How to hack a PSTwo

[Guest jhon13]

Hey guys, I’ve finally forced myself out of the laziness that’s been consuming so much of my time, so that I can show you how you can hack your PSTwo without a modchip, swap card, or swap disc. The hack is installed to a memory card, which means the hack is "hot-swappable"; any PS2/Two that has this memory card in it will be hacked as long as the card is in there. That means both the Phat and Slim models. For future reference, the PSTwo is the slim model of the PS2. This trick will work on an original PS2 as well if you have a flip-top or some way of loading copies, but if not, the hack needs to be “made” on a PSTwo. Scroll down to the Youtube video to get a look at how it works.

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What you’ll need:

An ORIGINAL copy of 007: Agent Under Fire (NOT PLATINUM EDITION). There’s an exploit we’ll be taking advantage of in this particular game. It should hypothetically work in some other games, but we’ll be using this one. NOTE: A burnt copy will not work, unless your console is already modded in some way.

A USB Drive (Basically anything larger than 8MB). This will contain a file browser, as well as the Free MCBoot Exploit that will be installed to your memory card

A Memory Card (8MB or larger). Be aware, though, that the exploit itself takes almost the 8MB completely. Read on to understand more.

A DVD Burner – self-explanatory

DVD Decrypter - used to make ISOs and burn them

Apache 1.1 – This is used for swapping files on the ISO of the disc you’re going to be making. Only v1.1 will work, and you’re going to have a hell of time find it, so I’ve uploaded it to my Dropbox folder for you.

Free MCBoot Exploit Files – again, I’ve uploaded them altogether, complete with extra plugins for use on your PS2, such as an external HDD reader, and ESR Support. Note: Copy the contents of the "FOR YOUR USB STICK" folder into your USB drive, not the folder itself.

ESR Disc Patcher (Optional, for original PS2 owners) – basically, this patches your ISOs before burning them so that the PS2 thinks they’re DVD movies. This is useful if you have an original PS2 and you don’t have a flip-top or card-swap method.

Electrical Tape – If your PSTwo has 2 hold switches (the buttons that let it know the lid is closed), you’ll need some of this.

A quick run through what we’ll be doing: Hardware aside, we’re going to be making an ISO of the 007: Agent Under Fire disc. This particular game has 3 different kinds of .ELFs (an ELF is the equivalent of an EXE file on a PC). One is for standard FPS missions, another is for Driving missions, and another is for loading cinematic movies if I remember correctly. We’re going to swap the Driving.elf file so that it loads a file browser instead of the level itself.

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Step 1: Determine how many hold switches your PSTwo has.

In the PSTwo, there are either 1 or 2 switches, or buttons, depending on what model PSTwo you have. The quickest way to test the method is by opening the lid, putting in a game, and sticking a piece of tissue, or the end of the one of the audio/video cables into the little hole where the lid goes in (bottom right corner of your PSTwo). If the disc starts to spin, congratulations, you won’t need to open up your PSTwo. If it doesn’t, there’s a second switch inside. But don’t fret, because opening up your PSTwo, aside from voiding your probably-already-expired warranty, is actually very, very easy.

A: First Switch. This is in ALL of the PSTwo models

B: Disc Brake: This slows down and eventually stops the disc while it spins when you open the lid

C: The second switch, only in later, but most, models is underneath here. We’ll need to open up the PSTwo to access it.

Flip over your PSTwo, and you’ll see 8 little rubber squares. Only 6 of them have screws underneath. You’ll need to peel off the squares and take out the screws. For a quick look at which squares had screws underneath, I found this diagram on Google Images:

After that, your PSTwo’s top should come off fairly easily. Be care, though, because there’s a small circuit board with the power button on it in the front right of the PSTwo. Watch out not to snap the ribbon cable. If it comes out of place, it snaps right back into the case, so don’t worry. Now, we want to do 2 things: apply electrical tape to keep the hold switch pressed down, and remove the disc brake that stops the disc when you open the lid. It’s located inside the top half of the case. There’s a screw and that you need to undo, and also a spring on the underside of the case. Remove all of the components. The disc can still stop fine on its own, and we don’t want the break interfering when we swap discs.

Disc Brake:

Location of 2nd sensor © that you'll need to cover up with tape:

Now that that's done, you can snap back the top half of your case on.

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Now to take care of the software side of things. I would send a pre-modded ISO, but as you know, that would be piracy, whether you own a copy of the game or not:

Put your Agent Under Fire disc into your PC’s DVD drive and open up DVD Decrypter. Set the mode to ISO mode/read mode and make an ISO. Now open up Apache 1.1 and open up that ISO.

Download this “Driving.elf” file (which is a renamed filebrowser file). Before we replace anything, we need to know the size, in bytes, of this file (the downloaded one). Right-clicking on the file, we see the byte size is 877420. Now go back into Apache, and click DRIVING.ELF. Now click ISO Tools, then “Change TOC for selected file”. DO NOT TOUCH THE LBA. In the TOC box, change the value to 877420, then hit update (ignore the value in the image). Now find the Driving.elf that you downloaded and go to ISO Tools and click Update File, locating the downloaded one:

Now you're set to burn the ISO onto a DVD. Using either DVD Decrypter in Write mode, or your favorite ISO-burning tool, burn the ISO to a DVD. Also, copy all the contents of the Free MCBoot rar I provided to a flash drive. Note: Copy the contents of the "FOR YOUR USB STICK" folder into your USB drive, not the folder itself.

1) With the PSTwo off, put in the ORIGINAL Agent Under Fire disc and plug in your memory card(s) that you intend to use, as well as the USB disk into the USB port. Be sure to have the altered, burnt version handy.

2) With Sensor A plugged up with a piece of wet tissue, start up the PSTwo with the lid open. The disc should spin regardless of the fact that the lid is open, and eventually the game will reach the title screen (it will say "Press Start").

3) Quickly swap the original disc with the copy. The music might stop in between if you spend too much time with no disc on the tray, but that's fine. It might even freeze until you put the copy in, but that's also fine.

4) Load your game and navigate to a driving mission. After the mission briefing, the screen should flash and a grey file browser should load. Here's a quick overview of what the whole process should look like:

http-~~-//www.youtube.com/watch?v=0i0MoJp8uwA

A little reference on the file browser: mc0 = Memory card slot 1, mc1 = Memory Card slot 2, etc. Also, O is used to select things rather than X. You'll figure it out. I forgot the code for the flash drive, but you'll see it easily. Go into the flash drive and run the "FREE MCBoot.ELF". You should see this:

Using a spare memory card, or one that is larger than 8MB (if you don't want a dedicated "hack" card), click Format MC. THIS WILL ERASE EVERYTHING ON YOUR CARD. When it's done, click Multi-Version Install, to ensure that the hack works on any PS2/PSTwo model. When it's finished, you can restart your PSTwo. You should see a FreeMCBoot splash screen and have a menu that looks something like this:

Any PS2/PSTwo you have this memory card in will boot into this menu, as long as the card is in there. There is a way to run Swap Magic from the memory card to enable the swapping of discs, but for compatibility and ease of use, I suggest the ESR disc-patching method since it can be used in both an original Phat PS2 and a PSTwo (it requires no disc-swapping). Also for compatibility, I've included a Java version of the patching application in case you're not running Windows (it will run on Windows, Linux, and Mac). Basically, the app simply changes the ISO's file structure so that the PS2/Two thinks it's a movie DVD. The discs contents are the same, but you can see the difference if you open a patched ISO yourself. You can also un-patch an ISO.

All you'll need to do after patching and burning the ISO to DVD, is put it in your PS2 and select the ESR Loader from main menu. The screen should flash different colors and the ESR logo should come up. Then the game will load.

All of the Free MC Boot options can be changed in the "Free MCBoot Configurator".

Congratulations, you have a hacked PSTwo. Stay tuned because I'm going to show you how to soft-mod an original Xbox. It's even easier than this.

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None of the photos or videos used in this tutorial are mine. I didn't have time to photograph/film all of the steps, so I Google Image'd them. Credit to the respective owners.

I know the tutorial is a little messy, and I did this as a quick, last minute thing, so I'll revise it if anyone's confused.

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This is much easier to do. (to play copies) You will need:

This is much easier to do. (to play copies) You will need:

- SwapMagic 3.8 ELF here hxxp://dl.dropbox.com/u/88583/PS2%20Hacking/FOR%20YOUR%20USB%20STICK/INSTALL/APPS/SWAP.ELF

- Any original PS2 game

- Any [burnt] copy of any game

- Tissue to make the PS2 think the tray is still closed

1) Put it somewhere on your memory card

2) Link it to the main menu just like with ESR, and/or set it to a startup button.

3) Go into Swap Magic with any original PS2 game in the tray. If it says you need another game with a high TOC, try another disc.

4) Swap the original disc with the copy and hit play or whatever the button says.

this tut was put up by -

Product F(RED)

Super Moderator

PSP Elite Hacker at pspmod

[Guest torrentguy]

Thx i´ve looked on the internet alot