PS3 Possibility of a Life With Playstation Revival? (Request) (sans folding@home)

Joe Robertson

Joe Robertson

Member
Its been 13 years since Life With Playstation went down which is a damn shame since it was a total vibe and genuinely useful, I think it would be awesome if someone managed to reimplement its News and Weather features like whats been done on the Wii!

Its been done on the Wii by pointing it to modern API's for its respective functions, Accuweather and Google's globe API's are functional on the Wii and the News Channel was fixed by making it use modern RSS Feeds which to me somewhat proves its not impossible for these old clients to play nice with modern hosts

It's unreasonable to expect folding@home functionality to be brought back, most people know that and it wouldn't be expected to have its functionality restored but I still think there's a boatload of people who'd be interested in all the other features of Life With Playstation being functional again! I use my Wii's Weather and News channel every day and my PS3 is my main media centre so having all that functionality packed into 1 box instead of 2 would be incredible. My Wii's GPU is on its way out from running in standby for years

Anyways, I hope someone smarter than me can let me know if its possible or not, I'd do it myself if I had literally any experience with making changes to the probably encrypted PKG's and RSS and other API's
 
Last edited:
Mystyqblaze347 said:
I have gotten it to boot and go to world/play music. But the feeds are dead and would be cool if they could somehow be resurrected.
Click to expand...
The PS3 would feel so much more alive if the feeds get fixed, I think life with playstation is the second best "in house" program for the PS3 [next to pshome] and would truly give the PS3 its full functionality back

I feel that its possible, .pkgs have been decryptable for a long time and the feeds should be pretty standard for 2008. From what I've seen online nobody has really had a crack at it, I'd be satisfied if an experienced PS3 homebrew dev took a look at Life With Playstation's code and told us if tricking it into using modern services is impossible, infeasible, difficult or simple.

Again, I'd do it myself but I'm only a ratchet android custom rom dev so I can only read basic yaml, if it comes down to it I could take a crack at it but it'll take me months to properly learn how to deal with the PS3's foreign to me environment
 
Funny enough… I've been taking a stab at it. I too got the package to start, and I'm working on capturing some traffic to see what it is trying to do. Last night I got it to talk to a fake webserver that doesnt do a whole lot besides logging GET requests, so I know at least I got redirection working.

My main challenge is that my time is extremely limited, so I can only work on bursts of time. Wish me luck!
 
marciolsf said:
Funny enough… I've been taking a stab at it. I too got the package to start, and I'm working on capturing some traffic to see what it is trying to do. Last night I got it to talk to a fake webserver that doesnt do a whole lot besides logging GET requests, so I know at least I got redirection working.

My main challenge is that my time is extremely limited, so I can only work on bursts of time. Wish me luck!
Click to expand...

Oh wow! I'm hoping you manage to hit a breakthrough because this could be a big thing!

Take all the time you need, getting redirection working in the first place is a pretty big step and proves there's some wiggle room to get this going. You seem a lot more knowledgeable in this area than me so I probably cant help but I have no doubt you can at the very least figure out if something like this is infeasible, best of luck to you :D

marciolsf said:
Funny enough… I've been taking a stab at it. I too got the package to start, and I'm working on capturing some traffic to see what it is trying to do. Last night I got it to talk to a fake webserver that doesnt do a whole lot besides logging GET requests, so I know at least I got redirection working.

My main challenge is that my time is extremely limited, so I can only work on bursts of time. Wish me luck!
Click to expand...
It's been a hot minute since I last checked up on this lol, have you had any luck with LWP and getting it to display some data? Still curious about this
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I havent given up, just been busy with IRL stuff. Last time I worked on it, and ran into the same problem I ran into last time I worked on this, last year — at some point the client just stops pinging the webserver and keeps on throwing errors. No matter how many times I would reset the console, reinstall the app, it would refuse to try the network again. Then some time later and voila, it starts connecting again.

I did just finish rebuilding some of my networking gear, so I should have some time soon to try to get this working again. I really super want to!
 
marciolsf said:
I havent given up, just been busy with IRL stuff. Last time I worked on it, and ran into the same problem I ran into last time I worked on this, last year — at some point the client just stops pinging the webserver and keeps on throwing errors. No matter how many times I would reset the console, reinstall the app, it would refuse to try the network again. Then some time later and voila, it starts connecting again.

I did just finish rebuilding some of my networking gear, so I should have some time soon to try to get this working again. I really super want to!
Click to expand...
I wish you the best of luck in figuring it out!
Im not really skilled in anything coding related so Im afraid I won't be of good help but I'll be there and trying to reach out more people about this project so we can get more help

Right now, im trying to find out where PIC1.png of the app was taken... no clues except its somewhere in Italy

I tried subreddits and my posts keep getting taken down because its not a public place and whatever [emoji58]
064390818b9f95dc5afd6959a54809d5.jpg
 
ok, so I found time over the last few days, and it's slowly becoming an obsession. Here's where I'm at:

* consistently getting the client to connect to the mock server (currently just a docker container I'm calling fah-server)
* While poking through the package, I found template responses for various things, including what looks like the response that contains news and weather
* The client is trying to talk to the server and asking for authentication, I think? It doesn't look quite right based on other things within the package, so I'm trying to mock up a response (but i have no idea what that should look like).
* I also got the client to request a list of channels, but then it just.... stops there and doesn't do anything with it.

What I really need is to decode the eboot somehow, but I don't know how -- that would hopefully remove a lot of the gueswork. Admittedly I haven't had time to look into how yet, but I'm sure there's a way.
 
marciolsf said:
ok, so I found time over the last few days, and it's slowly becoming an obsession. Here's where I'm at:

* consistently getting the client to connect to the mock server (currently just a docker container I'm calling fah-server)
* While poking through the package, I found template responses for various things, including what looks like the response that contains news and weather
* The client is trying to talk to the server and asking for authentication, I think? It doesn't look quite right based on other things within the package, so I'm trying to mock up a response (but i have no idea what that should look like).
* I also got the client to request a list of channels, but then it just.... stops there and doesn't do anything with it.

What I really need is to decode the eboot somehow, but I don't know how -- that would hopefully remove a lot of the gueswork. Admittedly I haven't had time to look into how yet, but I'm sure there's a way.
Click to expand...
Would a debug eboot or elf maybe help? Just a thought.
 
marciolsf said:
That'd be even better! I'm having to guess a lot of what the client is trying to do, so the guesswork is really slowing things down...
Click to expand...
Hi, how is it going? I was in vacation for some time and I just saw this

Those are some great discoveries and im pretty sure we may able to get more out of them soon, maybe someone here knows a person that knows how to work with eboots?

Anyhow I really believe in you and your work and I hope we can get more people on board to help you figure this out! Lots of luck to you!! [emoji2]
 
thanks! Yeah, I spent a ton of time on it this week. I did figure out how to decrypt the package using some community tools + ghidra. I have most of the package disassembled right now, and I'm trying to make sense of it all. I definitely feel like I'm starting to understand how the package works

Unfortunately though the decryption hasnt been all that helpful yet. It helped confirm something I'd suspected through packet capture - the package is doing some form of authentication against a defunct host (www.cbe-world.com) as part of the news gathering process. Without knowing what the server response should be, the whole thing just stalls. I cant't find anything about that site, so I dont know why the ps3 is trying to login.
Now, I dont think its trying to login with your psn account — I can tell thats a completely different process. I'm guessing its a service-level authentication (so you cant just login with your browser, for example). But again, without knowing the response, Im dead in the water…
 
marciolsf said:
thanks! Yeah, I spent a ton of time on it this week. I did figure out how to decrypt the package using some community tools + ghidra. I have most of the package disassembled right now, and I'm trying to make sense of it all. I definitely feel like I'm starting to understand how the package works

Unfortunately though the decryption hasnt been all that helpful yet. It helped confirm something I'd suspected through packet capture - the package is doing some form of authentication against a defunct host (www.cbe-world.com) as part of the news gathering process. Without knowing what the server response should be, the whole thing just stalls. I cant't find anything about that site, so I dont know why the ps3 is trying to login.
Now, I dont think its trying to login with your psn account — I can tell thats a completely different process. I'm guessing its a service-level authentication (so you cant just login with your browser, for example). But again, without knowing the response, Im dead in the water…
Click to expand...
That site is mysterious, there are no records of it in any search results or captures in the wayback machine, I suppose it wouldn't have had a interface as it would just be used to authenticate?

cbe sounds to me like Cell Broadband Engine
Cell Broadband Engine-world ???

Does the app keep a log of authentication processes? If so maybe like PS home we could try getting any logs from people with life with playstation before it got shut down, if they didn't get tricked into "updating" to 1.22
 
Thats not a bad guess! But yeah, I cant find anything about it - internet archive, whois, etc…

The app does have some logging features, controller via xml flags, but they are all disabled out of box. What would be really lucky is finding a debug package, like the home folks did.

I've mostly been working with the final working version of the package, 1.21. Im thinking maybe if I decompile my way across older packages, I can learn something new.
 
marciolsf said:
Thats not a bad guess! But yeah, I cant find anything about it - internet archive, whois, etc…

The app does have some logging features, controller via xml flags, but they are all disabled out of box. What would be really lucky is finding a debug package, like the home folks did.

I've mostly been working with the final working version of the package, 1.21. Im thinking maybe if I decompile my way across older packages, I can learn something new.
Click to expand...
True, a debugging package would surely help
Its not a bad idea either to also decompile older versions like you said, maybe the release version is structured differently and let's you easily bypass this authentication which then could let us use that instead

Incase of the ps3 asking for a update we can just change the param.sfo to say 1.22 and itll be set
 
Mystyqblaze347 said:
Would a lwp v.1.0 pkg help? If so it is here is a zip format with other versions... https://archive.org/details/life-with-playstation

I'm still trying to dig and see what I can find...
Click to expand...
Thanks! I'll compare with the ones I have.

RoboKing's Cosmos said:
It's awesome to see this revival. Hopefully, we can redirect the Earth on LWP with the missing content that Sony removed but has maintained elsewhere.
Click to expand...
I have a couple of ideas for that, once we can get through the authentication issues. I *think I understand the news file format, I just gotta talk the LWP client into asking for it, lol.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Back
Top