A few months ago, a contact reached out to me with an irresistible offer. I would be given the opportunity to experiment with an insanely rare, prototype development kit PlayStation Vita. The only ask from my source is that I somehow dump the boot code. I’ve spent the last seven years hacking every last bit of the Vita from exploiting the kernel to extracting hardware keys with AES fault injections. In that long journey, I’ve gotten intimate with every model and revision of the Vita so it seems inevitable that I would find myself with the very first prototype. The DEM-3000L is actually more rare than the DEM-3000H that recently made headlines having been sold for $20,000. Although I cannot confirm this independently, my source claims that the DEM-3000H units were distributed to early game developers while the DEM-3000L was used internally at Sony to develop the system firmware. The history of this particular DEM-3000L was that two of these were originally found side by side at a Chinese landfill. They had extensive water damage (I was told they were “at the bottom of a lake”) and was carefully repaired. One of the two (the one with the broken display) eventually made it to me.

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