forums.ps2dev.org

How can I access erom0?

Since these are development forums I have to ask what do you need to access erom0 for? There's nothing development related in there.

If it's region-free nonsense then it definitely has no place here.

Seriously, when did sharing info on (pretty) simple stuff like this become 'only on a need to know basis'?

If he wants to extract the dvd player, then what the heck..

Or should this forum be all clean from all reverse engineering discussions? It'd be sad if so.. If not, where do we draw the line? What is allowed?

http://forums.ps2dev.org/viewtopic.php?t=21

Specifically, Oobles' post. The line is drawn when someone is asking for information used to crack or circumvent copyright/region protection. All the guy has to do is let us know why he wants access to erom0, I don't think that's an unreasonable question :). Besides, as you say it's simple, and actually, the information to do it is already online.

[EDIT] The last bit of that above para is to say that he can figure it out without our help, very easily.

Oh, the forum rules are pretty clear on this also:
http://forums.ps2dev.org/viewtopic.php?t=17

mrbrown wrote:Oh, the forum rules are pretty clear on this also:
http://forums.ps2dev.org/viewtopic.php?t=17

"Sorry, but only moderators can read topics in this forum."

Quite clear, yeah :D

Hmm, I dunno why it's like that, but here's the entire text from "The Offical Rules Of The Forums":

ooPo wrote:*** This is a work in progress at the moment. ***

1) Any question, asked by any person, is allowed as long as it doesn't involve asking for information about illegal/questionable activities such as modchip development or copyright circumvention. These forums exist to create a shared information archive - we don't want to exclude anyone who is willing to share.

2) Flames will be deleted on sight. For the pedantic among us, a flame is any comment that may be considered insulting while containing no useful information other than that flame. You can take a small jab at someone, but make sure its backed up with substance. Like a memory map or something.

*** More to come... ***

[/quote]

I was also curious on how to access the dvdplayer in the early beginning, only because I just couldn't find it in rom0 and wondered where it was. I was never interested in region free stuff though (even if code for such things were already available at the time)

"How can I access erom0?" is imho a generic enough question to be answered here without a 'trial' (in fact I think it's a good example/introduction to some of the PS2 concepts).

We could at least provide hints (adddrv) ;)

mrbrown wrote:Hmm, I dunno why it's like that, but here's the entire text from "The Offical Rules Of The Forums":

Actually, it seems the whole "Announcement" forum is locked read/write. It was not like that before....


Anyway, for the original topic problem: a friend of mine also wanted to get this dvd player, for a "simple" reason: he wrote some DVD player code for the PS2, but it was then only working with non CSS protected DVDs. So, he wanted to find the way to exchange keys with the DVD reader, like any other (PC) player would do. Well, he couldn't find the right syscalls/functions/methods/whatever, so as far as I know, he just used the good old brute force DeCSS thingy.

So, yeah, maybe any questions regarding this player could be considered as "quite not legal" :-P

whoops! :)

pukko wrote:We could at least provide hints (adddrv) ;)

You are thinking about rom1, not erom0. erom0 cannot be accessed trivially (through adddrv), like rom1 can. I guess you could argue that because erom0 sits inside of rom1 they are the same, but there is definitely a non-trivial way to access the contents of erom0, which I don't think should be trivially revealed :).

mrbrown: Just sain the first step to get access to erom is to load adddrv :P

At least the way i do it (rom1 driver + erom driver). Dunno how you do it though (see this is basically what my point is, we all find out stuff that we never really share..) Guess I'm just in a "information wants to be free" lame type of mode atm ;P

As for the "all questions on how to access the dvdplayer is warez", imho, that can be applied to almost every part of the ps2 that's not related to the GS.. I do agree that specific warez questions should be asked somewhere else, but imo the original thread question isnt one of those.

You're right pukko ... and that's the sound of me shutting up.

I think you've all jumped the gun a bit here. Brown was right to ask the reason for needing info on erom. Maybe the way he asked was a little harsher than necessary(just barely, if so). But it was the rest of you that turned it into a debate. :P Yes, there are cases where the DVD player/etc could be used for "legit" purposes, however they're few. So his being on guard is certainly justified in that sense. And the fact that such info can be gotten easily enough with a bit of research, rather than just "going straight for the goods" usually means that the person asking isn't interrested in learning, just interrested in the end result(such as hax0ring the DVD player).

Everyone is too eager to get into a debate over these things, be it to suppress information or defend it. I think regional encoding is stupid, and since you can simply burn a DVD-R of a movie with no regional encoding and play it on an unmodified PS2, having regional protection for movies is doubly stupid on PS2. However I agree that this(region-free) is not a topic conductive to the overall good of ps2dev and if you had all just STFU and let the guy answer Brown's question, the poster could have given his reasons and been answered accordingly. :wink: I don't mean to lecture, it's just that it seems like alot of time, energy and bandwidth is wasted on debates that never need occur.

P.S. the fact that this was "snipper"'s (interresting name, perhaps something to do with the "Sniper" modchip?) first and only post, it's all the more likely that this guy was only interrested in getting ps2dev to help him crax0r DVD player for "nefarious" purposes. :?

I must say I agree with Herben.

I too think DVD region coding is evil, but no matter how passionate
one might feel about the topic, that issue is of little bearing on ps2dev
development efforts. There are many ways to get around region
coding without modchipping or looking at ps2 internals.

What other reasons might there be to look into erom0 ? I wouldn't
know myself, since I had no idea before anything was there. It
could be to make use of the dvdplayer code for playback, but the
effort involved one can guess would be easier and better spent
writing one's own playback software.

One more thing I noticed, about people just posting quick
one-liner messages "Where is, how do i...?" without supplying
any context, this is happening alot more lately. It seems alot
of newbs are discovering this site. Not a bad thing for ps2dev
efforts in having more people interested, but it is a group of
people not looking around at available resources first and looking
for quicky answers. Has ps2dev now grown big enough to be
attracting a less serious crowd ?

Hm, well..

Even if the dude was trying to make a region free tool, finding out how to access erom isn't really the most difficult part.. And there are so many different region free tools (and source) out there already, and has been for years now, (also, 'real' dvd players goes for $50 here) that it's hard to be bothered if someone tries to do another one. That doesn't mean I'd make a step by step instruction on how do it though (in fact, I've never tried to so I really don't know) :P

Guess it's all about where to draw the line in some sense.. I don't think rom1 & erom is some kind of secret that needs to be well kept (even though it's pretty uninteresting), but that questions about region free dvd does not belong here.

Oh well, I'll just tristate my opinion in this matter (which sadly reminds me that I must look over that sio thingy again).

Can I store family photos on the erom? Can I email it to gramma?

ooPo wrote:Can I store family photos on the erom? Can I email it to gramma?

gramma emailed me the other day saying she's sick of you sending her your fucking pictures and asked you to please stop.

pukko: my point is that these things are easily obtainable without wasting the time of ps2dev'rs. If someone is either too lazy or too stupid to find them on their own, that's their problem.

I'm certainly not one to suggest supression of information, but there are obvious cases where the only reason a question is asked is to further warez and other things that do not belong here. I believe mrbrown was right to ask the reasoning for such a request, no one wants to be the one to unwittingly further a lamah warez0rz goals and further blur the line between ps2dev and ps2warez. Sites like PS2ownz with their claims of ps2dev = making game patches/etc do enough of this without ps2dev containing "how to" information on circumventing protections, regardless of how lame the protection.

Now I'm doing exactly what I was bitching about before, perpetuating a debate that shouldn't have occured in the first place so I'll stop now. :P

In closing, I love white rice and I'm not even asian!

P.S.: We need a goatse smiley! :D

=E)O(3=