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Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

Usually more than a few years, the Switch was a perfect storm in that it was fully jailbroken very early thanks to the Tegra bootrom exploit, used commodity hardware which was already reasonably well documented, and was slow enough relative to modern hardware for the emulation overhead to be manageable. By contrast Playstation 4 emulation is barely at the proof-of-concept stage a decade after launch, and years into the lifecycle of its successor.

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Let's also remember something else: Console DRM is actually, finally, becoming strong enough to be unbreakable.

The PS5 has never had a public exploit. The PS4 was broken, but only on certain firmwares.

The Xbox One has not been cracked in 12 years. And no, the lack of exclusives or the addition of Dev Mode is only a small part of the reason.

The Switch OS (Horizon) is a microkernel, and according to people who have observed it, extremely secure. It's more intrinsically secure than the Xbox and PlayStation OSs. NVIDIA screwed up - not Nintendo. SciresM (an Atmosphere developer) has publicly stated that he believes the Switch 2 will have no useful software exploits, ever. Even on the current Switch, we've not had any kernel or useful software exploits in the last five years.

PS5 has a public exploit althought it is on older firmware (<4.51 IIRC). Check one of the videos on "Modded Warfare" YT Channel. He backed up the disc version of Ghost of Tsushima. The exploit itself is well documented, but method of backing up and running games is still primitive.

> The PS5 has never had a public exploit. The PS4 was broken, but only on certain firmwares.

It's also notable that these firmware exploits never drop out of the blue anymore either, since the console manufacturers started doing bug bounty programs (up to $50k in Sony's case) they always get advance warning when someone does find an exploit and it's fixed before anyone knows about it, by which point most people have already updated to a fixed firmware and it's too late for them to jailbreak.

This also helps for when an exploit is found, like say the issue with Firmware 4.51 and lower.

It's super easy to fix then - cook up a new DRM and encryption scheme (or modify the current one) that, without access to the internals, is impossible to figure out. Doesn't take much - probably just a generic encryption key that gets swapped out. Then, roll that out in an OS update. Finally, make new games use that encryption scheme and thus that firmware level.

Sure, games that run on 4.51 or lower are cracked. New ones? Uncrackable, until a new jailbreak is found.

> Sure, games that run on 4.51 or lower are cracked. New ones? Uncrackable, until a new jailbreak is found.

The PS4 scene is full of downgrade patches. Many games targeting 10.x for example didnt make use of newer syscalls and it was discovered how to patch the game for 9.0 (the 9.0 firmware has a jailbreak).

FWIW, there's a path to downgrade PS4 to the previous firmware, see https://wololo.net/2022/12/06/it-is-apparently-possible-to-r...

> [...] The PS4 was broken, but only on certain firmwares.

For the curious: the PS4 does have a few emulators available[0], but they appear to be at a very experimental stage.

[0]: emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/PlayStation_4_emulators

You can play backup games on a hacked PS5 now. If your PS5 is running an firmware released before March 23, 2022 then you can play backed up games. That means it took roughly 3 years from release to fully hack the PS5. It took a little over a year to be able to run hacked games on the Switch but that was a special circumstance due to the NVIDIA bootrom vulnerability.

> By contrast Playstation 4 emulation is barely at the proof-of-concept stage a decade after launch, and years into the lifecycle of its successor.

This is unrelated to being jailbroken. PS4 was jailbroken in october 2015.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ps4homebrew/wiki/scene_history

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