Were you ever involved? Nintendo is the only one with an active scene on the Switch since Nintendo are technology retarded with full blown custom firmware being available very early on (Recovery Mode exploit and Sleep mode (warmboot) exploit) although both have been addressed through hardware and software updates.
Sony are slightly less retarded with no known CFW for the PS4 however all models on firmware 5.05 or lower can be exploited. There is no known hack for the Xbox One.
These are a far cry from ten years ago, especially with the wii and PS3 homebrew scenes. In that era, both consoles had CFW, encryption reverse engineered and you could load all sorts of homebrew like console ID and firmware spoofers, change crucial system keys, run emulators, unban yourself from servers, attach modchips etc. Boy were those wild times. Even the original Xbox’s list of homebrew is mighty impressive.
I know, the short answer is the people at Microsoft and Sony learned a lot from the PS3/Xbox 360 era and have become very good at encryption. The way the Xbox One runs code is incredibly ingenious and complex. The machine essentially segments and locks itself off into many different “areas” depending on what you’re doing, therefore if you were to do a buffer overflow in an app’s data (eg: savegame file) there are signature checks everywhere (like in the RAM) which randomise everything so if you got “control” it’s been segregated and randomised therefore you would have garbage data. Microsoft can proudly say they’ve made the first truly “unhackable” console.
Homebrew (apart from the Switch) is dead guys. I really miss those days.
Homwbrew was neat,but it doesnt have many use cases anymore.
Oliver Sanchez
check out nesdev forums for some almost complete reversing of s/nes and gb/c
Liam Cox
I love retro consoles, but the technology for those seem like prehistoric artefacts compared to now. To me with modern consoles the killer moves are firmware updates and online distribution.
With firmware updates it’s obvious. Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo find an exploit, mandatory update.
The real headache is encryption and anything online related. DLC, digital games, etc. ALL files are encrypted and if you have an account, your console ID and YOUR ID along with the firmware are automatically uploaded no choice. Throughout the mess of proprietary files, archiving standards, etc, everything on the hard drive is keyed to the console and is an absolute pain to decrypt. Once a developer finds out a loophole, bam system update and everything’s patched. And since Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo own the OS, they control all software allowed.
Fuck me I miss the PS2 days when you could literally just rip the iso from a PC drive using imgburn (or the better dicui). Now with blu ray and online distribution, shit’s encrypted, tied to an account/console and with blu ray, the good ol copy and paste results in bad disc sectors meaning you have to bust out a wiki just to rip Ratchet and Clank Tools of Destruction.
Jack James
As you alluded to, in my opinion games are garbage in the PS3/360/PS4 era. Shine over substance
Caleb Flores
It’s a shame since homebrew is almost always associated with piracy. Deep down the devs say stuff like >I want to improve performance on my current library of games! but deep down almost everyone’s just in it for piracy. I think a lot of modern PS4 devs uphold this philosophy of anti piracy and simply don’t release anything which explains the lack of homebrew on PS4.
Jayden Smith
Just get a computer you dumb fuck
Hudson Hughes
Since the mid 00s were the dawn of hdmi and internet dependent systems, it made sense there were so many exploits. But I still like some games from the seventh gen like Demon’s Souls, Wipeout HD, hell even COD MW2 and Halo 3 were surprisingly fantastic.
Adrian Gutierrez
>I really miss those days. same
Aaron Butler
get a job so you can buy games, faggot
Luis Mitchell
There’s a reason homebrew is not as active as the 00s, it’s super fucking hard to exploit proprietary hardware + software and without exploits, no piracy and without piracy, no interest and the cycle continues.
Josiah James
I'm involved in the Switch scene. I've written a couple of projects (including gui amiibo spoofer), but I keep most of my work private because the scene is cancer and I would get ripped off by "devs" hungry for patreon bucks. Other than that I would say the Nintendo scene is pretty active as of today, but that will surely go downwards as time passes. The Switch's OS is incredibly secure (at least the parts that matter for a full takeover). The only reason we have homebrew today is because nvidia is retarded.
Jack Phillips
what if I do both?
Charles Jones
>nvidia is retarded
I’ve never owned a Nintendo Console apart from the 3DS and am surprised as to how complicated the inner workings of that was. Therefore I was very shocked when exploits were found almost days or weeks after release. The 3DS scene didn’t get good until a few years down the road.
What did Nvidia do? I don’t own a Switch and only read Nintendo homebrew stuff sometimes. I’m more of a Sony fanboy
Jose Cox
3ds and wii are the best homebrew consoles hands down. It's kind of funny how nintendo not only made the biggest homebrew device once but made the biggest homebrew device twice.
Zachary Garcia
Can you count the Switch too? The stuff posted on wololo for the Switch seems incredibly cutting edge. I don’t own a Switch so I wouldn’t know/test for myself.
Henry Wood
A lot of pajeet kode. The exploit used today is in the recovery mode part of the bootrom. Basically (if I remember correctly) you send a payload with arbitrary size which gets copied without prior bounds check. Before the payload is finished copying you send another command which makes the bootrom jump to overflown code, before bounds check is performed. From that point on you control the full system. The parts of the OS they have been involved in are infamous for being serious clusterfucks. Otherwise yes, the Switch OS is very interesting. It has a microkernel architecture, which to my knowledge is unique for consumer products. The kernel itself was adapted from the 3DS', and hasn't been exploited by anyone yet.
Evan Russell
the switch stuff is great. i've been playing skyrim with titty mods on it.
Nathaniel Phillips
>There is no known hack for the Xbox One.
While true, dev mode licenses are only $20 and are fully supported by MS. Retrix is a port of a ton of Retroarch cores so you have that. Works on every model as well.
Leo Flores
>Before the payload is finished copying you send another command which makes the bootrom jump to overflown code, before bounds check is performed. >From that point on you control the full system.
This sounds very very similar to the early days of PSP exploiting. One of the many early exploits during that time involved naming your character in the game Patapon. If you loaded too much data you overwrite different code sections of the game and you have an entrypoint. Actually that’s exactly how the Original Xbox was exploited. But the crowning jewel was in 2010 with Sony really fucked up and Failoverflow (a hacking group) used algebra to work out the PS3 private key which was conveniently also used on the PSP and PS2.
IMO this was the most Sony fucked up. With that key you could basically write your own program for the PS3, PS2 and PSP. It’s the reason why we still have a lot of boot-time exploits on these older Sony consoles.
Luis Ward
Yeah, this is a classic buffer overflow exploit. Though the "you control the full system" part wasn't exactly correct. Starting with fw revision 6.1 (iirc) Nintendo started taking advantage of the Tegra's security coprocessor (Falcon, designed by nvidia) to derive system keys. Since the chip is proprietary, you couldn't boot a modified OS anymore. However the chip got hacked (privately), so nowadays the CFW embeds a signed and encrypted payload for that processor, that will derive the keys. It's kind of a shame, because no one without that hack can actually compile a full blown CFW.
Ryan Gray
Haha yeah Switch exploiting has advanced way further than PS4. A lot of PS4 hardware (especially the GPU) simply isn’t documented and like the Switch, everything’s proprietary so the devs are either overwhelmed or can’t be bothered. Like you many devs privated their work since they don’t want to enable piracy.
A common misconception is that sonce the PS4, Xbox one run x86-64 it would be easier but holy fuck no. It’s true the Xbox runs modified versions of Windows but the key word is modified. And according to the emgen wiki now that the PS4 uses standard PC x86 instruction sets, devs ever wishing to write a PS4 emulator will have to account for ALL of the special ways the PS4 uses the modified PC like x86 instruction set and it uses all of these
