Enthusiast claims to have cracked one of the last PlayStation 2 secrets

An enthusiast going by the nickname DiscoStarslayer announced on 13 September that he had cracked one of the PlayStation 2's last unsolved mysteries. By his own account, it took four years of work.

The path turned out to be long and far from software-driven: first chip decapsulation, then an optical dump — and only at the final stage did a software solution appear. In other words, the key to the result was sought primarily in the hardware, not in code.

The post gave a special thanks to a contributor named Libby: according to the author, it was she who found the exploit in their raw optical dumps.

Three days later, on 16 September, DiscoStarslayer published a progress report — a public index of SPC970 (mechacon) chip dumps, the repository spc970-dumper-union/spc970-dumps-public on GitHub.

The announcement drew noticeable interest: the post has more than 350,000 views and several thousand likes. But the author chose deliberately cautious wording — commenters have already picked up on it and joked wryly about an "award for a vague post".

What exactly the secret was and where it could be applied in practice is unclear from the post, so it is too early to judge the scale of the discovery. Still, four years of decapsulation, dumping and exploit hunting speak for themselves about how tough this chip turned out to be.

Image: Evan-Amos Public domain

Translation editors: Соловьев В., Пеков А.