[Question]: Best place to source information from?

[jonbarrow]

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What would you like to know?

Where is the best place to source accurate, up-to-date, information for these guides/supported consoles/firmware versions?

There seems to be a common issue in the PlayStation scene (and possibly the Xbox scene, I haven't looked yet) surrounding CFW/homebrew. Information seems VERY scattered across TONS of random sites, forums, and wikis. All of these sources seem to be outdated or incorrect in some way or another. This makes sourcing information for this site challenging. I can't even find sources that have consistent lists of firmware version numbers

This has caused issues such as #7, where the source I got the information from for the PS4 was outdated, and thus support is broken here despite being just released

The Nintendo scene has largely solved this using https://hacks.guide. This is a centralized guide wiki for the Wii, Wii U, 3DS, and Switch (and PS Vita for some reason). The guides are all community-maintained on GitHub making it easy to ensure they are up to date https://github.com/hacks-guide. I can't seem to find the equivalent for the PlayStation/Xbox scenes

The closest I found is https://consolemods.org, but this is somewhat confusing to navigate and seems to be more of a research dump/wiki in general rather than a homebrew guide made for standard end users. And even then, this site also seems to be outdated. The PS4 section (https://consolemods.org/wiki/PS4:PS4_Mods_Wiki) links to several exploit sites, which all seem to have varying levels of firmware compatibility information

For instance, one exploit site (https://sleirsgoevy.github.io/ps4jb2/75x) says that if you are on a firmware higher than 7.55 then you cannot hack the console, whereas https://cthugha.exploit.menu has options for firmware version 9.00. I've also seen other sources claim support for up to 11.00. This same exploit site also links to https://sleirsgoevy.github.io/ps4jb, which says anything higher than 7.02 cannot be hacked which contradicts that site's own information

Additionally, finding reliable sources for firmware version numbers seems to be an issue. All 3 of these sites claim to document PS4 firmware versions, yet all 3 have different lists of version numbers:

• https://www.xtremeps3.com/ps4-firmware-history
• https://darksoftware.xyz/PS4/FWlist
• https://darthsternie.net/ps4-firmwares

All of these issues combined make sourcing information for this site somewhat difficult, and it's not clear which guides we should even link to for end users once we have accurate compatibility information

I'm wondering if it might be worth trying to contact the hacks.guide team to see about adding more consoles there? There are some open issues on https://github.com/hacks-guide/Guide_Landing/issues talking about the PS2/PS3, so there seems to be community interest, but the maintainers seem to have largely ignored these. Since I'm the lead developer of https://pretendo.network I might see if I can pull some strings and get in direct contact with the right people about this? Talked to some people internally, looks like hacks.guide is specifically for Nintendo consoles (the Vita being there is a hold-over from the previous owner). The site is maintained by https://github.com/nh-server, so adding non-Nintendo guides there seems like a no-go

Alternatively, https://cfw.guide also exists which seems to serve the same goals as https://hacks.guide. I have no idea why these communities are split, since they seem to cover the same ground in a lot of places, but this isn't a knock-off site either (it houses the official Cemu guide for example) (the sites are split seemingly because they just have different maintainers with different goals/platforms). This site SEEMS to want to support other platforms we are interested in, seeing as they have repos for them, but the guides are not online and seem to be inactive. For example:

• https://github.com/cfw-guide/ps3.cfw.guide
• https://github.com/cfw-guide/ps4.cfw.guide

Until something better is made, I may need help from those familiar with the PlayStation/Xbox scenes to help keep this up to date, as I mostly work in the Nintendo scene