Hardware Flashers:Overview

Hardware Flashers

Both early launch consoles which feature NAND flash memory (block devices, that interleave their data unlike NOR flash) and later consoles which feature NOR flash memory are able to be flashed.

Different Flashers

Infectus

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Noraliser

Marcan has made a NOR flasher / address sniffer for his PS3 slim by re-purposing a FPGA board (Xilinx Spartan3E XC3S500E) made for Wii hacking. Noraliser is a git repo that contains the HDL (verilog) and associated host computer tools for flashing/sniffing. There are ~50 signals to solder.

NORway

Work has been underway to brink a low cost AVR (Atmel AT90USB1286) based NOR flasher that is capable of reading and writing on all consoles by defyboy. This was opensourced and further enhanced, now known as NORway for Teensy++ 2.0 boards.

Progskeet

Other people haven't been sitting idle either: uf6667 and bmx have developed Progskeet 1.0 / 1.1, based on an Actel A3P125 FPGA for NAND and NOR based consoles (not only PS3, but also useable for Wii and Xbox360). Later followed up by Progskeet 1.2, which was anounced to get an open API. Although highly hyped/marketed as universal flasher, it is not the recommended end user choice: long history of issues, long time between fixes, no clear support path etc.

PNM

"No_One" has developed PNM - The PS3 NOR Manager is a custom board based on a FPGA (Altera Cyclone3 EP3C25) and 2 flash sockets. PNM is capable to handle the basic features like read/dump/update/copy but also to swap (hot swap or cold swap) the NOR used. It also enbles features to sniff bus activities, emulate NOR flash etc.

PIC32MX

PIC32MX is an opensource PIC based NOR flasher.

E3

The E3 is a China commercial developped PS3 only 'flasher'.
It uses MCU ARM 32BIT 256K FLASH 144LQFP - STM32F103ZCT6 controller to dump the NOR.