HDD OSD for non US/JPN consoles.

[l_oliveira]

An respectable member of the homebrewn development community made this possible and would like to share:















Due to copyright issues related to the code modified by this hack, the developer who decrypted and patched it prefers to remain anonymous.

The program is launched from a single 3.7mb elf file and graphics/sound assets are located at the proper place on the hard drive.

Also, it requires the drive to be initialized properly on APA format before it's usable.

[yoshi314]

you might consider making a xdelta against the original encrypted elf - it would be the most sane way out of the problem with uploading the file.

right now it's probablty illegal to post the modified binary.

[loki7777]

so this way we could get the ability to save on hdd(non sony hdd)?
when or where it will be available

[yoshi314]

so this way we could get the ability to save on hdd(non sony hdd)?
when or where it will be available

no, each game would have to support it separately. only a handful of games supported hdd savegames.

[l_oliveira]

In fact just hacking (anyway involves modifying the game) the game memory card drivers would allow for this. It's one of the things the former HD Project was up to. It should be possible to patch the drivers to write to a folver/directory on the HDD instead of using an memory card FS image, but then for that would need to borrow SONY SDK libraries, which cause copyright issues. That's why coders tried to stick to the memory card image concept.

This stuff is up for grabs but no link on the forum due to copyright issues.

This is required to installing this hacked OSD and them people might like it for other things too:

ule_440h_hacked.elf

- PS2DSK ps2hdd.irx patched to allow access for password locked partitions. (This gives access to "__system" on drives formatted with SONY utility disc. Honestly I think people at PS2dev are afraid of SONY )
- Creates and deletes any kind of partitions except "__" (system related partitions)
partitions. No more "only creates partitions with + before the name". (Cannot delete system partitions due to artificial restrictions imposed by PS2SDK HDD modules. More useless PS2DEV restrictions stuff. )
- Renames *ANY* partitions exeption being "__MBR". *Use this with care.*. Rename anything from "__xxx" to something else and you will be able to delete it.
- Acess for the "__contents" APA partition on PSBBN.
- Other minor limits removed.

Minor issue:
An small error with the name parsing code on the rename function cause the 1st character to be omitted from the original name automatically pasted on the rename window (just type the new name and ignore the old.)

THIS IS DANGEROUS SOFTWARE if you don't know what you're doing. MASSIVE DATA LOSS MAY OCCUR IF MISUSED

[urbigbro]

In fact just hacking (anyway involves modifying the game) the game memory card drivers would allow for this. It's one of the things the former HD Project was up to. It should be possible to patch the drivers to write to a folver/directory on the HDD instead of using an memory card FS image, but then for that would need to borrow SONY SDK libraries, which cause copyright issues. That's why coders tried to stick to the memory card image concept.

This stuff is up for grabs but no link on the forum due to copyright issues.

This is required to installing this hacked OSD and them people might like it for other things too:

ule_440h_hacked.elf

- PS2DSK ps2hdd.irx patched to allow access for password locked partitions. (This gives access to "__system" on drives formatted with SONY utility disc. Honestly I think people at PS2dev are afraid of SONY )
- Creates and deletes any kind of partitions except "__" (system related partitions)
partitions. No more "only creates partitions with + before the name". (Cannot delete system partitions due to artificial restrictions imposed by PS2SDK HDD modules. More useless PS2DEV restrictions stuff. )

Is there an option to copy the non + before the name partitions to USB?
This would be awesome for backing up the partition that Codebreaker creates for storing saves.
I'm sure dlanor would love to have that feature


Edit1:

I have messed around with HDD OSD, and it works fine, but all I can see that it does on my console is to add some more information to the save management part of the browser, and let me look at and delete PS2 game partitions. I can't copy any saves to the HDD in the save browser.

Edit2:

Oops! I didn't create any folders on the HDD to copy to. Doh! After I did that I could transfer saves to the HDD Sweet!


Is it possible to play those few games that were released in Japan that were BBN download only games? Of course they probably won't work outside of Japan anyway.

Do you or your friend plan on writing a tutorial on how to modify a game to work with saving to the HDD?

I would image this method will have higher compatibility with games than the VMC homebrew.

Do you also happen to know of a list of games that natively support HDD saving apart from FF11?


Thanks for sharing all this cool info and modified homebrew.

[l_oliveira]

Is there an option to copy the non + before the name partitions to USB?
This would be awesome for backing up the partition that Codebreaker creates for storing saves.

The official HDD OSD does not support anything related to USB mass storage. Please consider using uLE for that.
The HDD OSD does support HID devices (USB Keyboard and Mouse) though.

On my youtube channel I have shown some "hacked" and bootable partitions that can be used to launch uLE from the HDD OSD. They're usable on official drives as like if it was FMCB and on this hacked HDD OSD it would give you the option to return to homebrewn. I thought of working something related with this and FMCB but then anyone who asks around for FMCB sources are instantly branded as cheating bastard, thief or rascal who is going to make and sell custom branded softmods...

http://www.youtube.com/user/leonardoliveira <- the videos

This only works as FMCB replacement for people who own an official HDD. People with normal HDDs can use FMCB to launch the HDD OSD.

It won't work on 10k consoles because of the same old ROM issues that hinders homebrewn. SONY uses the MC boot mechanism on these machines to temporarily update the bios and kernel on the system RAM.

Is it possible to play those few games that were released in Japan that were BBN download only games? Of course they probably won't work outside of Japan anyway.

No it's not because of a lot of reasons:
They contain an Magic Gate encrypted elf (KELF) which does extra region checks, security checks, HDD checks and then after all that passed it still reads the HDD and Console S/N numbers to unlock the RSA BSAFE encrypted SLPS/SCPS file which launch the game. DNAS at it's best... lol

Do you or your friend plan on writing a tutorial on how to modify a game to work with saving to the HDD?

No I don't. I'm not a game hacker myself. I would not mind helping people who know what they're doing, though.

I would image this method will have higher compatibility with games than the VMC homebrew.

Yes, very likely to, but then, it would add new issues, including memory limitations on the games. Imagine you changing a game to play from DVD emulation and using custom memory card drivers that make it access a folder into an APA partition. That has a memory cost and some games may not fit on the ram with so many patches. D:

Do you also happen to know of a list of games that natively support HDD saving apart from FF11?

FF11 support saving to the HDD ? I didn't knew that. The Japanese version of Xenosaga episode1 does. And I played it, so I saw it for real.

Thanks for sharing all this cool info and modified homebrew.

You're welcome. Most credit goes to the anonymous hacker who did the job, though. I just decrypted the OSD MG files and sent him as he can't do it himself (he's on a PAL region so he can't use his PS2 to decrypt US files)

[yoshi314]

DD checks and then after all that passed it still reads the HDD and Console S/N numbers to unlock the RSA BSAFE encrypted SLPS/SCPS file which launch the game.

and here i was thinking sony was taking it easy with ps2

[urbigbro]

The official HDD OSD does not support anything related to USB mass storage. Please consider using uLE for that.
The HDD OSD does support HID devices (USB Keyboard and Mouse) though.

On my youtube channel I have shown some "hacked" and bootable partitions that can be used to launch uLE from the HDD OSD. They're usable on official drives as like if it was FMCB and on this hacked HDD OSD it would give you the option to return to homebrewn. I thought of working something related with this and FMCB but then anyone who asks around for FMCB sources are instantly branded as cheating bastard, thief or rascal who is going to make and sell custom branded softmods...

http://www.youtube.com/user/leonardoliveira <- the videos

This only works as FMCB replacement for people who own an official HDD. People with normal HDDs can use FMCB to launch the HDD OSD.

The sources for v 1.6 and 1.7 were available at one time, so it's not like there is nothing to learn from.
Booting from the HDD isn't super important, but would be cool to do even without a Official Sony HDD.
Perhaps your hacker friend could make a FMCB that only boots from HDD from the already released 1.6 or 1.7 sources. I know that the memory space needed for HDD booting is much bigger than the current size of both MC and USB booting.

Due to the inherent faster random access speed of flash over HDDs, USB booting of FMCB is likely to always be faster than an internal HDD, unless of course that HDD is an SSD.

No I don't. I'm not a game hacker myself. I would not mind helping people who know what they're doing, though.

There are plenty of people here that can help with that part including myself.
console exploits already has a tutorial on rebuilding games for VMC support when run from HDD.

Yes, very likely to, but then, it would add new issues, including memory limitations on the games. Imagine you changing a game to play from DVD emulation and using custom memory card drivers that make it access a folder into an APA partition. That has a memory cost and some games may not fit on the ram with so many patches. D:

This is likely to be true, but hopefully we can see how $ony gets around that issue in the games that do support it.


From my initial using of the HDD OSD it seems the most useful part of this is the addition of option to copy saves from MC to HDD via the familiar $ony browser. (I use uLE as it is faster and I don't need a GUI.)
You may want to update the first post with some more info on how that is accomplished, i.e.

1. create a folder on the HDD via the options menu
2. copy save from MC to HDD via copy or move command in options menu in MC browser.

A few more questions I had while experimenting with this.

1. The HDD browser lets you see all the partitions for each game, but gives an error if you try to launch the game. If you have the original game in the drive, will the game then boot from a non-$ony drive? (All my PS2 lasers are dead, so I can't test this)
*What about games that have HDD support in the Japanese version but not the US/PAL version like Street Fighter Alpha Anthology?
*Can the games be run this way if you have a Official $ony HDD?

2. Can homebrew be put in one of the HDD folders and launched from there, or are there some modifications to the files, or certain directories where homebrew need to be put?

3. I've been looking for a way to move my codebreaker partition that has all my codes in it to a new HDD with all the codes intact. Could this tool theoretically be used to copy said partition to an appropriately sized VMC MC?
I believe dlanor said that the CB partition is different than other PS2 partitions, thus no version of uLE can do this yet, since the differences are not known.

Thanks again for showing us this cool stuff.

[fresh]

Hi!

I am in the need for a little hint:
V7 with dms4pro, bb-adapter and non sony-hdd.

I used WinHIIP_V1.7.6 to format the drive and configured spaces for __system, __common etc. pp. ...

With the ULE 4.40h patched i don´t see any of the system partitions...


Thanks alot!


Rgds.