YHK - yet another hacker news clone

AnyPS5: Port PS5 binaries to PC without emulation (87% system libraries mapped)

87 points Fe2O3 2 hours ago 59 comments

someperson 2 hours ago | parent

It's always nice to have local git clone backups/mirrors of these projects because they may eventually be taken down through legal threats eg, Yuzu and Ryujinx.

Eg. https://torrentfreak.com/nintendo-wipes-out-400-switch-emula...

orionblastar 1 hour ago | parent

Keep them in a private GitHub repository so Nintendo can't see them. Slowly release it to different Githubs on a different account.

jojobas 38 minutes ago | parent

Self-host gitlab in darknet.

ThrowawayTestr 18 minutes ago | parent

Just download the zip file

emkoemko 1 hour ago | parent

is this like the WINE approach?

Xirdus 57 minutes ago | parent

Halfway between Wine and Rosetta. The binary itself gets modified, but both source and target are x86 so no transpilation.

isityettime 44 minutes ago | parent

That sounds like just Wine?

jpk 34 minutes ago | parent

WINE doesn't modify binaries, does it?

moreveal 45 seconds ago | parent

Yeah, Wine doesn't rewrite the binary itself. It runs the original PE and provides the Windows APIs/ABI it expects

dukodk 59 minutes ago | parent

Are we gonna get a PC port of GTA 6 on day one?

marak830 57 minutes ago | parent

Wrong firmware is being worked on, you would need a version of the firmware that GTA6 is being targeted towards to have a vuln found.

piskov 41 minutes ago | parent

Xbox cloud or whatever it is called will stream this without an actual xbox

pitched 37 minutes ago | parent

From the amount of activity and how much this all smells like heavy AI usage, I have zero doubt that something will be working shortly after launch. The agents won’t sleep until it boots.

This project is the first hint I’ve seen of the complete destruction of all copy protection schemes. Scary times for any industry that relies on those!

sankhao 7 minutes ago | parent

This hopefully pushes Rockstar to accelerate the official PC release.

dsedgwick 57 minutes ago | parent

Since the PS5 is already x86-64, the main friction point here is likely the proprietary graphics API rather than CPU instruction translation. I wonder if they handle GNM command buffers by pre-compiling them into Vulkan during that static relinking phase or if there is still some runtime interception happening when the game tries to queue those draw calls.

causesothere 55 minutes ago | parent

I always wonder who the folks who build these things are. If they become too popular, it seems like a good way to have the government pay you a visit you will not enjoy. But they also seem like technically interesting problems to solve. Glad someone is out there preserving these games in any case.

dghlsakjg 32 minutes ago | parent

A lot of people live in places where the government does not really care to use police to enforce copyright, or where this just isn’t really considered illegal.

xyst 19 minutes ago | parent

The PlayStation platform in general is the easiest console to reverse engineer. There’s a lack of security in depth that makes it easy to reverse engineer.

It’s only recently (earlier this year) that the _last gen_ of xbox was cracked.

lewelove 47 minutes ago | parent

You will own everything and be happy.

Retr0id 41 minutes ago | parent

For now. In the next few years I bet we'll see AAA games releasing streaming-only.

Funnily enough I ended a recent blog post on this topic with "You will own nothing and you will be kinda pissed off about it."

https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/reversing.html

lisplist 28 minutes ago | parent

True, but if we (eventually) have models which can produce high quality games, who cares?

Retr0id 27 minutes ago | parent

Games are shared cultural artefacts

vuurmot 22 minutes ago | parent

You think people play Dark Souls because it is "hard" and "dark fantasy" Or do people play it because the gaming community at large plays it, and people want to join in the conversation and have fun with the community?

High quality games were never the point, look at Roblox

lisplist 5 minutes ago | parent

I just mean if AAA games become inaccessible, I imagine there will be large community efforts on creating alternatives to that.

popalchemist 21 minutes ago | parent

The Hollywood equivalent to this is to make only AAA blockbuster titles in order to drive theatrical ticket sales. It is a strategy with diminishing returns - just look at the box office trajectory over the last 25 years.

sigmar 8 minutes ago | parent

in a few years, won't I have an agent that can play the game via the video stream and then code my own local copy of the game? it might have to iterate through story branching, but that's hardly an obstacle

lewelove 6 minutes ago | parent

Perhaps, but I doubt it. The immersiveness and suspention of disbelief come partially from the richness and massive bandwidth of the data stream players receive. Streaming degrades it massively. Even with media streaming, e.g. Netflix, there are many folks (including myself) who can't stand the low-ish bitrate they _have_ to supply to customers because of the infrastructure strain / $REASONS. With games it will be even worse. And there's also the latency problem, which is kinda massive for this. Unless of course they invent some kind of protocol where assets are stored and loaded on the console, but the logic of the game is received via a low-bandwidth stream.

Regarding your post: I think the future of RE of server-side bound software will be something like 1. Point your AI robot with eyes and ears to an interface designed for you (the human customer). 2. Make it explore software at massive speeds, map and record every possible behavior, closely construct/approximate the human-computer interaction model. 3. Rewrite it completely in Rust. 4. Profit.

There will be no moat. Popular non-FOSS will be laughed at and rewritten by its users in hours/days. Proletariat will finally own the means of production, and the Stallman dream will finally become real.

vuurmot 39 minutes ago | parent

GTA 6 is releasing on PS5 right? Who is going to pay a single cent for software if everything can be ripped day 1? Countries with a huge stake in the software industry are going to get crushed?

Retr0id 36 minutes ago | parent

Music and movies can be ripped day 1, and it hasn't done a whole lot.

dghlsakjg 34 minutes ago | parent

Most software and games is available pirated already and has been for decades. You could get pirate games on the original PlayStation two decades ago. Cracking the most recent PlayStation is not going to change things

tripleee 33 minutes ago | parent

Most games today can be ripped day 1 and they're doing fine. Pirates are a tiny minority

OptionX 31 minutes ago | parent

If you think this project, not even month old, can recompile gta6 to pc and it be in anyway playable on release have I got a bridge to sell you.

bathtub365 2 minutes ago | parent

[delayed]

vuurmot 29 minutes ago | parent

I think the replies to my comment are not realistic.

The Goldilocks zone for earning revenue for movies & games were always: Day 1 earnings = Week 1 earnings = Year 1 earnings

The revenue in this case is heavily protected by your IP NOT being copied in a single day, and that people want to experience the product together with their friends.

When people talk about convenience, is there really any inconvenience in downloading a pirated game/movie on release day?

uurrnn 26 minutes ago | parent

Especially for GTA6. The most amount of money is riding on this. It's still going to be a lot if it's copied on day1, but there is no way it is near their projections.

gchamonlive 28 minutes ago | parent

Do people pay only because there's no pirate alternative? Valve showed this with Steam, people pay for convenience and for good service quality. Piracy is an answer to lack of corporate respect about culture and art that's used to create a commercial product, which manifests in enshitification.

para_parolu 24 minutes ago | parent

Check steam game sales

singpolyma3 22 minutes ago | parent

Everything has always been able to be ripped day 1. People pay for convenience or because it's expected, not because there's no other option

xyst 22 minutes ago | parent

False, myth. This is a common claim pushed by MPAA/RIAA (the copyright police for music and film industry).

Consumers want _access_ to their games/content. For example, netflix made it easy to "rent" or stream content. But as they slowly clawback those features (multi-streaming, password sharing, incorporate ads, increase prices beyond inflation). Then access to content decreases, visibility decreases.

pitched 4 minutes ago | parent

Ads can still be served to pirates, especially if they’re product placements baked into the assets shipped.

weakened_malloc 38 minutes ago | parent

Unfortunately, this is only going to push Sony/Nintendo/MS more towards cloud gaming. AI enabling these amazing reverse engineering efforts and democratizing access to gaming is amazing, and preventing vendor lock in is always something I'll support. However it's hard not to see them pushing gamers towards needing to play games on cloud only, preventing these kind of things happening.

gchamonlive 37 minutes ago | parent

It's already happening, every effort into preservation of what already exists is important

vuurmot 36 minutes ago | parent

I honestly welcome cloud gaming. Action RPGs might be dead in the water, But there were many games suffering from data mining, and having their secrets revealed day 1. Bringing games to cloud gaming could restore the mystery in games

isatty 32 minutes ago | parent

Meh, overblown. Very easy to not go looking for that and just enjoy your games.

vuurmot 27 minutes ago | parent

"Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game."

flaunf221 2 minutes ago | parent

This relates to game design, not outside actions.

Also if that's what you believe, players who start after day 1 will not have mystery. Even players who start day 1 but can't dedicate all of their time to the game will inevitably spoil themselves when they have to do anything else, meaning someone will progress farther than they and will share that info.

rhipitr 34 minutes ago | parent

Feel like eventually ai will get so good people will just autogenerate games just for themselves. Same for movies/shows/etc.

asdaqopqkq 14 minutes ago | parent

Already happening on insta and tiktok with genAI stuff, people are creating a lot of funny stuff

Forgeties79 5 minutes ago | parent

Why on earth would anyone watch that nonsense? Who cares if it’s even cohesive. It’s the bedrock of “derivative.”

Ugh I know the answer but it’s just sad. I don’t want all media to become cotton candy.

xyst 27 minutes ago | parent

Have you even tried "cloud gaming"? It’s useless for any game that is latency sensitive (fps, moba, …).

I have only had success with single player games.

vuurmot 24 minutes ago | parent

If revenues are going to suffer because of this, that is the way the industry will move towards

wincy 22 minutes ago | parent

But nobody will play it? Steam exists and all those games get pirated. You can’t force gamers to buy duds. I have a gigabit connection wired and found a cloud version of Control to be totally unplayable.

vuurmot 18 minutes ago | parent

It is in the realm of design to make games playable within the context of their technological limits. In this case, I could see games moving towards being turn-based i.e. online chess.

greenavocado 8 minutes ago | parent

The gaming industry as you know it is dead. The only survivors will be the prolific sloppers who can outslop the hoi polloi.

xyst 16 minutes ago | parent

Revenues suffer because game studios and publishers make awful decisions. See the botched releases of Marathon (Bungie) and the more infamous examples — concord and split gate.

wzdd 27 minutes ago | parent

Microsoft just cut their cloud gaming offering significantly (https://kotaku.com/xbox-cloud-gaming-controller-microsoft-as... and https://kotaku.com/game-pass-will-start-capping-the-number-o...) so that's not happening any time soon.

nperez 22 minutes ago | parent

This continues to be an absolute no-go for competitive real-time games due to input latency. I honestly think there's a chance that game clients might go the way of the recording industry, and they just might not be worth that much.

As doubtful as I am about the viability of cloud streaming, this IS going to cause a bigger push into live service functionality where maybe you have a light client but the server is authoritative over more and more aspects of the game. Even then, AI can write its own server, so it needs to be full of FOMO if you're not on the official server.

abrookewood 4 minutes ago | parent

Surely no one playing competitive real-time games are doing it on a PS5?

lunar_rover 6 minutes ago | parent

It'll happen regardless, as of now the public internet infrastructure still isn't fast enough to be comparable to local rendering, cloud gaming needs to deliver >50mbps bandwidth at sub 16ms latency.