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10 Ways to Hack Your System

10 Ways to Hack Your System

We are all a bunch of filthy pirates, modders, and weirdos who want to put Linux on our PlayStations. Ever since consoles became a reality, the more tech savvy of our generation has loved tinkering with them in order to make them do things that they just weren’t designed for. Here are just a few ways we have managed to hack consoles in the past and present.

Internet Exploits

Internet Exploits

Internet exploits are actually a relative newcomer to the hacking family, as they have only been around since consoles could access the internet, and most of them only effect consoles that can access the internet and play a game at the same time. Usually these take advantage of an exploit in a browser, giving it a web address that is too long, connecting it to a server that makes it read corrupt data, so on so forth. This exploit is then used to get the console to do something it isn’t supposed to do, which usually involves running unsigned code, or somehow rewriting addresses in RAM. This is how up until the most recent system patch, we could run any Game Boy Color game we wanted or hack in custom Pokemon simply by visiting a website with the 3DS browser.

Computer Link Up

Computer Link Up

Computer link ups were devices that existed around the time of the PlayStation that were supposed to be used to allow you to store your save files and other game data on your home PC. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you look at it, the right program on your PC could take advantage of these link up devices and inject data into your system’s RAM, or at the very least onto a memory card where your system would load corrupt data that could make it execute arbitrary code. Or, if you were a small time hacker, you would just alter your save files to give you infinite money and skip to the last stage or something.

Disc Swappers

Disc Swappers

Disc swappers were originally popularized as importing devices. These tricky little things were simple. All they did was freeze your console after it got through the copy protection part of loading a game. You ccould then take your legitimate game out and put an imported game in, and you would be able to play it just fine. Of course, you could also put fake games in, or CDs with your own homebrew programs on them. From there, the sky was the limit.

Burned Discs

Burned Discs

Many hacking devices are symbiotic with each other. The presence of disc swappers made burned discs much more valuable too. Disc burning was young when burned pirated games were popular, and it was easy to screw up, but any computer with a CD-R drive would get you access to an entire library of games. But that’s not all. Many people would take it a step further, modding their games, or even trying to rewrite their console’s firmware. The Dreamcast was actually notorious for being the one console that easily played burned discs, and while this created some of the most interesting mods, homebrew software, and fan made games that any console has ever seen, many suggest that this is also what killed the console.

Developer Modes

Developer Modes

This is another more recent hacking technique, and it may be just a myth. Current generation consoles are set up so that any console can become a developer console, given the right sequence of inputs. Developer consoles can run unofficial code, of course, as you need to when testing your game. Of course, this means you can program a developer console to do whatever you like. Supposedly, you can jailbreak your Xbox One by unlocking its developer mode, but this hasn’t yet been proven. However, the PS3 DID have an exploit that essentially allowed you to treat your console as a developer console, and this lead to the incredible lawsuit between Sony and hacker Geohot which eventually lead to the first big PSN network outage.

In-Game Bypasses

In-Game Bypasses

Of course, most console developers don’t want you to hack their console, so you likely won’t get anywhere just fooling around with the firmware. Luckily, we have poorly developed games to fix all that. Games that are badly programmed usually allow you to get into memory addresses you aren’t supposed to by causing an underflow or overflow. Essentially, you can try to make the game read a variable that is too big for its location (usually via save file manipulation) and this allows you access to the next byte over, and so on and so on and so on until you can alter what you like.

On a very simple level, this allows you to run arbitrary code, sometimes without even altering your console. Many Smash Bros. Brawl mods run this way. But on a greater level, you can do amazing things by altering a game using its own mechanics. In last year’s AGDQ, they managed to use a Gameboy copy of Pokemon in a Super Game Boy in order to run a program that fed a Twitch chat stream into the console. Essentially, the whole console was reprogrammed just by using one cart. That’s nuts! They also reprogrammed Super Mario Bros. into a working copy of Super Mario World using only in-game inputs.

Soft Mods

Soft Mods

When hacking gets sophisticated enough, a soft mod can be performed. Soft mods, or software mods, are essentially permanent programs that allow you to do things you aren’t supposed to be able to do on your system. For example, the Wii could be modded in order to install the “Homebrew Channel.” Installing it required an in-game bypass of some sort, but once you installed it, you could pretty much run whatever arbitrary code you wanted with no muss and no fuss, allowing you to play homebrew titles or get around the system’s region lock. Of course, people would also install things like USB loaders and other dubious pirating software, but that’s not necessarily the soft mod’s fault.

Custom Firmware

Custom Firmware

One step up from the soft mod is custom firmware. While a basic soft mod simply installs a program onto your console that isn’t supposed to be there, custom firmware overwrites the entire OS. So, for example, if you overwrote the Wii system software to not care about copyright protection, you could play as many burned games as you want. You could also do things like, change the way the menu looked, or even totally overwrite the OS into something more suitable to your tastes, like Linux. The PSP was perhaps most notorious for its custom firmware, which you could cheat onto the system using a memory stick, but several of our current generation systems and handhelds are still being hacked with custom firmware to this day (though it’s still a work in progress for most).

Hard Mods

Hard Mods

Yet another step up from custom firmware is the hard mod. Now you are getting into some really sketchy stuff. Hard modded consoles (most popular during the original PlayStation era) were basically opened up and their innards are fooled around with. You could do things like install faster processors, more ram, and even bigger hard drives if you wanted to. However, most hard mods were done to install a chip, or replace a chip, that would make your console stop caring about copy protection. At this point you can play any game, import, pirated copy of a game, or even run arbitrary code to your heart’s content. The only problem is, a botched hard mod meant you no longer had a working console and your console’s warranty was kaput. Since you usually got these done at sketchy places in Chinatown, they tended to not offer you a money back guarantee.

Cheat Devices

Cheat Devices

The most popular hacking tool out there was the good old Game Genie. “But wait!” you may be asking “This was just good clean fun! This had nothing to do with hacking!” Au contraire ! The Game Genie, Game Shark, Pro Action Replay, and other devices of the sort had one purpose and one purpose only, to overwrite your system’s RAM values with something else. While, yes, this could be used to give your character infinite life, It could ALSO be used to completely change the way the system ran. Don’t believe me? Did you ever have to use an “activation code” in order to get the rest of your codes to work? Do you know what that code did? It bypassed copy protection! It kept the game from crashing when it realized, “holy crap, someone is altering my RAM values without informing me about it!” You are hacking your console just to get your infinite lives cheat to work!

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