The Sony SDK is really made for game development and the stuff given there is also 100% directed to that. It’s nice to have or nice to read but not a must have at all for anyone who is not a licensed developer. If you are a homebrew kind of guy, you might want to have a look for curiousity. Otherwise you should give PS1Light a go.

There have been many leaks in the past, but most of them were not even useable. The recent 3.60 leak which occured after some drama in the scene is most likely the best one. If you are starting of with it, the docs will guide you the way. Don’t worry, real licenses don’t get much more info either.

Edit: If you are really now looking for it, try to google. Sorry but since I don’t support piracy and I can’t give links to a downlaod here.

The most interesting thing about Playstation 3 TOOL and TEST devices might be the ability to run unsigned code. You can even write code with Visual Studio and push it via the famous sn tools target manager (TM) to the device. The problem is, this code is caged inside a hypervisor which you cannot escape from unless you got a exploit to do so. These exploits are hard to find and write and before you can actually go of with that you should learn the basics of PS3 development. You can get yourself the leaked 3.60 sdk i.e. and start of with some homebrew, or write a little game to find out more about the plattform.

There are a few more things TEST and TOOL can do, but unless you own a TOOL, the debug facilitys are not interesting to you. Don’t think you can hack with the debugger as well, it’s pretty much limited to the game you are working on or better said the process you spawned via target manager.

One of the other few outstanding features is maybe the ability to change the enviorment. There are serval PSN enviorments other than the retail (NP) one you can access from your retial console. The most outstanding is most likely the SP-INT one. Sadly this one got locked down to the bone after a custom firmware named Rebug was released, which incooperated the Debug firmwares extracted XMB (main GUI) with the debug features and people used the testing features to virtualy rob the PSN store and stole tons of games. So it became useless for most people now unless they got a whitelisted IP.

Before Firmware 3.60, it was also possible to connect to other PSN testing enviorments too, this is now completly locked out on TEST device, they just will accept the few ones which usale press and testers are allowed to go. As well a effect of the Rebug drama.

There are quite some more features inside the debug menu, but most of them are nothing you should try out in first place. Most of them are for performing certain QA test cases or similar, nothing really needed for hacking.

If you are looking into PS3 development, you most likely heard of scedev.net. Scedev is the developer plattform by Sony which gives approved and licensed developer access to SDK downloads, Updates and Documentation. A lot of people would really kill for access to this, but tbh, most of the content which is available via scedev leaked anyways and it is not that great for PS3 hacking than you might think. The really important parts of the hardware documentation are not even given to licensed developers since they are usally not really needed. You will have much more gain from reading the IBM CELL SDK docs, especially the EXTRA ones from the second disc (Security SDK) than from anything you find in here.

If you are just interested in how it looks like from the inside, than you might want to google for the leaked scedev src which was published by a group called lulzsec a while ago. It at least gives you a bit of inside view of something you most likely will hardly see from the inside. For everyone else it got even harder firewalled now. No luck, sorry.

The TEST devices are sold to game studios for QA testing their games, MINI developers to test their game on PS3 and press contacts to check out review discs or beta code sent to them by publishers. TOOLs are only loaned and thats why you wil hardly get one unless it was stolen somewhere. If you want such a device you really need to check out special places like the assembler games forum.

Sony is selling test units at prices around 700 Eur in the SCEE area. There is no definate price since Sony can give iinterested studios huge discounts if they want their idea on the plattform. Thats totaly up to the business skills of the studio.

Before you now think “hey let’s just apply to sony as a developer and get one the straight way”, that’s really not easy. It’s not like the iOS developing program or anything similar. To get accepted into the PS3 Program you need to be a big studio or got very definate plans for a title before they will even think of talking to you.

Well, even if the sticker on your TEST says it’s a debugging unit, it’s more for testing than real debugging. Sony has a long history since PS1 of calling their development testing devices “debugging unit” but they aren’t really. If you are developing games for PS3 you will get another device named TOOL, these TOOL units got double RAM which is needed to run the debugging agent properly and a control panel to manage the device. There are two of these TOOL devices these days, the cheap DECR-1400 and the older DECR-1000 devices. The 1000 are the better ones if you are into hacking, the 1400 is a “cheaper” version now sold to dvelopers by Sony. They look completly like TEST phat units but have 2 network connector ports and TOOL written on the front.

There is also a third type, the Prototypes. These were PS3 units send to press and studios before the PS3 was offically released. They are basicly the same as Ps3 TEST units. The biggest difference is the transluscent plastic used for the case and the sticker on the back telling that it is a proto unit. A picture of that sticker can be seen below. The Type Number is DEH-H1000AS-E or DEH-H1000AS-ES. The only difference is that ES units don’t have TEST written on front. I still assume that these were used for shows or something. Technical, they are identical.

Many of you who are interested in PS3 hacking proberly heard of the famous PS3 TEST Units. The cost around 600 $, got a TEST marking on the fornt (the phat ones at least) and can be obtained via various sources on the net. But what are these units, what can they exayctly do and what benefit do the give to you? I will try to cover some of the most important infos about them in a few articles I am going to publish here. I hope this will help some of you to understand these machines better.

Many people asked why I don’t just blog some random scene news like the big news site do. Well, if you read them for a certain amoutn of time you notice the scene is pretty borken in a lot of ways. Every time a Debug firmware leaks, people are screaming “this will lead to finding new keys?”. I guess the main reason why is cause most people are not familiar with the technical details and there are a lot of youngsters out there who are even missing the technical knowledge about the topics. Thats why I write this stuff and try to fill the gap a bit. I don’t think it will lead to a better scene or anyhting but maybe I can pass some solid infos to a few people to understand better how certain things work.

If you are really interested in console hacking, the first thing you should do is stop reading news sites. Most of them are poorly informed and just bragging news which aren’t any. Belive me, it’s worth it.

If you asked yourself how to compile the latest ps3tools for OSX (if you want to use MFWBuilder or something) here is the trick:

Run the commands as follow, you see the error “configure.ac:8: error: possibly undefined macro: AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE”, aclocal will fix that.

autoconf
aclocal
autoconf

But still:

configure: error: cannot find install-sh, install.sh, or shtool in “.” “./..” “./../..”

So whats next? Do the following:

autoreconf -f -i -Wall,no-obsolete


Now run “make” as usale. You are done!