Starting up

This is more of a lab book than a real blog. I am going to post my progress with Playstation 2 development from the ground up.

Why?
Some may wonder why I start fiddling with an aging platform instead of going for the XBox 360, Wii or Playstation 3. Well, I have 2 good reasons for that: one, I am a cheap bastard and I have most of the stuff on hand and two, this is my first experience with a console so I wanted something that is well-known and with the homebrew SDK ironed out.

The setup:
I have an old-style "fat" PS2, unmodified and without a hard drive or network adapter. I have a friend that has an adapter gathering dust and that is willing to give it away, but eBaying could land me an example for cheap. The adapter will let me access the Playstation remotely to execute code or use a console program to execute shell commands(?) I will probably add a hard drive soon to expand my options but for now it is superfluous.

To inject my homebrew code in the Playstation's memory, I need to bypass the copy-protection features that prevents running unauthorized discs. Since I have no love for soldering modchips, I will use the "PS2 Independence Exploit" to do that. In a nutshell, that exploit uses a "feature" of the PS1 subsystem to execute some arbitrary boot code from a memory card. PS2link is one of the possibilities, and the basis of the PS2DEV toolchain. NOTE: this will NOT work on "slim" PS2's.

The first acquisition:
Which brings me to my first official acquisition: the Memor32 memory card with USB port. This card looks nifty: you can upload and download save files between it and a computer (Windows, Mac or Linux) . This is totally untested for homebrew dev (this toy is still new on the market), but to me this looks like the best way to put the Independence Exploit on a memory card without doing swap tricks or soldering.

Next step: waiting for the postman, then doing a test run of a precompiled demo ELF.

The workflow should look like this:

1. Make an Independence memory file for an original PS1 game I have on hand
   
2. Upload the memory file from (1) on the Memor32
3. Put the PS1 game and Memor32 card in the PS2
4. Push Power on the PS2
   
5. Use a PC client (PS2EXEC for Win32) to upload the ELF to the PS2 through the network
6. Bask in the demo-ey glory of it all.