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What happened
Tom’s Hardware reports that a researcher known as DiscoStarslayer and collaborators reverse-engineered and dumped the CXP102064 MechaCon used in an original PlayStation 2 model. The work took about four years and involved chemical decapping, optical reads, and microscopy to expose and record the chip.
How it works
The process did not depend on a perfect first read. Tom’s Hardware says imperfections in the optical dumps revealed an exploit that enabled software extraction of the chip data. The MechaCon controls optical-drive and flash-drive mechanics and supports PS2 security functions including MagicGate and KELF decryption.
That makes a small support chip part of the preservation target. Understanding its behavior can give emulator and homebrew developers more information about the console’s security boundary, while replacement-drive and repair work can benefit from knowing what the original hardware actually did.
The work also shows why preservation sometimes requires destructive laboratory methods. A chip hidden inside an aging console cannot always be documented through normal software interfaces or service manuals.
Why it matters
Preserving a console is not only about documenting its main processor or graphics chip. The less visible controllers and security components can determine whether software boots, media works, and future tools can reproduce the original environment.
What we don’t know yet
Tom’s Hardware presents emulation, homebrew, preservation, and replacement optical drives as possible beneficiaries, not completed outcomes. This is community reverse engineering, not a Sony disclosure, and the extraction does not guarantee an immediate emulator feature.
Source: Tom’s Hardware, Mark Tyson, September 16, 2026 - original report