Article about a recent revelation by the Youtube Channel Modern Vintage Gaming: The game "Alien Resurrection" by Argonaut contains a code which allows to run burned CD copies of Playstation 1 games.

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[–] someguy3@lemmy.world 11 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

How exactly can a code on a game affect the system itself?

[–] kn0wmad1c@programming.dev 59 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

When Playstation reads a disc, it looks for a special sequence on the disc that tells the Playstation "hey, this is a Playstation game. You should load it."

That sequence is proprietary and isn't on burned copies of games. This is anti-piracy protection, and makes sense from a monetary standpoint.

When you put Alien: Resurrection in the console, which has that sequence, the Playstation is told that "hey, this is a real Playstation game. You should load it." The game loads, then you can put in the cheat, which tells the game to stop loading from the disc momentarily while another disc is loaded (think "please insert disc 2 from final fantasy"). At this point, you can pop in your burned copy of the game, then press a button to continue loading from disc, at which point the game tells the system "hey, this new guy is with me. Let him through", and the Playstation loads the new game from the disc.

[–] 30021190@lemmy.cloud.aboutcher.co.uk 16 points 2 years ago

Importantly and how it's different to FF is that it boots the content without calling the disk reset and if you keep the disk button wedged then that reset never triggers, so that copy protection isn't called, where as FF basically triggers a drive reset which is why you couldn't use that.

[–] Serinus@lemmy.world 15 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The PS disc copy protection is only checked when the system is booted. You can load one legit disc and swap it live for a burned disc, but it's difficult because the disc is spinning the whole time.

This cheat code on a legit disc just stops the disc from spinning for a short time, allowing you to much more easily swap to the copy.

[–] WarmApplePieShrek@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 years ago

Can you install a switch in line with the disc motor so it stops spinning or does that trigger an error?

[–] affiliate@lemmy.world 12 points 2 years ago (2 children)

i don’t really know, but an educated guess is that it has to do with how old the console is, and how micro optimized/hacky things had to be at the time. for example, morrowind would reboot your xbox during loading screens. there was probably quite a lot more control given to developers in the olden days, whereas now things are more sandboxed. but i would be happy to be corrected on anything i’ve said here.

[–] someguy3@lemmy.world 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

“There’s been great tricks that [Xbox] taught us,” Howard said. “My favorite one in Morrowind is, if you’re running low on memory, you can reboot the original Xbox and the user can’t tell. You can throw, like, a screen up. When Morrowind loads sometimes, you get a very long load. That’s us rebooting the Xbox. That was like a hail Mary.”

That's interesting but that's still in that one game. This thing sounds like it allows you to play burned roms forever afterwards, which means it really affects the system itself.

[–] mateomaui@reddthat.com 6 points 2 years ago

It’s essentially the same as using a boot cd before using a copied game, which also was a thing then.

https://consolecopyworld.com/psx/psx_utils_bootcd.shtml

[–] Takumidesh@lemmy.world 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

https://youtu.be/uRB7iUCX4KQ?si=4tJcrjmnaSSRfdyf

This video does a great job explaining how it works.

It has to do with system calls for stopping the disc that multi disc games would use.

Edit: I'm a dummy and didn't realize this video was posted in the op.