with a new one to add DVD video support. For instance, "Howling Wolf & Chelsea" patched the closed source SNES Station emulator, allowing me to make the following demo (special thanks!):
https://github.com/CTurt/FreeDVDBoot