ARM Blog

This is a somewhat strange post for my blog, but since I’m using this on my NAS to serve it’s games to my PS3 I might as well spend a small post about it.

A couple of weeks ago I’ve pulled my old PS3 out of the basement and fired it up. As expected, the device still works, but was using a rather old firmware and since my PS3 is jailbreaked, I needed to update the firmware first.

I’m always used to place the PS3 games on an external harddisk which is handy, but rather slow using the USB2 bus of the PS3, so since I needed to update the firmware I wanted to check if there were other possibilities. Luckily there was a very nice one: Playing your PS3 games directly from your NAS!

The construction is pretty simple, there is software called “ps3netsrv” which can be used in conjunction with Multiman and using a Cobra enabled firmware of Cobra stick. The Cobra part is mandatory here, using Rogero or other firmwares non-Cobra based will not work!

In this post I’ll explain how to compile the ps3netsrv program and how to use it with the PS3!

Prerequisites:
– A PS3 obviously and it has to be running a Cobra enabled firmware (or use the Cobra USB stick)
– A network storage device (in this case my Linksys NAS) running Linux
– PS3 ISO games
– Latest version of MultiMan installed on the PS3

Installation:
You’ll need git installed and a C compiler in order to build the server. Using the following commands you can retrieve the ps3netsrv software from Github:

git clone --recursive git://github.com/dirkvdb/ps3netsrv--.git
cd ps3netsrv--
git submodule update --init
make CXX=g++

Now the software is compiled! Let’s use it now to serve your media!

Running ps3netsrv:
Let’s say you have your PS3 game ISO’s in:
/media/games/PS3/

It would suffice to run it like:
./ps3netsrv++ /media/games/PS3/

Or dump the process to the background:
./ps3netsrv++ /media/games/PS3/ &

Note that you have to use the general folder names Sony uses for the kinds of media used, that’s VIDEOS for movies, MUSIC for music etc. These folders need to be present inside the directory you are sharing using ps3netsrv! For game ISO’s they need to be placed in a folder called “PS3ISO”.

Also placing games in the GAMES folder in JB format will not work at the moment as MultiMan does not have any support for this feature. It may be added in the future, but as of writing it was still unsupported.

Setting up MultiMan:
In order to see the games that are present on your NAS you’ll have to open up MultiMan and go to the Settings tab. Navigate to “Network Servers” and select “/nethost0 – Enable”. A total of 3 popupboxes will open up which want to know the IP-address of the server, the port (best left as is) and the friendly name you want to give this host.

Playing games:
Now go back to the Games tab in MultiMan and hit the Refresh option, depending on the speed of your network and NAS the games should pop up in the list within a couple of seconds and are recognizable with the tag “ISO” and with a globe icon indicating that it is on a remote server. Select a game and start it as you would with any other game!

Updates:
Some games push updates, although they can be applied normally it may result in a black screen where you have to reboot the console. In this case updates are not possible, once prompted for them, simply deny them.

Converting games:
I have almost all my games in the well-known JB format, that is the directory contents of the original game disc. Since this is not supported over the network they need to be converted to ISO format. One simple tool called “PS3 ISO Tools” can be used for this purpose, the only caveat is that it only runs on Windows.

It can be downloaded using the following URL:
PS3 ISO Tools V2.1

The conversion of a game can take a couple of minutes, depending on the amount of files which resides in the game folder you are trying to convert and is also depending on the disk speed you are reading from and writing to. The tool also has the possibility to supply the toplevel folder which contains all your current JB formatted games and can convert them all to ISO!

Tips:
Don’t use Wifi for streaming, although it will work, it will be horribly slow as the PS3 itself only has a Wifi G connection, limited to 54Mbps. Using at least a 100Mbit wired connection will be alot better. Using Gbit at home works just flawless, loading times have never been as good as they are now!

Have fun!

Disclaimer:
The instructions here are used on my side to play the games I’ve bought on disc. In the past I’ve ripped the contents to USB disk in order to play them. I don’t use this method to play games illegal and neither should you.