PlayStation 4 : Breaking Into Modern Gaming

INTRO

Sony’s PlayStation has been a beast player in the gaming arena for years now, showing up right in the middle of the fight and landing devastating punches left and right with rampant abandon. Atari had peaked and was on the downswing, Nintendo was pwning the market with the NES, Game Boy and SNES, and Sega was cleaning house with the Genesis/Megadrive, Game Gear, and the venerable Master System. The Saturn was in there somewhere too, but quickly went down flailing and was never seen again.

January 1995, and Sony came along, looking a bit like a street urchin rummaging for scraps. By 2013, it was clear that Sony knew what time it was on the street, as evidenced by their domination of the market, with the PS2 selling a record 155.2 million units, and Nintendo’s DS sniffing at its heels.

Today, for current (commercial) game consoles, you’re pretty much in one of 3 camps: Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft. The thing is, Nintendo’s current unique form factor has it running its own path and creating its own gaming experience apart from the others, while Sony and Microsoft are vying for top spot with platform exclusives (like HALO or Uncharted). Each has its own appeal and comparative drawbacks.

If you’re a modder, it’s pretty much down to Sony now. Nintendo has its massive team of lawyer vultures weighing down the power lines, watching for miscreants. Microsoft went the unapproachable route, and their platform runs as a hypervisor, making it (currently) impossible to mod in any permanent sense. While that method does put the XBox One in a prime position to become an emulation juggernaut, they have yet to show any signs of considering this angle seriously, and indeed have been actively cracking down on attempts to run Retroarch and the like on the very capable consoles.

Meanwhile, Sony has been working to keep up with the exploit sniffing crowd, but if you have just a little knowledge, you can still take advantage of the gaps they have been trying to patch out of existence, and enjoy gaming across the PS2/PS3/PS4 and XBox One eras!

THE BROAD STROKES

So here are the important parts to consider about this project:

• You can use PS4, Slim or Pro. The big difference is that the Pro is more powerful, so tends to cost more, depending on where you get it.
• You will have to re-jailbreak the console every time it is power-cycled (shut down completely and/or unplugged, as opposed to simply sleeping). While this might seem like it would be an intolerable annoyance, it’s only a minor issue once everything is setup properly. All your installed games and save data and settings will remain perfectly intact between these re-breaks, and the potential for trashing the drive contents is exceptionally low.
• Our primary limiting factor is the version of firmware that the console is running. Ideally, we want 9.00, but we can work with anything up to (but NOT beyond) 11.0. If your console is updated beyond 11.0, then sorry, but you’re stuck with the stock experience for now.
• The method outlined below is most reliable for firmware v9.0. If you’re at 11.0, there is an alternative method to make the jailbreak process even more automated! Look for hardware at https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256807387092009.html?gatewayAdapt=vnm2usa4itemAdapt
• Another method is using a Luckfox Pico to run the v11.0 jailbreak, but that requires actually opening the chassis and soldering the device to the mainboard.

THE NECESSARY BITS: HARDWARE

Hardware

THE NECESSARY BITS: SOFTWARE

THE PROCESS

Burn the SD card

Slot the card into your USB reader and slap that puppy into an available (hopefully working) USB slot. Launch your image burner app (I’m using BalenaEtcher here), select the downloaded image file, select the SD card as the destination, and burn that beautiful bean footage.

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Transfer updated GoldHEN to SD card

After the burn process completes, open the one drive partition containing the GoldHEN folder. Drop your updated GoldHEN .bin file in there, alongside the other 2.09 versions already present. You can leave those others there, just in case. They won’t cause any trouble down the road.

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Disable auto-updates on PS4

Go into Settings > Automatic Updates, and turn update downloads the frick OFF. We do NOT want Sony jumping in and helpfully jumping your firmware up to the latest, currently non-exploitable firmware version on there. If the update gets to download, you can still kill it in the Notifications section. If it actually gets to install, that’s it. Cue Private Hudson: “Game over man, game over!”

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Shut down PS4

Hold down the PS button on your controller, to to Power > Shut down PS4. Wait for the power light to stop its infernal blinking and go dark once and for all.

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Connect Pi to a USB port

If you’re using a Pi Zero (any why wouldn’t you?), make sure your SD card is mounted, and connect the USB cable to the SECOND port, not the one actually labeled PWR. Trust me: as long as you are using a USB cable that handles power and data, the Pi will power up fine this way.

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Boot PS4

Start ‘er up. Nothing will be different. Yet.

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Connect to the Pi’s ad-hoc network

• Open Settings
  • Network
    • Set up Internet Connection
      • Use Wi-Fi
        • Custom
        • PiZero network
        • Enter “password”
        • Automatic IP Address Settings
        • Do Not Specific DHCP Host Name
        • Manual DNS Settings
        • Primary DNS 7.7.7.1
        • Automatic MTU Settings
        • Do Not Use Proxy Server
        • Test Internet Connection

You may see errors about not being able to connect to the internet, but that’s fine, so long as you see Successful for “Obtain IP Address”

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Open User Guide

Now that DNS has been set to the Pi’s own internal IP, any action that normally accesses the internet will now instead forward you to the Pi’s hosted web app, instead. For this reason, you can most quickly get there by going to Settings > User’s Guide

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Set GoldHEN Version to Use

Now we can tell the web app which version of the GoldHEN loader we want it to drop when we run the jailbreak process. Go to the GoldHEN button NOT in the top row. This will be near the bottom of the list of buttons in the main field. In my example, it’s highlighted near bottom right. Select this one.

Now choose the newer version, and you will get confirmation that the setting has been updated. The jailbreak process will now drop this version onto the system when it has done its job.

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Select GoldHEN Jailbreak and Install Launcher

Now you can click the topmost GoldHEN button. Be patient! The Pi will switch over to USB emulation mode after a few moments, and run its jailbreak process. You will see notifications along the way as it’s happening. Don’t touch nuthin! When you see the notification to close the dialog after the popup closes, watch for the little notification indicating the USB device file system is unsupported. This is fine, and it’s an indicator that our expected process is working. Wait for that notification to actually go away, THEN hit X on your controller to close the dialog and get confirmation that the jailbreak has been completed.

After you hit OK again, you should see another notification indicating that GoldHEN has been installed. It’s done! GoldHEN replaces the Playstation Store icon at far left of the icon bar. In there, you can choose to install your available packages, enable cheats, and enable remote connection servers such as FTP.

We’re ready to go! Now you just need to get some stuff to actually play with. You can virtually rip discs you may already own, but these days, that’s like going through the effort and time to rip your own movie DVDs when so many others have already done the job with fine results. You could take the time to learn how to rip and compile your existing purchased discs, but that takes some time to figure out, and you could save all that one-time hassle by simply going out and downloading what you’re looking to install, instead.

POPULATING THE PALACE

First, take a moment and protect yourself. A lot of sites that deal with the content we’re after know dang well they’re popular, just as they know the people who frequent it have no means to hold them accountable if they should accidentally compromise your system with malware, or overrun your browser with ads that make them some extra bucks on the side. Any time you go to website looking for something for free, just assume there’s a catch, every single time. In this case, you can be much more safe if you install an adblocker extension to your browser. I’m not going to teach you how to do this part; if you don’t already have some awareness about this, you’ll soon learn the way the rest of us did: the hard way. Educate yourself or take your own chances, simple as that. Personally, I use uBlock Origin because it’s lightweight, effective, and doesn’t have any history of abusing its users’ trust (like when AdBlock Plus was found to be accepting payments to let some ad networks get through).

Seriously, do that step above. I may seem like I’m being lazy about it and offloading some legwork on you, but this is worth learning more about on your own. The short of it is that ads on most websites today aren’t just annoying; some can be very deceptive or even outright malicious, redirecting your browser to other websites designed to look like legitimate logins or warning messages. Ever get one of those big fullscreen blinking and moving alerts that your computer has been infected with a virus and you need to call a Microsoft Specialist right-freaking-now to save yourself, when you were only scrolling through a news website? Yeah, a malicious ad snuck in by some shady asshole did that. You want to never see those again? Install uBlock Origin on your Chrome, Edge or Firefox browser, and strut forward with confidence into the shady software underworld.

All snug and secured? Okay good. Now go here: https://dlpsgame.com/list-all-game-ps4/. This is a listing of available titles you can download for your jailbroken console. These downloaded games and apps get installed and run right from the internal hard drive, no disc required whatsoever.

What you will download from here will be .pkg files, which GoldHEN can extract and install automatically.

But first, you may want to get a 1File monthly membership to get around the free account limits, so this doesn’t take all year. 1File (or 1Fichier, as it’s French) is a bit like Dropbox or Google Drive, except is has crazy bandwidth and apparently very generous storage limits, as most people who offer up these downloads tend to host their stuff there. However, that site does charge for its services, with a substantial penalty for trying to use them for free. Non-members are limited to one download at a time, and at a drastically-limited speed. Since you’ll be dealing with potentially dozens of gigs at a time, this will require either the patience of a saint, or a few bucks out of your wallet for a month’s open access at the feeding trough. You don’t have to pay their actual rates though; there are quite a few vendors that resell membership vouchers at a reduced cost. Get a membership voucher for about 5 euros at https://www.boutique-pcland.fr/produit/cle-1fichier-com-compte-premium/. I would recommend paying with a temporary card number, just to be safe.

The vouchers are like Amazon or Steam gift cards. You buy the voucher, they provide a voucher code that you then activate over at 1fichier.com. It’s all French, so Google Translate in Chrome can help navigate this stuff.

Once the voucher is activated, you won’t need to go back to those sites independently again. After you’ve logged in with your membership, subsequent download requests from them should just automatically happen.

Now, use the DLPSGame site to find what you want, then download the appropriate version and whatever updates you want for it, including any available DLC!
Why wouldn’t you want to go right to the latest updated version of a game? Well, for example, Ace Combat 7 has some cheats available via the GoldHEN Cheats Manager, but the most options are available with v1.51 of the game, even though there are later updates available for the game itself. You may also see other download options available that pertain to earlier firmware versions. If you don’t care about cheats and stuff, just get the base game and whatever updates and DLC you want for it.

This image shows one of the options for the aforementioned Ace Combat 7. This is game ID CUSA05636 region USA, and version 1.51

There are links for the Game itself, the update to 1.51, and the DLC content which is outlined underneath. Links pointing to 1File will lead to the fastest and easiest download source to work with. I only ever choose something different if a particular entry has been removed for lack of activity or whatever other thing happened to that particular folder.

Depending on the game, the space it takes up could be anywhere from just over 1GB to over 70GB. Newer and more cinematic experience games will of course take up more space. Simpler arcade-style games will be much smaller.

You can also find PS2 and PS3 titles in that downloads list. These are backports that rely on the PS4’s native emulation capabilities. Most of these work pretty nicely, but do keep your eyes open; you might find there’s a new or remastered version of the game specifically to run on the PS4. For example, Mass Effect Legendary Edition provides all three of the original games in remastered format, and also consuming less total space than the original individual titles too! You can find Tomb Raider and Uncharted collections like this too.

Some of the downloads will come as multipart rar or zip files. You can use 7Zip to extract all of these effortlessly, but however you open them up, you need to be sure you’re getting the .pkg files themselves out of there and “in the open”.

Once you have your initial collection, move those pkg files over to your transport drive.

Connect the drive to your PS4, and launch GoldHEN > Debug Settings > Package Installer > Install All

Be patient! Large files still take time to transfer, and the PS4 doesn’t have a USB bus that’s some magic lightning-fast variation from what we use on desktop computers. Chances are it will take just as long to install these things as it took to move them to that transport drive in the first place.

INTO THE WILD BLUE YONDER

From here, you can explore what’s available via sites dedicated to the Homebrew hobby. Here are a couple to check out:

https://pkg-zone.com

https://www.psx-place.com/resources/categories/ps4-homebrew.42

For firmware v11.0, check out https://wololo.net/2024/05/11/pppwn-you-can-now-run-goldhen-on-ps4-11-000-with-a-raspberry-pi-and-its-100-automated/

Enjoy!