2005-03-25 #1

Phantasy Star Online Communication

I was talking before aboout Herrschaftswissen. The attitude of the person that had cracked the PSO communication really irritated me so much I got ambitous.

After like a week of research I am finally able to decode most of the communication between PSO servers and the game. First I thought it is an encrypted protocol but it is more of an obfuscation, really. It is quite possible SEGA settled for such a hackable protocol encoding to save cpu power on the game consoles.

Unfortunately as a working person I don't have so much time to regularly look into this, so the actual data protocol still has to be looked into. For testing purposes I will have to get more sample communication logs to ensure the decoding code I have written works as expected.