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."

Will PCs Be Outlawed?

[blueZhift]

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 [extremetech.com] shipping.

Re:Why do they exist?

[chudgoo]

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.

Re:Sounds fishy

[KDR_11k]

He could watch the screen and tell the computer something happened and then slowly replay the last few seconds of key presses and do some further experimentation to narrow down which keys were involved in the cheat.

Trying all buttons? How fast?

[LordOfYourPants]

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.

Because the game is too damn hard?

[EnglishTim]

Maybe I'm too old and lame to be playing it, but there were a couple of missiong on GTA: VC which were just too hard for me to complete without using the 'slow motion' cheat codes.