SDK

Discuss the development of software, tools, libraries and anything else that helps make ps2dev happen.

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Gordon Freeman
Posts: 3
Joined: Sun Jul 10, 2005 9:07 am

SDK

Post by Gordon Freeman »

excuse me,but how you guys buit your own unofficial PS2 SDK withouth the console technical specification? for building an sdk you first had to discover the machine internals,how did you do it ?
rinco
Posts: 255
Joined: Fri Jan 21, 2005 2:12 pm
Location: Canberra, Australia

Post by rinco »

A quick and dirty overview would go like this:

- The psp package format (pbp) was dissected for months earlier this year.
- It was discovered that the relocation technique used by prx (psp executable) is similar to irx (ps2 iop executable), through identifiers known as nids.
- The psp primary cpu (allegrex) is mips and mips architectures are well documented.
- Official function names can be found in commercial binaries and generating the nids is straightforward. Also, many function names have been found by using by brute force dictionary attacks against lists of extracted nids.

edit: and i'm sure ps2 was very similar
pixel
Posts: 791
Joined: Fri Jan 30, 2004 11:43 pm

Post by pixel »

Heh.

Two big pits to know about ps2:

-) the linux kit provides lots of informations about the machine
-) lots of games (and even some parts of the bios I guess) have debug symbols in.
pixel: A mischievous magical spirit associated with screen displays. The computer industry has frequently borrowed from mythology. Witness the sprites in computer graphics, the demons in artificial intelligence and the trolls in the marketing department.
Gordon Freeman
Posts: 3
Joined: Sun Jul 10, 2005 9:07 am

Post by Gordon Freeman »

ok you read the debug symbols for finding out what are the function names and their respective addresses...but how did you know in which format they are stored debug symbols in the ps2 executables?

...and the format of ps2 executables itself,that surely is not PE like the Windows' one
pixel
Posts: 791
Joined: Fri Jan 30, 2004 11:43 pm

Post by pixel »

ELFs.
pixel: A mischievous magical spirit associated with screen displays. The computer industry has frequently borrowed from mythology. Witness the sprites in computer graphics, the demons in artificial intelligence and the trolls in the marketing department.
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