In the last 2 weeks I:

- reverse-engineered a Mac AppStore menubar ppp (using Ghidra), modernized its UI, and added support for Apple Silicon. It took about 90 minutes running in the background.

- created faithful macOS ports of ~7 classic 68k Macintosh games via 68k disasm tools Claude wrote for itself; most are now written in Swift, with MacToolbox routines reimplemented (one exception: MS Flight Simulator 1.02 worked better as a plain C and SDL2 app, since it has a hand-authored bytecode interpreter in 68k assembly and draws the entire UI itself)

All it takes is a goal with nearly 100% specificity

One hack in Anthropic is all it takes. They already have all the source code of each company in the world.

Does this not encourage proprietary vendors to just make everything cloud only with subscription? Including games? In the CFO's office, that's a win-win: increased revenue and security of the code.

At some point, boycott will be consumers' only viable move. Legislation is urgently needed here imo.

Agents' ability to disassemble and reverse engineer is amazing, the scary thing to think about is what does it mean to sell software in a world where the only moat is brand/marketing?

More like open-to-utilize-full-capacity in that case.

Not all software, obviously. Apple is notoriously good at producing "black box" products.

That was always true according to an old saying in software cracking circles: „everything is open source if you know reverse engineering“

That's not open source.

Smells like communism to me... no private property, expropriated by the AI.

Yes me too. But I doubt it. The EU's own software like the age check refuses to work on rooted android phones. Pretty stupid because I as the owner should be able to decide whether I want to take that risk or not.

A jailbreak is similar to a root on Android. I think the EU is very happy to have us locked in by big tech unfortunately. They do enforce Apple to open up for other stores but I don't think they're going to go much further than that.

Sony was already planning to do that by ending disc production entirely

Is there still a market for physical media? I assume they're transitioning to download-only because physical media are expensive to produce and most customers prefer downloads anyway.

Perhaps it is us who is poking the bear, and games will become stream only!

Usually you could overcome simple version checks with a little reverse engineering / live debugging. However, I'm certain with Sony being on notice, they'll probably introduce a bunch of breaking APIs in the coming versions (existing APIs will start behaving differently, might introduce more server checks - worse still, some game/PS5 logic lives on the server). More work for game developers.

Source of Rockstar's announcement about requiring latest firmware?

Works fine on my 13.00 console too FWIW

they tried that with the psp and we just spoofed the version lol

Piracy is more “I don’t like the terms you’ve set.” Some terms are overbearing. Some are more reasonable. Both get pirated but at different rates. Some people just don’t like the idea of paying at all. Some people will pay onerous terms.

> "Piracy is a service problem" - Gabe Newell

This quote has been taken too far out of context from the original talk, which is worth viewing.

He was saying that piracy can be reduced by making the product easily available. When it was easier to download a pirated version from home than to drive to the store and back and unwrap a physical CD, piracy was easier.

That is not true today. The easiest path is to buy the game digitally through the service on the device and play it directly. Pirating it is more work and harder to do.

So quoting Gabe Newell in support is wrong. Saying it’s a service problem is also wrong when the piracy route takes a lot more work. The goalposts keep moving around (and I’m sure they’ll move more in the replies) but we have to eventually admit that a lot of pirates are pirating because they don’t want to pay for the game. It’s the most obvious fact on this topic but the comments are always full of mental gymnastics pretending the pirates are noble people doing the right thing.

They should really give you code execution with nothing but a paperclip like the original Switch models

It will probably happen once the new Pokémon game releases. The most dedicated players really want their hacked monsters.

if the switch 2 actually materializes a worth to play library ...

By your own argument:

Sony prefers charging a tax on game sales that's high enough to recoup the cost of the hardware discount.

This means playstation owners are getting a discount on hardware, and then paying so much more for each game - to the point Sony prefers this because they get higher revenue than just selling the hardware at cost.

---

You are literally advocating for the worse model for yourself.

Jailbreaks don't ruin anything other than a "predatory loan" style arrangement.

Personally, I fail to see the problem.

> Get a PC and do whatever you want on it.

the PS5 at its launch price was best game PC price/performance, with super fast storage, keyboard and mouse support and more

but the keyboard & mouse support is locked by DEVs and only a handful titles support it. a very limited 3rd party app store it could have been the steam box on steriods, alas not so.

at end of the day, buying a PS5 allows you to do with your hardware what you want, be it play games on your console or create a super computer cluster with your PS3 consoles running linux.

But the hardware has already not been subsidized, and actually turns a small profit since ps4, same for xbox.

They will all go full streaming the moment they can possibly get away with it anyway, the same as everyone else in all fields.

And when they do, what do you care anyway? Your argument is to just eat what you're given, so you can still just "buy a console and play ganes". If anything the console will be even cheaper and in more supply then.

I see no valid argument anywhere in here and I think you need to think up some better excuses to justify being mad at people who have done nothing to you. This attempt to make a peeing in the pool, ruining it for everyone argument doesn't hold any water.

Maybe you work Sony and that's why you have any opinion at all about what other people are doing with their own property? And even literally presume to tell them what to do and not do with it?

You attempt to criticize anyone elses proper civil upright behavior when you're doing THAT? Those maniac criminals hacking their own ps5's at least only hacked their own. They didn't try to tell you you had to hack yours.

Vast majority don't care about the console or hardware at all, they just want an easy way to play games on a tv. If consoles disappeared tomorrow, most people would start figuring how to connect a PC to a tv. It's not difficult, it's just less convenient until they learn how to use it.

> People don't realise the console hardware is subsidised and the firmware locks are the way to recoup the costs from Sony walled garden of games.

Is this still true? PS5 price has gone up in the 5 years since release. I think there’s now a profit on every machine made, but Sony would like more money.

The supply shortages are already here, ps5 pro is sold out nearly everywhere and even GameStop is selling USED ps5 pros for $1400 USD.

This is a drop in the bucket, blame component surges (not to mention shortages and orders getting cancelled/trimmed) plus GTA 6.

Surely the goal for these people is being able to download ISOs for the emulator, no?

I very doubt these are overlapping groups: people who cry about physical disks and people who can port ps5 games to pc

I had my LLMs RE a sunsetted mobile game and within a few days ($10 equivalent of my monthly plan) replicate the fight screen with nearly perfect pixel by pixel animations and visual effects. Heavy use of ghidra and a MCP. Then it installed an android emulator to build an automated compare pipeline between the game and my remake. When I don’t feel like babysitting it, I tell it to spend some tokens on the long backlog of RE items and it happily churns away at it. It’s so easy and cheap, anyone can do this by themselves, for themselves. No need to wait for someone else to do it.

A swarm of humans with frontier models could probably rebuild many mobile games in a month. Only limiting factor is the lawyers. I’m somewhat surprised the models don’t have guardrails for this. They probably will soon enough, but by then the Chinese models will be good enough to do it. The dream is to have local models that can do it.

The option will be vexatious litigation to make some examples. It’ll probably work too, at least long enough for this whole AI reverse engineering transformation to piss off enough companies to lobby Congress to outlaw reverse engineering

Wait did something happen with modern warfare?

This is not like the PS3 generation where the Cell processors had massive untapped potential, and were priced well below market for that kind of compute.

The PS5 (and its Xbox counterpart) is more-or-less just a modern budget gaming PC with a little bit of special sauce. The only advantage here is that component pricing may have been locked in before the RAM crisis.

CPU is a rather weak Zen2. If that still appeals to you, instead purchase a BC-250 mining board. It's a PS5 reject and nearly all of them can be fully unlocked for all 40CUs and 8 CPU cores. They are quite popular right now for building Steam Machines and all the hacking has been done with replacement BIOS mods.

Not worth it. It's basically a knee capped Ryzen 3700X with less cache. You can get a better CPU for less money. The GPU performance is still alright but it's not good at non-gaming tasks as it lacks cores for ML tasks.

Nah you're better off just buying a PC. Gone are the days where you were getting amazing hardware for the price

Beware that you need a hypervisor exploit to run Linux. And these are incredibly rare. But, there was one patched very recently on firmware version 14.10

So, if you buy a PS5 now, you should be good

It is indeed a good time. Latest firmware patched the recent exploit, but most or all boxed PS5s in stores should still be on old enough firmware. This will not be true forever. Beware of used units since they could've been updated already.

Wouldn't make much sense since hardware-wise you're very much paying for the GPU power and not CPU power, which isn't gonna help you much at compiling.

I'm hearing this since the early 90s when I started playing games but probably happened before too

I cannot recommend Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 enough if you're into RPGs!

If it gets opened up for Linux, other people might be interested.

Many multiplayer games are worth playing on PS5 because there is less cheating. Due to stronger software integrity protections. Oh...

Ace Combat 8 just came out bro