Burning Your Own PS1 Modchip Is Easy

The original Sony PlayStation came out just in time for CD piracy to really start taking off. Aware of this threat to sales, Sony engineers included a copy protection and region locking mechanism that placated executives and annoyed end-users alike. [MattKC] explores how this copy protection worked, and how you …read more

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Clear PS2 Is The Crystal Edition We Deserved

Every so often, console manufacturers release a crystal edition of their hardware that never really lives up to the hype. The manufacturing realities of producing optically clear plastic mean the expense is rarely justified, even for a special edition. Instead, we get hazy, smoky translucent cases that are comparatively underwhelming. …read more

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Official Teardown Gives Unexpected Look into PS5

With Sony and Microsoft still a month away from the public release of their next-generation game consoles, you’d expect technical details of their respective systems to still be under a veil of secrecy. But both companies look to be taking things a bit differently this generation, as it becomes increasingly …read more

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The Mini Console Revolution, And Why Hackers Passed Them By

The Raspberry Pi was initially developed as an educational tool. With its bargain price and digital IO, it quickly became a hacker favorite. It also packed just enough power to serve as a compact emulation platform for anyone savvy enough to load up a few ROMs on an SD card. …read more

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FreeDVDBoot Opens Up The PlayStation 2 Like Never Before

For many generations, home consoles have featured copy protection. Aiming to stop users from playing pirated games as well as running homebrew code, hackers often race to find vulnerabilities shortly after each new launch. Of course, finding workarounds can sometimes be more of a marathon than a sprint. [Grifter]’s new …read more

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Ultra-Rare Nintendo Play Station Prototype Hits Auction Block

If you are interested in such things, you can buy a 1990s Sony Play Station via Heritage Auctions. We’re sure this will have caught your interest, after all it’s not every day you get the chance to catch such a machine. But before you call us out for seemingly reporting …read more

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Sleeper PlayStation Hides a Raspberry Pi 4

[Andreas Wilcox] wanted to get his brother a birthday gift that reflected their shared love for the early days of 3D gaming, but just handing him a second-hand original PlayStation lacked a certain style. So he decided to gut the classic system and replace its dated internals with a shiny …read more

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Portable PS2 With A Side Of Pi

Home games consoles have occupied a special space in the marketplace over the last 3 decades. The crowning jewels of their respective companies, they inspired legions of diehard fans and bitter enmities against followers of alternative hardware. For some, a mere handheld is a watered down experience that simply won’t …read more

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PC And Console Gaming United Courtesy Of Origin

When folk at Origin PCs realized that their company was about to celebrate its 10th anniversary of making custom (gaming) PCs, they knew that they had to do something special. Since one thing they did when the company launched in 2009 was to integrate an XBox 360 into a gaming …read more

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Nintendo Does Sony, Better Than Sony

Fans of game consoles from the golden era of TV game appliances have been in for a treat over the past couple of years, and a slew of official reboots of the stars of the past have reached the market. These so-called “classic” consoles closely follow the styling of the originals, but under the hood they pack modern hardware running an emulator to play a selection of games from ROM. Since with a bit of hacking they can thus run more than just the supplied emulator, people have managed to use them to emulator completely different consoles. Even then, it’s …read more

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