PlayStation Homebrew News (KytyPS5 Emulator Progress, 10K PS5 13.42 Bounty, PS5 AIO BD-JB ISO V28)

[00:00:00]Hey, what's up everybody? Michael here and today we have got a huge PlayStation Homebrew news episode. Now, before we jump into things, I did want to let you know that I have went ahead and did a complete overhaul on my YouTube channel's homepage. So, now you can see things such as playlist for PlayStation Homebrew news. Now, you can just subscribe to this. You maybe want to just take a peek at all of the PS5 jailbreaks and Homebrew. I've got playlists now for that and including some of my brand new shorts that I just started doing, Nintendo Switch 2 jailbreaks and Homebrew. And yeah, if you just scroll all the way down through this, you can see a variety of different systems. So, anyways, if you could do me just a big favor and subscribe to the channel and that will ensure that I make many more episodes. With that out of the way, let's go ahead and jump into the very first item. So, first up we have two experimental PlayStation 5 emulators that are receiving a ton of attention.

[00:01:09]So, the first one is called Kitty PS5 and then we have another one over here which is called Sharp EMu or Sharp Emulator. Kitty PS5 is a free open-source PlayStation 5 emulator that is written in C++ for Windows. It is based on a heavily modified version of the original Kitty project and according to the developers, Kitty PS5 can boot 2D games and a selection of 3D games including titles with the Unreal Engine, Unity and other custom game images. Screenshots show Minecraft Legend and Silent Hill: The Short Message and then others. Now, do keep in mind that this is a very early project, so expect crashes, graphical problems, low compatibility, and poor performance. Windows also is the only currently supported platform, and there are no official releases yet. So, this is mainly something for developers and experienced testers to follow. It's still pretty good regardless, and you can go ahead and build this for yourself. Again, since there are no releases associated with this. Now, the other project that we have over here is called Sharp EMu. This is an experimental PlayStation 5 emulator that is written from scratch in C#. So, Sharp EMu supports Windows, Linux, and Intel-based macOS, and you can find all these over here in the releases. This emulator can currently load PS5's eboot.bin and elf files, execute native CPU instructions, and much, much more.

[00:03:04]However, there are several pieces that are still missing. So, this should not be confused with the finished or generally usable PS5 emulator. The big social media story this week claimed that a Discord user managed to boot Astrobot using Sharp EMu. Now, that post is just right over here. Now, the keyword here is is that they said boot, not play. And so, what we see here is is that they get beyond the Sony Interactive screen before freezing or crashing, and it doesn't demonstrate anything like gameplay, stable rendering, or working menus, or anything like that. So, this is still just an interesting progress for such an early emulator, especially with a 2024 PS5 exclusive. But, anytime that I see headlines claiming that Sony is in full panic mode, yeah, they really aren't.

[00:04:03]And it seems that they are not going to move on their stance on physical media.

[00:04:08]Next up, we need to talk about the The Floo Foundation's PlayStation 5 bounty.

[00:04:13]So, at the time of recording, the total bounty pot is listed at more than $26,000 containing public donations and matching other funds. The goal of this is to produce a hardware or software method that bypasses or modifies the PS5 hypervisor enough to boot an alternate operating system on firmware 13.42 or newer. So, the alternate operating system must have access to the PS5's primary processor, memory, and graphics hardware. The console must also remain capable of booting in its original operating system and playing PS5 games. If hardware modification is required, it cannot be excessively expensive and must be possible for someone with soldering skills and equipment. The bounty supports a variety of different PS5 systems, including the slim and the slim digital edition, as well as the PS5 Pro and the original. But, what was kind of an interesting thing about all of this is that we saw over on X, The Floo responded by saying a user plus kernel plus hypervisor chain is worth more than $10,000, my friend. And that is a fair technical point. A complete chain targeting current PS5 firmware would involve multiple high-value vulnerabilities, not one small bug. Now, we saw directly from the bounty page itself that it states and will not be required to release their solution to the public if they do not wish to do so. So, obviously that has caused quite some concerns. And well, you can see it's been even making its way over to PS5 jailbreak on Reddit stating the PS5 bounty can be claimed even without releasing anything to the public. And so, as we can see, one of the concerns here is is that I was excited and donated, but now I'm worried the flow and others will claim it and release a year later or never. And here is that message. So, my advice here is to read all the terms before donating.

[00:06:33]Treat this as a funding security research and advocacy, not a pre-order for a guaranteed public jailbreak. Next up, victorious has released version 1.28 or V28 of the PS5 all-in-one BDJB ISO.

[00:06:52]So, this release includes automatic firmware detection when the BDJB menu starts. Payload identifies the console's firmware and stores that information in the cache. The menu can then automatically select the appropriate Popline category. Firmware 7.61 and below defaults to the UMTX category, while firmwares 8.00 through 12.00 use the PoopSploit. A new run last selected Popline option remembers your previous selection, which should reduce repetitive menu navigation. The update also adds two icon groups including a dark theme along with the firmware and the ISO version information in the upper right-hand corner. Payload manager Poplines have been added for both Poops Floyd and UMTX 2. This release updates the PS5 Linux loader to version 2.4 with firmware 7.40 support and updates the included Shadow Mount Plus build.

[00:07:57]Backport was removed from the all-in-one poplines because it is already included in Shadow Mount Plus and it should shave off around 5 seconds from loading.

[00:08:07]Remember that using the ISO requires compatible firmware, a compatible Blu-ray setup, and a properly prepared disk. So, those of you that have a burner can take advantage of this. Next up, we've got a pretty big update over here to a very popular tool, which is PS5 Payload Manager 0.3.3.

[00:08:30]So, the cloud repository screen has been included and this gives us searching and sorting by category, update time, or name. If you sort the preferences, those do persist now between sessions.

[00:08:44]Third-party repositories can define custom payload categories and the number of supported sources has been increased.

[00:08:52]The launcher icon now appears in the media section of the PS5 homebrew. This release also fixes the HTTP server becoming unresponsive after rest mode or a dropped network connection. SSL verification has been improved. File uploading from our West devices has been adjusted and some application installer cleanup problems were fixed. The good news is is that existing users do not need to manually replace their original L file version 0.3.3 can be installed through Payload Manager's own repository interface. Next up, we've got Shadow Mount Plus and it has now reached version 1.7 alpha 4. So, this update adds optional persistent image mounting between game launches, reduces the scanner's file descriptor usage, and improves the USB game recovery after suspending and resuming the console. It also adds more detailed crash reports for tracked games, seamless switching between mounted games, and localized notifications for 30 languages. As always, keep in mind that when you use these alpha versions, they are not ready for primetime, so do this at your own risk. Next up, we did get an update over here to the PS5 Y2JB auto loader. So, if you're wondering what this is, it basically is a Y2JB auto loader that automatically runs a compatible kernel exploit, and then loads configured elf payload. So, this project currently lists support for PS5 firmwares 4.03 all the way up to 12.70.

[00:10:40]And the reason that I'm calling this out is is that I noticed over here in the releases that not only did gaganana update the Y2JB, but they also merged that in over here and added firmware 13.40 support. So, anyways, this is one of those projects that I am using on my main machine, so you should check it out, too. Next up, let's go over to an update over here from EchoStretch, and what we saw was was that he released dump installer 1.07 beta, and the change log for this one is pretty short. It just contains an installation fix. So, if you have experienced installation failures with the previous release version 1.07, it may be worth testing. And since it is labeled as beta software, use the same precautions you would with any experimental homebrew applications. Next up, let's go over to a project that I'm pretty excited about. And this one is by stoned modder who has made all kinds of different applications for us. And this one is called PS game state lib. And this is a standalone PS5 game state detection payload. And primarily developers are going to get a lot more out of this. And so this payload runs as a demon on the console and listens on TCP port 9877. And a Python desktop tool can query it every 5 seconds and display information such as the title ID, process ID, controller focus, application ID, and much much more. So this is very useful groundwork for tools that need to know whether a game is actually active instead of simply checking whether an eboot.bin process already exist. Next up, we have an update over here from Earth Onion.

[00:12:45]And that is Garlic Save Manager 1.12 has been released. And so this very latest release focuses on file permissions inside mounted PlayStation file system.

[00:12:57]So some imported saves could authenticate and mount successfully, but later be reported as corrupted because files were written with the permission of 0644 instead of 0777.

[00:13:12]So version 1.11, which was the previous version down here, it fixed the primary file copy path. And then version 1.12 expands that correction to generated param.sfo files and much much more. Now, what's kind of cool is is that back over here in version 1.10, this one added multiple backup destinations. So, you could use the PS5 local storage, USB, FTP, and even Google Drive. So, anyways, this is a great little project and thanks to Earth Onion as they've been doing tons of stuff over in the scene. So, next up we have yet another project by StoneModder and this one is for Discord. It is called PS Presence and it is a PS5 payload enabling Discord Presence for your jailbroken console. Python is required and here is what it looks like. So, inside of Discord, you can see that they are playing Astro Bot on a PlayStation 5 and just like always, they have released the full source code to this. And so, the only few things that you'll need is going to be Python and Pa Presence package in order to get running with this. So, anyways, take a look at this repo if you want to learn more about that. Next up, I thought I would include a quick project that I've been working on and this one is called Universal Payload Sender and really what I decided to do was just to rebuild Netcat GUI into something that had a little bit more data validation and just a few other little minor tweaks that I was looking for. So, anyways, if you do want an alternative to Netcat GUI, you can go ahead and grab the Universal Payload Sender. All you need to do is supply an IP address, a port number, and then the payload file, and then send it. And what's really great about this is is that this is running in Python completely and the only other thing that you're going to need is either a Windows, a Mac, or a Linux computer. So, this one, unlike Netcat GUI, works absolutely everywhere. So, anyways, the full source to this is currently available if anybody wants to take a look at and help me build on to it. I have quite a few ideas that I'll probably get to over the next couple of days and weeks. And the very last thing that I'm going to leave you with is all kinds of new PlayStation 5 games that have recently been released. So, we can see in here we've got In Nightmare, we've got Kong, The Thing Remastered. I would 100% recommend that you go ahead and play through this one, Call of Duty: Vanguard, and yeah, Madden and a couple of other games are starting to drop. So, yeah, go ahead and check out some of the latest and greatest PS5 games that are now available. Anyways, [snorts] thank you so very much for watching, and I'll see you on the next one. Michael out.