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PS2 Controller Hack Nets Codes for GTA
glengineer writes "Gotta love edisoncarter for his cheesy, brute force, and effective hack of the PS2 controller to discover cheats for Grand Theft Auto - San Andreas. He used the parallel port of his PC connected to relays on the PS2 controller to step thru the combinations of button pushing needed to obtain cheats that were not released by Rockstar."
By FAR, one of the best things to come about from A.D.D.
Apparently the webserver's connection is over a parallel port connection too.
I remember being a little kid, looking at Nintendo Power's codes section and wondering where all those codes came from. Did kids like me just sit there all day punching random codes in and seeing what happened?
Looks like someone figured out a way to do just that.
"We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all." - Douglas Adams
Heh heh heh! I love these kinds of hacks because they cut to the reason that PCs are both so useful and at the same time the bane of the movie, recording, and to some extent, the gaming industry. As far as I know, this hack to get the cheat codes doesn't violate any current laws (maybe the EULA for the game), but I can imagine the legal types at Rockstar not being too happy, especially if Rockstar planned to profit by publishing the codes later. In their zeal to protect IP like cheat codes, I'm sure that some would love to be able to ban PCs altogether or at least control access to various ports with DRM schemes. There's already at least one DRM enabled BIOS shipping.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Is the art of the Easter Egg lost on you or what?
It's a long standing tradition among game makers to leave little presentsin the final build of the game,
and much like real presents it's up to you whether or not to open them when you should (after you've beaten the game)
or to completely destroy the experience by using them early on.
In this age of big business and artificial limitations I find it very refreshing that developers remember where they came from.
So, how did the "relays" know when he'd actually found one? I'd read the article, if it was actually available.
SUre, it's easy to program some i/o lines to just twiddle all combinations of the buttons, but you have to have something that confirms that you actually hit something interesting.
Even better, it's the presentation. You play a game once without them, and you play it with cheats the second or third time around -- it's an entirely different game.
Last year when bored I became a fan of turning my UT2003 single-player speed ('slomo') down to something far below normal, like 0.001, 1.0 being normal. At that speed it became more like an elaborate chess game, where you had minutes to decide where to go or who to shoot first. While it's not for everyone, it made for some very interesting matches -- you savor the triumph of a frag a little more, and then kick your own ass for not noticing the guy behind you for four minutes.
There's something that we like in games that's more about situations than strictly playing. Cheat codes allow us to get to the parts we really liked about the game.
I bet his system also plays a mean game of Tekken!
(joking, I love tekken...)
Slashdot - Mutual Assured Discussion
Damn right. I never played VC or SA but in GTA 3 I eventually got bored of all the stupid missions and would see how long I could stay alive with the army hunting me down.
:) But yeah, playing for survival is fun.
;)
You know it's funny, when I BOUGHT VC I played it for about 25 minutes, other than that, my old roomie and I were just plugging in cheat codes and seeing who could last longest. The funny part is, I eventually got sucked into the plot (I -love- Scarface). Went and started playing the game, realized once I took over half the game, that I had so much damned money that the cheat codes couldn't compete with my arsenal
You know what I miss though? Is that in GTA1 it gave you a REPORT once you finally got hospitalized or arrested. How many misdemeanors, felonies, cops you killed, civilians you killed, etc... Made it a hell of a lot more fun for going on rampages
http://server3.uploadit.org/files/KSquared-edisonc ircuit.jpg
But the real question is my understanding of the playstation controllers is that they speak a serial-uart communications to the ps2. Wouldn't it more elegant to rig up serial-out from a computer to the ps2?
The nice thing about the parallel port is that it is pin programmable. You can individually control any of the pins directly. Where as with serial you need to talk UART
Since all I see is a pic of the joystick on the main page, I wonder if he's trying out all the buttons (L3, R3, and the directions on the analog sticks as well as select and start)
Even with the 12 "buttons" he's pressing and an assumed maximum code length of 12 presses, he's got 12^12 possibilities -- 8916100448256. Testing that number of possibilities (with 12 button presses per possibility) means that if he can spit out something like 48 button presses a second that leaves him with 2,150,000 days to find all the combinations.
If the game has been out for 120 days (I don't know the real amount of time, I'm estimating), that joystick would have to be sending 1 million plus button presses a second to have a complete code list as of today? Anyone know how often the PS2 probes the joystick for button presses?
There is one key error in my math that might shrink the figure by a bit: if you have a range of 24 button presses that the joystick is sending, that could actually be a test of 12 different 12-lengthed codes. My *guess* (I can't prove it mathematically -- maybe someone else can) is that it would shrink times/sizes by a factor of 10. Meaning at 48 button presses a second you need 215,000 days or to have found every code as of today you would have need to be sending input at ~100,000 button presses a second. Even then, assuming the analog state of the joystick can be packed into a byte somehow, that exceeds parallel port speeds.
Add *ALL* the buttons into the mix, R3, L3, Select, Start, and the directions on the analog sticks and the problem just gets a whole lot harder.
Someone please correct me if my math is off. I really am curious to know how the guy discovered so many codes so quickly.
From what I can tell, he leaves it on all day. He's using cheats and convienent locations to muffle or get rid of all the other sounds, and when the Cheat Confirmed box pops up and blips, Cool Edit catches it. Then, he just looks for the spikes in the otherwise flat sound wave, and cross-references to the program to see what code was entered at that time.