Question about old unlicensed PS2 bootlegs

[root670]

I've been wondering about his recently. There are quite a few unlicensed products for PS2 (Action Replay, Gameshark,, Swap Magic. etc.). Many of these have versions dating back to 2000. Considering that there weren't any open source, legal development kits available at the time, how were they able to create these products?

My only guess is that they managed to steal an official dev kit, or had a connection to a developer who had a dev kit. Either way, isn't it still illegal to sell the product if you're not a licensed developer? Not to mention that Datel and Success-HK/SuperUFO (SwapMagic publisher) have ways of producing bootleg disks. I'm surprised Sony never did much about this.

[Lazy Bastard]

They may have reverse-engineered the official dev kit, and had their own unofficial kit long before the open-source ones came about. Or, as you said, they may have used the official dev kit illegally, and then perhaps used encoding or encryption of some sort to cover their tracks. Or, perhaps there is a legal avenue of purchasing the dev kit, but to obtain licensing for a product you must got through Sony, which they never did...which I think is perfectly legal in itself.

Also, Success-HK is in Hong Kong, which is currently owned by China. It's my understanding that it's nearly impossible to prosecute in China for things involving intellectual property rights.

I don't remember if I ever took a look at a disassembly of any of the cheat system ELFs, but it might be interesting to determine what dev kit they used, if only for historic reasons.

[bungholio]

I think I've seen a few of these from pawn shops around me. Are they anything special worth grabbing? One said something along the lines of "Unofficial codes for Medal Oh Honor! Infinite Health, Unlimited Ammo, Have All Weapons, and more! Blah blah stuff about special GUI interfaces, menues, or whatever else that didn't sound too important." I've seen AR, Gameshark, Xploder or whatever, and others didn't have names.

[root670]

I looked around the CodeBreaker and Gameshark ELFs and found some interesting stuff. In the GameShark one (which is packed) there is one string near the beginning -> "(C) Blaze 2002-2003 : !PJH!". Who is PJH? In a few other places on the disk, some of the IRX files had strings like "FCD USB-OHCI V1.00 : PJH". The odd part is that a few of the other IRX files look like Sony ones. I found "PJH!" in the header of some STR videos on the disk.

I was able to unpack the Gameshark ELF with PS2Packer. Didn't get a chance to look into it that much.

CodeBreaker didn't have any giveaways in the unpacked elf. I did see a "firesux0:cmx.irx"..... Fire International made Xploder, which was the basis of CodeBreaker early on. The only way I can link CodeBreaker and Gameshark's code together is the fact that Blaze (who's name was mentioned in GS's elf) is the same company was Fire International (I think). Therefore if Xploder's source code is still partially in CodeBreaker, and Xploder's code is probably the basis for GameShark's source code, they must have been developed with the same set of tools, weather it be a stolen Sony devkit or there own custom made devkit.