NOTICE: I am in no way advocating piracy, or even mentioning piracy beyond this notice. This is not a backup discussion thread. You can seriously find about a million of those in other places. Don't discuss them here. Thanks!

So, this is rather late but I didn't see a thread about it before. For those of you who don't know, the PS3 root key was recently released by the "hacker" Geohot. (Not linking to it for obvious reasons).

This essentially means that people can now jailbreak their PS3s and sign their own code, allowing things such as emulators, regional free blu-ray playing, alternative OS running, (and yes, backup games which shall not be mentioned beyond this).

This is pretty big news, because in the past it really wasn't possible. The closest thing was PS3Jailbreak (and the resulting spinoffs), which was a USB stick that allowed you to turn your PS3 in a devkit, allowing the running of unsigned code.

Sony patched this pretty quickly with a firmware update, and only people happy to play old games could use the jailbreak. With this release, Pandora's box is open, and it ain't closing with a hardware refresh.

It's also remarkably easy to do. Anyone who's ever had any experience in jailbreaking xbox 360's knows just how much of a pain that shit is. It's often hardware dependent, meaning it just won't work.

Now, all you need is a thumb drive and some common sense to do it. I've already jailbroken mine, and have had some fun playing around with older emulators.

Anyone else tried it yet? Results?

 

I actually hadn't heard of this, but damn that sucks for legit owners. Now they won't be able to enjoy the two dozen or so games exclusively on that system worth playing =P Supposedly it'll let people hack their asses off on PSN, which is pretty nasty unless you're doing it too.

I just read how to do this, it's pretty simple, awesome. I wonder if they've progressed anymore on the 360 hackage, the last time I looked into modchips for that, they required extensive soldering, and considering my xbox has bricked twice, I don't want to void the warranty. Xbox Live can and does ban you from using Live if they detect you have a modified system, but hell I don't use live for anything other then Kinect video chat and RockBand DLC, so I might have to crack my 360.

I'll say this though, freeing your console is awesome. We still use the original Xbox because of that. I got a Xenium modchip in that, like 100 xbox games, something like 1k+ emulator games NES/GB/GBA/Sega, 3K+ music and video files.

 

Back when I still modified xbox 360s on my campus (made a decent chunk of change doing it), it wasn't nearly as bad as it used to be. For a bunch of models, you could take the HDD and connect it to your PC using an external enclosure, then install the JB. I don't know how far it's gone, this was early last year mind you.

Original xbox was awesome as well. I remember a friend of mine's dad had his modchipped. There were mods for the original halo which added in Starwars vehicles, weapons, tons of stuff.

 

Looking into it, it's a lot of just flashing your drive now. What about the games that require updating to play? Like damned near every game I've gotten lately needs to connect to download an update when I try to start it, can you still update the game from Xbox if you're Live banned?

 

I don't believe so, no. However most of these games only require an update if they detect an internet connect. Keep your 360 offline while it's JBed, so it doesn't get live banned. I believe you can download updates on your PC and transfer via USB, but I'm not quite sure. That may have changed.

Edit: Just an FYI for anyone trying to jailbreak your PS3. Make sure your flash drive is formatted to FAT32. I had mine in NTFS and couldn't figure out why the damn thing wouldn't read my updates.

 

It's definitely a pain in the ass. I dragged one of my 1TB WD drives out, and had to transfer almost the full contents to my network backup so I could format without data loss. 1TB transfer takes time, even over eSata -.-.

 

What format are the PS3 games in? If it's isos, the Fat32 thing would get in the way, since that only supports files up to 4GB...

 

Update: there's really been a blitz in releases during the past few days. The gist of it is, basically backups can now pretty much be played without fiddling around (which in the past required either downloading peoples custom signed eboot files, or signing your own).

If you are interested in this however, I would highly suggest you wait a week or so before actually using the new custom firmware beyond Geohots release. Unfortunately with such fast development, you end up with very little testing (ironically quite a bit like The Scene, only with much worse consequences), and many of these releases are either unstable or just plain unsafe. There have been reports of permanent bricking on many PS3s with one release, though a second seems to be fairly safe.

Either way, there's really no reason to use the new firmware right now in any case. It'll probably take a day or so before backup managers are released that work, and a few more before they're stable enough to be trusted. Give it a week so you don't end up with a paperweight where your PS3 used to be.

 

Rply to my PM before I keel u John

 

I replied to your PM before I replied to the thread .

 

I didnt get it

 

Resent

/filler

 

Wth I still didnt get anything, lemee resent something to you

 

I got your message, replied again.

Also {google it or irc it} an easy to follow guide to JB your PS3 with additional abilities not found in basic Geohot. I'm not quite sure how the rules fall on this one, so if an admin disapproves, delete the post please.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DO NOT USE WANINKOKO'S METHOD!

It may seem simpler, but it bricks almost every fat PS3, and many slims. It's seriously the simplest form of hack around, pretty much just cramming in Geohot & the original 3.1 jailbreak into one package. The guy is a hack well known for bricking many a Wii in the early days of softmodding.

Editz:

I may or may not have tested this recently, and no it's not in iso format. It seems that the games come as essentially installed (looks like a windows game install directory actually). I was extracting a 14gb compress file, and started wondering why the fuck a 14gb file was taking 20 minutes to extract. Found out it was actually extracting several thousand smaller files.

 

Son of a bitch, still didnt get anything, something's wrong with my pms =/

 

Is your inbox too full maybe? If all else fails, blame Raven

 

Maybe it's an admin thing

Back on topic, this is the first time I've considered buying PS3.

If I can't write an app for it (and linux didn't really count), I'm not buying it.

 

Try and send me one please, I just tried from another normal user account and it didnt go through. I deleted a ton of PMs, box has 106 in it atm, but I've had way over that before and was still getting them