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The road so far... A long journey

Orbis development

If you want piracy, stop here buy originals.

Note: Other articles:

See also for historical purposes. All was done at that time in user land, and with usb traffic sniffer:


Brief History

I began my research on PlayStation 4 with PlayStation Camera in 2013. All done on macos side without PlayStation 4 user execution code publically available at that time. I was porting fMSX emulator to PlayStation Vita using a port from psp by Akop Karapetyan in parallel with PlayStation 4 research.

After that the first user's land webkit exploit was released around July 2015. The Ps4-playground allowed us, initially, to make memory dump of sprx modules loaded on PlayStation 4 user's process. I used that to get camera stuff done on that limited environment with the PS4-SDK from @CTurt. Cool don't you? PlayStation 4 homebrew execution PlayStation 4 Camera POC

The PS4-SDK had many limitations, it was payload oriented and gcc based, and binary payload loader was a real pain in the ass, and with camera plug in, it was a real mess with default load address used xD.

Hitodama began work in libps4 around November 2015 evolving to PS4SDK. Finally a proper sdk with elf generation features. So i decided to switch to Hitodama's PS4SDK because it was better option for what i was developing. I created ps4link a set of libraries based in old stuff that we used in the past in ps2/psp/ps3 to get host file system and elf loader features. I was making some camera stuff too and to get frames saved in a easy way from PlayStation 4, ps4link's remote file system features was the best option and loading my code in elf format with commands from ps4sh was much better and easy than that fucking binary payloads. So ps4link/debugnet/ps4sh were the tools in that time to work in proper way for me.

Switch to clang and gnu freebsd cross compiling binutils for linker was the next right choice. This generation has the best compiler directly from Sony using the same llvm code released by Sony in llvm/clang master branch. So we had a proper toolchain using clang and we were generating freebsd/ps4 valid elf non signed code that we can load in PlayStation 4. This was done in January 2016 switching ps4liink to clang.

Kernel exploit information for 1.76 was available on december 2015 by CTurt and others and finally on April 2016 we had kernel execution on 1.76. Hitodama made a very good job to incoporate kernel land features on PS4SDK so it was a very fun time learning new things about PlayStation 4 internal architecture.

We had lack of graphics a many other things so i began to work in liborbis, a set of little libraries to get my fMSX port for PlayStation 4 done. We got a method to load elfs generated with Hitodama's PS4SDK and liborbis with PlayRoom game, so finally we use it to load elf plain code generated with clang and liborbis with pad, audio, basic framebuffer and remote file system. Finally the initial graphic elf using liborbis2d was published all build with open source toolchain based on clang and gnu binutils and open source sdk!!!

After that fMSX port source was released and published on december 25th all done with open source toolchain and open source PS4SDK with liborbis for firmware 1.76.

Later @flatz released pkg installer,the tauon and gl es stuff with piglet:

I wrote orbisgl library incorporating to liborbis and PS4SDK for 5.05 firmware. We had only one problem, orbislink was the loader to load plain elfs but there was not open solution available to build the pkg and orbislink. Tauon was used for that so that was a problem to publish it, i didn't release the pkg for that reason, but all elfs build with Hitodama's PS4SDK were plain freebsd ps4 compliant elf. However they couldn't run directly in PlayStation without a proper loader. Orbislink is reading from host the homebrew.elf. Elf was done with open tools and load it in memory and jump to the entry in its own thread, like we are done in the past on other PlayStation consoles.

After that I released source for orbisGlPerf porting from raspberry pi code done by Steve Chamberlin

With a gl backend @frangar and me were working in libretro with liborbis incorporating changes to retroarch master branch.

A new msx port was released, the msxorbis a bluemsx port for PlayStation 4. It was presented in Sevilla in MSX RU06 May 18th 2019, check the video at the end of link (in spanish sorry)

Later in 2019 article about fuse on retail and liborbisNfs was released

And for my birthday something special a modern graphic backend was needed so i choose to port raylib to PlayStation 4 and orbisGl2 was released.

After orbisgl2 was released and in the middle of Covid pandemic @frangar,@fjtrujy,@masterzorag and me decided to make our own tool to generate sony compliant self using lief and a custom tool to generate all stub. Finally our own tools in open source way were done

New orbisdev sdk a new hope :P

Finally June 13th my name day San Antonio orbisdev team(@frangar,@fjtrujy,@masterzorag and me) bring to developers:


A lot of fun for devs

Thanks