We are all familiar with the various tricks SCE use to fool devs, though I recently came across one that has annoyed me the most.

When 3.40 was released, a ‘special’ prx was flashed with the rest of the firmware that didnt seem to be used at all. It was special in that not only was it not used nor referred to once in the entire firmware, it also could NOT be decrypted (the keys to decrypt it simply did not exist in the firmware). Because of this and the fact that the prx was promptly removed from all future firmware (it only exists in 3.40) it was assumed to be a remnant of a debug prx used during testing and they had simply forgot to remove it. Or was it?

The prx was “idcheck.prx”. The module name sounded interesting and on first glance it was assumed to be the debug version of the embedded prx SCE hid in 3.30+ updaters to check for corrupt idstorage in their updaters (the one that refuses to update the PSP if either your keys 4, 5, 6, 7 & 8 were corrupt).

Long story short, the prx has been decrypted and the result was far from expected. It seems that the original module has been taken out and replaced with a dummy instead. The only remains left of the original module was the module name “sceIdCheck” and the data segment, which included the strings “Illegal idstoarge” (SCE always misspell ‘idstorage’), “flash is corrupted”, and “cannot restore PSP system”. The rest of the module (including all the code) had been dummied with another module from the firmware.

Now why would SCE do this? If it were a debug prx that was accidently left in, why would they bother going to the trouble of dummying the code?

Some accidental mistake on their part, or more of their ridiculous mind games at play……

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 2nd, 2007 at 10:22 pm and is filed under Misc, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.