Playstation Hacks

190 Articles

Vibrating gaming chair

Gaming Chair Gives Full Body Feeling To Collisions

May 21, 2016 by 18 Comments

A PS-3 controller has an unbalanced motor inside that vibrates your hand whenever you crash a car into a wall or drive it off a cliff and hit the rocks below but [Rulof Maker] wanted that same feeling all over his body. So he added a serious unbalanced motor to his favorite gaming chair to make his whole body vibrate instead.

To do that he opened up the controller and found the wires going to the unbalanced motor. There he added a small relay, to be activated whenever the motor was energized. Wires from that relay go to a female connector mounted in the side of the controller, keeping the controller small and lightweight.

Next he needed to attach a much bigger unbalanced motor to the underside of his favorite gaming chair. For the unbalanced mass he poured concrete powder and molten lead into a tin can mold and attached the result to the motor’s shaft. Using a piece of wood he attached the motor to the chair’s underside.

All that was left was to power the motor and turn it on when needed. For that he wired up a bigger relay, with the relay’s coil wired to a male connector to plug into the PS-3 controller. Now when the PS-3 wants to vibrate, that relay is energized. All that was left was to wire the relay’s normally open switch, the motor and a power cord in series, plug it into the wall socket, and he was ready to shake.

Continue reading “Gaming Chair Gives Full Body Feeling To Collisions” →

32C3: Running Linux On The PS4

December 31, 2015 by 16 Comments

At the 2010 Chaos Communication Congress, fail0verflow (that’s a zero, not the letter O) demonstrated their jailbreak of the PS3. At the 2013 CCC, fail0verflow demonstrated console hacking on the Wii U. In the last two years, this has led to an active homebrew scene on the Wii U, and the world is a better place. A few weeks ago, fail0verflow teased something concerning the Playstation 4. While this year’s announcement is just a demonstration of running Linux on the PS4, fail0verflow can again claim their title as the best console hackers on the planet.

Despite being able to run Linux, there are still a few things the PS4 can’t do yet. The current hack does not have 3D acceleration enabled; you won’t be playing video games under Linux with a PS4 any time soon. USB doesn’t work yet, and that means the HDD on the PS4 doesn’t work either. That said, everything to turn the PS4 into a basic computer running Linux – serial port, framebuffer, HDMI encoder, Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, and the PS4 blinkenlights – is working.

Although the five-minute lightning talk didn’t go into much detail, there is enough information on their slides to show what a monumental task this was. fail0verflow changed 7443 lines in the kernel, and discovered the engineers responsible for the southbridge in the PS4 were ‘smoking some real good stuff’.

This is only fail0verflow’s announcement that Linux on the PS4 works, and the patches and bootstrap code are ‘coming soon’. Once this information is released, you’ll need to ‘Bring Your Own Exploit™’ to actually install Linux.

Video of the demo below.

Continue reading “32C3: Running Linux On The PS4” →

USB Proxy Rats Out Your Devices’ Secrets

December 23, 2015 by 19 Comments

If you need to reverse-engineer a USB protocol on a computer running Linux, your work is easy because you control everything on the target system — you can just look at the raw USB data. If you’d like to reverse-engineer a USB device that plugs into a game console, on the other hand, your work is a lot harder. Until now.

serialusb is a side-project by [Mathieu Laurendeau], alias [Matlo]. His main project, GIMX is aimed at gaming and lets you modify your gaming controller’s performance by passing it first through your PC and tweaking the USB data before forwarding it on to the target console. Want rapid fire? You got it. Alter the steering-wheel sensitivity curves? Sure.

GIMX is essentially a USB man-in-the-middle between your controller and your console, with the added ability to modify the data along the way. For hardware that’s not yet supported by GIMX, though, either [Matlo] would need to borrow your controller, or teach you to man-in-the-middle your own USB traffic. And that’s what serialusb does.

The hardware required is very modest: a USB-to-serial adapter and an ATmega32u4-based Arduino clone. Many of you could whip this together with parts on hand, and it’s the same hardware you’d need to run GIMX anyway. Data goes through your computer, is usbmon’ed and wireshark’ed, and then passed over serial to the ATmega which then converts it back into USB, plugged into the console. A very tidy little setup.

In case this seems familiar, we’ve covered a similar trick by [Matlo] before that used a BeagleBoard as the computer in the middle. That’s a sweet setup for sure, but if you don’t have a spare single-board computer lying around, now you can get it done for only around $5 in parts. Happy USB reversing!

Turning A Car Into A Playstation Controller

November 20, 2015 by 7 Comments

For a rather obscure brand advertisement, Nissan decided to turn one of their cars into a giant Playstation 4 controller to play a game of football (soccer).

The first question to pop into our heads was why? And that’s because Nissan is a major sponsor of UEFA Champions League. From there, it became why not? We love the companies that get their hands dirty on a hacking level, and actually do something instead of just funneling money into your standard billboard advertising — it’s just more fun this way.

The second question you should be asking yourself is how do you play soccer using a car? Well, it’s pretty simple. Steering is your left and right controls, the indicator switch is forward and backward, the windshield wipers kick the ball, a steering wheel button lets you run faster, the brake pedal passes the ball, and the gas pedal shoots. Simple right? As one of the prototype testers describes:

It’s kinda like tapping your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time, it really messes your head up — but it’s really enjoyable when you get it right.

Continue reading “Turning A Car Into A Playstation Controller” →

ps3 eyetoy

PS3 Eye Lives Again Thanks To Low Prices

May 20, 2015 by 28 Comments

[Henry Tonoyan] has started getting into OpenCV and digital control system projects. He needed a decent webcam that could do higher than standard frame rates. As it turns out, the PS3 Eye is actually a pretty capable little camera. Now that it’s kind of obsolete, you can have it for as little as $7 from places like Amazon!

The PS3 Eye has a standard USB interface, and after messing around with it a bit in Linux, [Henry] was able to adjust the frame rate settings for his application. He’s using a library called video for Linux with an application called qv4L2. It’s capable of 60fps at VGA, which we admit isn’t amazing, but at $7, we can’t complain — if you drop down to QVGA (320×240) you can go up to 120fps.

From there you can play around in OpenCV to your heart’s content.

Seeing as the Eye has been out for over 7 years now, it has been used in quite a few hacks since then. From an actual eyeball tracker (seriously), to an interactive projection globe with touch tracking to even a physical tower defense game.

PS4 NES

Add Extra Storage To Your PS4 With Retro Flair

February 5, 2015 by 14 Comments

[Frank] came up with a clever way to extend the storage of his PS4. He’s managed to store his digital PS4 games inside of storage devices in the shape of classic NES cartridges. It’s a relatively simple hack on the technical side of things, but the result is a fun and interesting way to store your digital games.

He started out by designing his own 3D model of the NES cartridge. He then printed the cartridge on his Ultimaker 3D printer. The final print is a very good quality replica of the old style cartridge. The trick of this build is that each cartridge actually contains a 2.5″ hard drive. [Frank] can store each game on a separate drive, placing each one in a separate cartridge. He then prints his own 80’s style labels for these current generation games. You would have a hard time noticing that these games are not classic NES games at first glance.

Storing the game in cartridge form is one thing, but reading them into the PS4 is another. The trick is to use a SATA connector attached to the PS4’s motherboard. [Frank’s] project page makes it sound like he was able to plug the SATA cable in without opening the PS4, by attaching the connector to a Popsicle stick and then using that to reach in and plug the connector in place. The other end of the SATA cable goes into a custom 3D printed housing that fits the fake NES cartridges. This housing is attached to the side of the PS4 using machine screws.

Now [Frank] can just slide the cartridge of his choice into the slot and the PS4 instantly reads it. In an age where we try to cram more and more bits into smaller and smaller places, this may not be the most practical build. But sometimes hacking isn’t about being practical. Sometimes it’s simply about having fun. This project is a perfect example. Continue reading “Add Extra Storage To Your PS4 With Retro Flair” →

College Researcher Makes Supercomputer From 420 PS3s

December 28, 2014 by 64 Comments

Noting that funding for science has run dry for many researchers, [Gaurav] has built a supercomputer from 200 Playstation 3 consoles housed and chilled inside an old refrigerated shipping trailer. His mission at UMass Dartmouth from the National Science Foundation is simulating black hole collisions with an eye on learning something about gravitational waves.

Dr. [Gaurav Khanna] is no stranger to using PS3 supercomputers to do meaningful science. Seven years ago he proposed a 16-PS3 supercomputer running Linux and managed to convince Sony to donate four consoles. The university kicked in funding for another 8 and [Gaurav] ponied up for the last four out of his own pocket. He dubbed it the “PS3 Gravity Grid” and received international attention for the cluster. For equivalent performance, it cost him only 10% the price of a real supercomputer. This led to published papers on both hacked supercomputers and gravity waves. But that rig is looking a little old today. Enter the Air Force.

Dr. [Khanna] was not the only one using PS3s to crunch data – back in 2010 the US Air Force built the “Condor Cluster” of 1,760 PS3s to perform radar imaging of entire cities and do neuromorphic AI research. With their hardware now expired, the Air Force donated 200 of the PS3s to [Gaurav] for his new build. Now that he has wired them up, the Air Force is donating another 220 for a not-snicker-proofed total of 420.

For those sceptical that the now 8-year-old hardware is still cost-effective, even with free consoles it is marginal. RAM is an issue and modern graphics cards are each equivalent to 20 PS3s. Ever the popular target these days, Sony has the PS4 OS locked down from the get go – thanks Sony. The next cluster planned will be with PCs and graphics cards. For now, [Gaurav] has plenty of calculations that need crunching and a queue of colleagues have formed behind him.