Setting Up your PS3 for Development
Well Welcome! If you’re here it means you are in for some nostalgic adventure. The PlayStation™3 system is one of the most hardest and intriguing hardware ever built. It’s unique cell architecture makes things challenging, which also makes the entire process of development even more exciting. In the coming blog posts we’ll dive deeper into the Architecture and detailed tutorial series on how to develop and take full advantage of the SDK and use other industry standard frameworks.
Before we get all technical let us first setup out environment and explore some samples, samples are a great way to stay motivated and explore the SDK. We’ll see what all tools we will be needing along with the SDK and configure everything to start our journey deep down this rabbit hole. I will also explain the structure of the SDK in detail in the coming posts.
Good news! You don’t really need an actual PS3 Development kit which looks like this :
You can convert your own PS3 into a dev kit. But there’s a catch, If you’re lucky enough and have either a PS3 Phat or one of the PS3 Slim(CECH-200xx, 250x) models you can jailbreak them!. I hate to disappoint you but it doesn’t work on any of the PS3 super slim models and slim models above 250xx. Yes! you’ll need a jailbroken console running on a specific custom firmware (Rebug DEX) to actually develop. We will also be using a lot of leaked and deprecated stuff, but that’s the fun of it right!
Jailbreaking your console
There are many amazing youtube videos explaining this so I’m going to link to some of them here. You can continue reading this after you have jailbroken your console.
How to Jailbreak Your PS3 on Firmware 4.87 or Lower! by Mr.Mario2011
How to Downgrade CFW on a Jailbroken PS3 by Mr.Mario2011
How to Update CFW on a Jailbroken PS3 by Mr.Mario2011
Remember to use the Rebug Custom firmware, because we will be using the DEX(developer firmware) version of it!.
If you need to downgrade your system no worries! Here is a video on it. (It will probably be necessary if you’re on 4.88 because Rebug-DEX is only available up to 4.84)
Converting from CEX to DEX
I would suggest you to follow this amazing youtube tutorial on How to Convert a Jailbroken PS3 from CEX to DEX by Mr.Mario2011.
CEX vs DEX What’s the difference?
CEX is the retail version firmware and DEX is the developer firmware with additional debug features.
Congratulations! Now you have an unofficial PS3 Development Kit! Hooray🎉!! (probably illegal too idk)
Don’t worry the feds don’t care.
Setting up your development Environment
Now you can move to your PC and get ready be a software pirate. First you’ll need to download the PS3 leaked SDK from here. It comes packed with a lot of samples, official documentation, tools and libraries for the PS3. I will explain the SDK structure in details so don’t be confuse if things doesn’t make sense.
SDK Installation
Let’s get on with the SDK installation process. Unzip the SDK and double-click the SDK installer.
It looks something like this
Click on the SDK and the Installer should open up, the options should be straigt forward, select all that yout want and click on Install and it should be smooth as butter. Here are the list of selections I made
// TODO: Improve this in detail!
Testing the SDK
Goto C:\usr\local\cell\samples\sdk\graphics\psgl psgl stand for PSGl- Playstation OpenGL, well I guess as a graphics programmer you’d be more comfortable with some OpenGL ES/2.0 code rather than the daunting Playstaion’s GCM API. So open the Visual studio solution selec oyu choice of sample project as the startup project and click on the PS3 debugger that looks like this. This will build and then Open up the PS3 debugger that looks super weird.
Use the Return to XMB aka start in software mode option in the target manager to quit out of the application, as the traditional ps button won’t work because you’ve now switched to debug mode of the OS. I hope you get to see some pretty graphics that will put a wide smile, now that you’ve setup everything we will begin our journey down this dirty and intruiging rabbit hole. Here is a cube demo I ran from the samples. Looks sick eh?
If you have any question or trouble during any of the steps feel free to comment below. I’ll assist you as soon as possible.