PlayStation Classic hacked, now games can be run from a flash drive

Fragment of the motherboard of the included console

On Habré already wrote about PlayStation Classic, representing the hardware PlayStation One emulator. Unfortunately, the number of games sewn by the developers of the console in its memory is limited to 20 titles. But there were already craftsmen who removed this limit and taught the console to work with a flash drive - you can download games directly from the drive.

It turned out that the cryptographic protection of the device is weak, so it was easy to crack the prefix. Burglars - professionals in the field of modification and hack of consoles, received a dump of the console through the UART-port and began to analyze it. The software part of the console is protected by a key, which, by a strange coincidence, is not stored somewhere, but in the console itself.


So there is no question about any private keys that are stored by Sony. Perhaps the company simply did not bother too much with the problem of protection, understanding that the hardware emulator is not too hard to crack. This is not a PS Vita or PS4 Pro.

Moreover, the prefix, when executing any code, does not verify the signature, so that the craftsmen managed to launch their own files. You can download them from a USB device, the process was demonstrated by a hacker (in the positive sense of the word) with the nickname yifanlu.


Thanks to open-source projects created for the PlayStation Classic, now users of this console can download games from USB-drive. The latter is recognized by the prefix and allows you to run a virtually unlimited set of games. True, you need to edit some INI files, plus some regional versions of the console may not work with a hack.

There are also reports that an improperly formatted and configured drive “wry” the device. So when modifying a device, be careful.

It is worth noting that the approach to the modification of consoles from Nintendo, including the NES and SNES Classic, is about the same. The software contents of the console are downloaded to the PC, modified, and then poured back, after which the console receives new features.