the new psp game wipeout pure apparantly comes with a full featured web browser that is used to download updates.  normally it’s restricted for that purpose alone, but roto sent me a line this morning saying that it could be hacked to function as a general web browser with a little dns trickery.

just point the psp to a nameserver that you can control, make a dns entry for ingame.scea.com to go to your own webserver, and stick a /wipeout/index.html there.  when you hit download in wipeout, it will load up your custom page!

i’m told the browser supports javascript, so it wouldn’t be too hard to code up a quick address bar along with links to google, and (of course) your favorite site.

(thanks yuppicide for the link to the working mirror.  the author’s url is here but it’s currently down.)

update: just received some more detailed info from roto.  continue reading for more information.

from roto’s email:

Also here’s a summary of what I did (taken from the forum post):

Wipeout Pure for PSP has a feature that lets you access updated content online (such as grabbing new textures or levels). This little feature has been reversed and “exploited” to our benefit. Note I am NOT the first person to do this, nor have I ever claimed to be. I did however figure this out on my own (as did the 4 or so other people who’s links you can find on the forum posts).

Anyway, accessing the “Download” section in Wipeout brings us to a hidden but full-featured web browser which at this time is obscured by a “Coming Soon” logo from SCEA’s webservers.

Taking the access requests apart I figured out (like many other people did) that this can be exploited by simple “spoofing”

The way I loaded up my own “page” is by setting up my FreeBSD machine with some DNS entries that point ingame.scea.com and webcluster.scea.com and all NS’s for scea.com to my internal LAN machine. I also created some files for Apache to serve. So then I changed the PSP’s NameServer settings to point to the server on my local LAN (FreeBSD machine). When the Wipeout client accesses http://ingame.scea.com/wipeout/index.html it gets my LOCAL file because of the DNS mapping.  It’s all pretty simple after that. I made a static page with a bunch of spring-board (or portal-like I guess) links to access from the PSP. When you select “Go to home page” by pressing start it returns you to the portal site (index.html). So thats an easy way back.

While browsing, you can enter input (we googled stuff!), when you enter a textbox and press X the PSP pops up the Keyboard API (remember there’s alot of API to be taken advantage of with the PSP). After that its as simple as any other input on the PSP.

Browsing is simple enough, up and down to move from link to link. D-Pad only though. Also there is no cursor anywhere, and no title-bars. If there is no link in the nearest vicinity, the PSP just scrolls the page (awesome). Entering links is X, refresh page is []. Again entering text into boxes pops up the API.

JavaScript works (Again API for Alert boxes, NEAT feature…my friend MomDad gave me a scare with a “PANIC!” joke which turned out to be PSP’s Dialog box API kicking in), Java is yet to be tested. Frames don’t work. Large pictures are to be tested too. Uhm I think thats it for now. Most of HTML works (no H1’s and stuff). Background colors and pics etc work fine.

I’m attaching a huge HackADay pic just for you :) Love your site.

aww, shucks.  thanks roto!

• permalink