About a PS3

So my mother bought a PS3 in 2006 or 2007 because it was the cheapest Blu-Ray player on the market. Of course if there is a way to run code on it I'm in!

The chosen path was a PSGroove based around the PIC18F2550 (My first microcontroller with native USB!) and here you can see how simple is is (and what a waste of a PIC!).

So why even post about a 2007 PS3 hack? Well, I only have 3 games for it and only one of them gets played (Trinity Universe). Now, I really dislike loading times, so I have a copy and play it from the internal hard drive. All is great up until now as the PS3 was upgraded from 3.41 to 3.70 (most likely a Blu-ray movie) so the solution is invasive surgery (direct NAND manipulation)!!

After poking around the net I found it is possible to reflash the internal memory of the PS3 so that is something I would like to do (plus it's an exscuse to delve into the console) but I do not want to buy a special flash tool.

It can be done with a cheap Teensy++ 2.0 so that got me thinking a bit. After looking around on many forums there don't seem to be many options for DIY tools. Either the Teensy++ 2.0 or Progskeet or other more expensive tools or kits. Of course I could buy a teensy but I don't like the idea of spending money on a relativly low end and slow board. I already have an Arduino Uno and various PIC boards.

I am assuming that the lack of other DIY tools is due to the programming involved with the microcontroller. Therefore after looking into some of the code used and chip timmings I believe it would be a great experience to "port" or write new code for a developing board that interest me.

Something nice and fast with plenty of I/O and a host of features yet cheap and easy to use in projects. 30€, 48IO, USB host, 70Mhz and up... Well... thats for another time. I have other projects to get done first and learning how to properly handle flash memory, USB connections and data managment.

In the meantime I'll just have to deal with the loading times and search for a nice development board!

Here is a photo of my previous P16PRO programmer before getting a wonderful pickit2 :)