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SDK

Posted: Sun Jul 10, 2005 9:12 am
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 ?

Posted: Sun Jul 10, 2005 11:39 am
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

Posted: Sun Jul 10, 2005 10:28 pm
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.

Posted: Mon Jul 11, 2005 6:48 am
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

Posted: Mon Jul 11, 2005 11:45 am
by pixel
ELFs.