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It was also possible to copy games using a cd burner and boot them without any mod chip. During the boot process the Saturn would check the drive for an authen
by thevagrant 4y ago
It was also possible to copy games using a cd burner and boot them without any mod chip.
During the boot process the Saturn would check the drive for an authentic disc. Once the check passed, the drive paused and prepared to boot the game.
At this point of pause you could swap the authentic disc to a completely different pirated game (one burned onto a normal CD-R that would fail the first boot check).. Timing the swap correctly, the Saturn would play the pirated game.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y agoThere are also ways of bypassing the protection using the memory cartridge port. Cartridges with Pseudo Saturn Kai pre-installed are readily available these days.
- daneel_w 4y agoRight, the Saturn just like early versions of the PS1 had an opening for the famous "swap trick". I never used it myself other than on the PS1.
- jmkni 4y agoIIRC you could do something similar with Action Replay, you would load into the Action Replay UI, swap out the disc and then boot into a pirated game
- ericlewis 4y agops2 slim also had the disc swap trick
- deaddodo 4y agoIf you had the action replay cart, you could just leave it in and it would bypass the check altogether. I played burnt discs aplenty on my Saturn.
- Grazester 4y agoSimply not true. I own several Saturns and action replays since the 90's. The Pseudo Saturn Action reply hack to circumvent disc checks was only within recent years released.
- deaddodo 4y agoWeird. I definitely had a bog-standard Action Replay and most certainly played burnt discs. Perhaps my console was hardmodded, without my knowledge. (Also, someone had downvoted you, which I disagree with completely. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. So, here's an upvote to balance it out.)
- justinhj 4y agoHa yes I remember this. There was a physical mod that allowed the disk door to be opened without the ps1 noticing so you could switch disks after the verification
- jcpham2 4y agoPurchasing Verbatim purple bottom CDR blanks to copy original PSX games was my introduction to piracy. I was quite young. Those first gen Playstations with the port in the back were amazing easy to mod with the action replay or just the swap trick. I also jumped on the XBMC and Xecutor modchip for the original Xbox when that came out. Another mind blowing time in computer gaming.
- eatbitseveryday 4y agoWhat prevents current generation consoles from loading a game that was copied exactly from the original disc to another Blu-ray?
- mnw21cam 4y agoSimply the fact that it's actually very hard to make an exact copy of the disc. You can make an exact copy of the files, but there are layers underneath the file level that are harder to duplicate correctly, and the copy protection uses idiosyncrasies in that to work out if the media is original.
- I_dev_outdoors 4y agoWhy can't you also make a copy at the block level?
- comboy 4y agoProtection is at the physical level. I mean, it was for the CDs, but you can easily imagine stuff that you can press onto the disc that your burner can't do. https://youtu.be/XUwSOfQ1D3c?t=481 https://youtu.be/XUwSOfQ1D3c?t=481
- sumtechguy 4y agoBR is one part key exchange, one part manufacturing, one part firmware lockouts using that key. So if you mod a drive you probably could get raw data from the disc. The problem is getting that back out to a disc correctly that another unmoded player would like it. There are projects out there that are reading data right off the read head. But they are more focused on laserdisc items.
- jaywalk 4y agoPart of the copy protection includes physical features of the disc that must be pressed into it when it's produced, meaning a BluRay writer has no way of replicating it.
- Melatonic 4y agoReminds me of the BleemCast CD's - with the right one you could play PS1 games on a dreamcast! And it nicely upscaled the resolution and everything. Such an odd product
- PokemonNoGo 4y agoEven though emulators were a thing and we had seen copying devices for the most obscure consoles come out of China bleem was something else. Such a mad idea and they actually made a business case out of it.