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Steve Jobs announcing PlayStation emulator at MacWorld https://youtu.be/3OqMcqRI-xA?si=nUkGn6vLrLLMiGOP https://youtu.be/3OqMcqRI-xA?si=nUkGn6vLrLLMiGOP

Wowfunhappy 3y ago
This is really cool. However, I think an underrated difference between then and now is that you could physically put a commercial Playstation disc into a standard CD drive and read it, no console hacking required.
- ascagnel_ 3y ago
  It’s trivially easy to take that same PSX disc, make an image of it, and load that into an emulator today.
  - D13Fd 3y ago
    The difference is that the PSX disc had some semblance of DRM or at least indicated ownership. Most ROMs are just copied.
- pipeline_peak 3y ago
  That standard usage is part of what killed the Dreamcast. Just burn an iso of Sonic and throw it in.
  - rezonant 3y ago
    Interestingly, The Dreamcast's GD-ROM format was nonstandard enough to not be copyable with a normal CD burner, at least at first. They used CAV + cutting the disk speed in half in order to write more data (up to 1.2GB). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GD-ROM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GD-ROM I think what you are referring to is the fact that the Dreamcast itself didn't only read from GD-ROM- it was perfectly happy to execute code from a CD-ROM via the MIL-CD format. > The "foot in the door" came from a seemingly obscure capability of the Dreamcast to boot not from a GD-ROM but from a CD-ROM. Originally intended to add multimedia functions to music CDs, the functionality called "MIL-CD" was never used much, accounting for a mere seven karaoke applications. [1] Which meant if you were able to acquire a GD-ROM image, and you could repack it into the CD-ROM's max capacity of some 650MB, then you could burn it to disc and play it without any modification of your Dreamcast, at least once the other protections were defeated. For games that actually utilized more than a CD's worth of data, usually pirates would recompress or remove images, video files and other assets to save space. So that copy of Sonic might not behave exactly the same as a genuine copy, simply by the necessity of the format (not that I know if Sonic required this sort of rework). Fascinating post from Fabien Sanglard for this: [1] https://fabiensanglard.net/dreamcast_hacking/ https://fabiensanglard.net/dreamcast_hacking/
    - extraduder_ire 3y ago
      Wouldn't CAV decrease the amount of data that can be stored unless you're compensating for it elsewhere? I assume they used CAV so they wouldn't have to change the disc's speed when seeking to a different area of the disc. The MIL-CD thing reminds me of the expansion port on very early playstations which was never used officially, but allowed exploiting the console by plugging a modchip into it.
  - Wowfunhappy 3y ago
    I know the Dreamcast had piracy issues but I think the situation must have been more complicated. PS2 games can be read by standard DVD drives, and PS3 games can be read by standard BluRay drives.

Wowfunhappy 3y ago

This is really cool. However, I think an underrated difference between then and now is that you could physically put a commercial Playstation disc into a standard CD drive and read it, no console hacking required.

ascagnel_ 3y ago
It’s trivially easy to take that same PSX disc, make an image of it, and load that into an emulator today.
- D13Fd 3y ago
  The difference is that the PSX disc had some semblance of DRM or at least indicated ownership. Most ROMs are just copied.
pipeline_peak 3y ago
That standard usage is part of what killed the Dreamcast. Just burn an iso of Sonic and throw it in.
- rezonant 3y ago
  Interestingly, The Dreamcast's GD-ROM format was nonstandard enough to not be copyable with a normal CD burner, at least at first. They used CAV + cutting the disk speed in half in order to write more data (up to 1.2GB). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GD-ROM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GD-ROM I think what you are referring to is the fact that the Dreamcast itself didn't only read from GD-ROM- it was perfectly happy to execute code from a CD-ROM via the MIL-CD format. > The "foot in the door" came from a seemingly obscure capability of the Dreamcast to boot not from a GD-ROM but from a CD-ROM. Originally intended to add multimedia functions to music CDs, the functionality called "MIL-CD" was never used much, accounting for a mere seven karaoke applications. [1] Which meant if you were able to acquire a GD-ROM image, and you could repack it into the CD-ROM's max capacity of some 650MB, then you could burn it to disc and play it without any modification of your Dreamcast, at least once the other protections were defeated. For games that actually utilized more than a CD's worth of data, usually pirates would recompress or remove images, video files and other assets to save space. So that copy of Sonic might not behave exactly the same as a genuine copy, simply by the necessity of the format (not that I know if Sonic required this sort of rework). Fascinating post from Fabien Sanglard for this: [1] https://fabiensanglard.net/dreamcast_hacking/ https://fabiensanglard.net/dreamcast_hacking/
  - extraduder_ire 3y ago
    Wouldn't CAV decrease the amount of data that can be stored unless you're compensating for it elsewhere? I assume they used CAV so they wouldn't have to change the disc's speed when seeking to a different area of the disc. The MIL-CD thing reminds me of the expansion port on very early playstations which was never used officially, but allowed exploiting the console by plugging a modchip into it.
- Wowfunhappy 3y ago
  I know the Dreamcast had piracy issues but I think the situation must have been more complicated. PS2 games can be read by standard DVD drives, and PS3 games can be read by standard BluRay drives.