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."

Re:Sounds fishy

[pluke]

Not having read the article either or even played the game, i can only go on my prior knowledge of such games, which cause the controller to vibrate when you have correctly input a code. So if that was the case it would make automating the process very quick indeed.

Re:article text

[gotmemory]

K^2 posted this diagram that he made in paint. The post is buried in the forum, so I'll just put the link here:

http://server3.uploadit.org/files/KSquared-edisonc ircuit.jpg [uploadit.org]

Re:Will PCs Be Outlawed?

[blueZhift]

Hmm, who's ranting? I'm well aware of why the cheat codes are in there, but in case you had not noticed, there are plenty of publications that later publish the cheats. My guess is that in some cases they pay the game publisher for the privilege of publishing the cheats. Given that, it is not a long stretch to imagine a company not being happy that someone publishes these cheats without paying them to do so.

Yes I know, you already bought the game, yadda yadda, but in fact you bought a license to play the game on the platform it was made for. Reverse engineering is generally prohibited by the end user agreement. I don't like these licenses either, but right now that's the way it is. Rockstar could even argue that unpublished cheats are trade secrets.

Re:article text

[prockcore]

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

Re:huh.

[daveo0331]

Mod parent up! I'm surprised there's people that read (or used to read) Nintendo Power and don't realize Nintendo publishes it, or that can't figure out how a Nintendo publication would go about getting cheat codes for Nintendo games...

Anyway, Nintendo Power also used to publish glitches, like World -1 in SMB1 or the jumping-over-the-top-of-the-screen-and-using-fairy -magic glitch in Zelda 2. Since these things wouldn't have been put in deliberately, I'm guessing these were sent in by readers. The magazine actively encouraged people to send in stuff like this, and with over a million readers, it's not hard to see how a few of them would accidentally stumble upon some glitch even if the likelihood of doing so is very low.

Re:Trying all buttons? How fast?

[t2h3c]

The directions on the analog sticks are the same as the D-pad when entering cheats in GTA, so it would not be necessary to test both the D-pad and the analog stick. Select and start are not used for cheats because they pause the game, so it would not work.

Re: Catching Button Inputs

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

He has NOT discovered ALL of the cheats

[Anonymous Coward]

If you actually read the article, he says at the bottom that there are some cheats that have not been unlocked yet and still require the use of a cheat device. So he *hasnt* checked ALL the different combinations possible, only a number of them.

Plus, if you compile a list of cheats from the previous GTA games, and look closely at them all, you will actually start to see a pattern with the cheat codes. Theyre not just *random* button presses, theyre put in there by a developer who has just thought one up in their head and written it down. Take the first code on GTA: San Andreas, what is it?

R1 R2 L1 R2 L D R U L D R U

Look at it, you are going round the buttons on the right button pad in a circle twice. Its not random, its a logical number. Im sure with a bit of clever thinking and a well thought out program to brute force all logical numbers before random ones it would spit out plenty of working codes within a few days.