My thought on the black ink being an anti-counterfeit measure, is that it would make it difficult to sell a counterfeit disc to a buyer while stating it's legitimate.

11:28 "Visual Aid" is by far the WORST PS1 game I've ever played. I'm surprised to see it featured here.

I remember doing the disc swap a little differently. You had to boot up the PlayStation with the lid open, button pressed, and no disc, then put in a PlayStation disc and enter the cd player in the system menu. It would spin up the disc and get the copy protection code. Once you backed out of the player the disc would stop, swap in the burned copy, and whamo, I was playing the bootleg Japanese tekken 2 disc my brother got from who knows where. Doing it while the disc is spinning seems crazy.

When the PS1 was new, I shortly discovered that my kid already broke or cracked 2 discs. That's when the discovery of the MOD chip came handy at a Computer Expo in town. I took my chance and bought the chip from some Chinese vendors. Every game we bought was backed up onto a rewrite-able and the master copy stored in safe keeping incase another disc got damaged.

Also, from personal experience: I worked at a company who burned CDs (legally, for the legal publishers). One day we made Audio-CDs, the other day PS1-CDs, CD-ROMs, etc. We had four big rigs, but all for the same size. Those things are expensive as hell. So Sony, WB and others simply rented our time to make their CDs. Sony having to build their own factories, making their own CD wouldn´t have been profitable.

4:45 I always figured it made it easier to identify pirated games, because they just look different. At the time I had a few people try to sell me pirated games, and that lack of a black disc saved me from getting ripped off because my PS1 didn't have a mod chip.

10:34 I remember having a burnt copy of Tomb Raider and thinking that it was impossible to get past the first area. I found out years later that there was copy protect on the disk that made it so any body of water had piranha in it. Including the Croft Manor swimming pool.

Of note is how the sega Dreamcast did use a "bigger cd" in their GD-rom format which was out of bounds of a normal CD as a form of copy protection. This was actually defeated by compressing the data into cd size and a fancy software exploit that allowed for the code to run. People used a firmware hacked dvd drive to read the GD-ROM format

Ten thousand people don't want to be patient and learn something from someone that's very thorough and excellent at explaining complex concepts.

I worked on Need For Speed 1 and had always wondered how the PSX did its copy protection. We used the "blue" dev kits which could read normal CD-Rs and the _"swap trick"_ was pretty common knowledge (I think one of the QA guys re-discovered it) so I knew the copy protection wasn't complicated. Thanks for taking the time to explain the wobble!

My first hustle was selling and installing "mod chips", in 8th grade. I had the whole ft. Worth water department coming to my grandparents house to have mod chips installed and browse my "back up" collections. Started a long story of devious activities and interest in fine soldering but was a good run!

I love revisiting these older videos to refresh my brain on things I have forgotten, but seeing how the channel has evolved is equally fun. Seriously proud of this channel.

Renting games at Blockbuster to burn them was the good ol days my dudes

As a PlayStation hacker during its heyday, I can confirm that what is described here is true. The only thing that I would add is a clarification that on the PS1, the regional lockout and copy protection are closely tied together. The copy protection data was different for each region, and other regions' PlayStations would think that the disk wasn't just an import, but also illegitimate. This is why you used the same mod chip to play imported games. The copy protection data was simple: four ASCII letters. Japan was "SCEI", America was "SCEA", Europe/Australia was "SCEE". The special Yaroze boot disk had "SCEW". All mod chips did was inject "SCEISCEASCEE" into the data stream: the console ignored the wrong-region codes and accepted the correct region (this is why PS1 mod chips weren't region-specific). The ignoring of wrong codes seems to be both for reliability and to keep open the possibility of manufacturing multi-region disks, which as far as I know never happened other than by unauthorized parties.

3:16 Sony always trying to be different: "Let's run the loading bar backwards."

I just wanted to say thank you: I remember well the early PlayStation days, disk swaps and modchips and all that... But I never knew that much about how they worked and why. While anyone can read a wiki page, I enjoyed listening to your explanation and all the detail you added.

The larger area was simply to allow the disc to be picked up by larger clumsy fingers.

"Parappa the rip-off" insta like to the video

20 yrs later, I'd say that "FU" to nintendo worked pretty well.

My personal theory that I've held throughout the years is that Sony specifically designed PS1 to be easy to pirate. They wanted an easy way into a market that was absolutely dominated by Nintendo and Sega, and making their system easy to pirate was their way in.

As one of the only teams to produce PS1 discs outside of Sony (I think there were two) I can confirm your information is completely correct. The wobble groove is a 22.05khz (IIRC) oscillation. Spelling the initials SCEA, SCEE and SCEI for the three territories. Early PS1's had a very primitive and easy to reverse. 18 to twenty something bandpass filter. How we produced the discs was to find a friendly CD-R masteringhouse and instead of using the ATIP generating machine just use a small microcontroller along with the original 22.05khz signal generator and switch it on and off appropriately during the lead in area

You wouldn't be able to burn a 15cm CD, because there was no machinery for this at the time. China: Yeah, right, but IF THERE WAS...

My favourite example of developers getting around the mod chip is spyro where they made the game increasingly more annoying to play if its a chipped console making it impossible to finish because it would drive you insane

This makes so much sense now! I remember PRAYING for that second stage, and that sweet sweet sound of the black screen that ensured an old disc would boot. If the copywrite protected area were scratched in a way that hindered the system from picking up he wobble, it was fubar. WOW

don't understand why the dislikes. It was brilliant mate, well done. Nice context to everything being said, nice personal input, and with the ability of making one wonder :) Well done buddy, wonderful video! Subscribed!

The black color does not protect the game in action, but does make a real copy stand out from a pirate, making it extra hard for someone to fabricate a copy that would pass as a real copy, so at least you always knew what you were bying, if you paid for a pirated copy. Same goes for the Purple shade of CD based PS2 games and five faintly visible playstation logos in bottom of DVD based PS2 games. Like with trading cards, gamers do assign value to genuine product, even those who got pirates, and making it uniquely clear what is genuine, making it easy to spot and next to impossible to replicate without bigger effort, probably Chinese factory getting involved just to make very realistic pirates but if the "wobble encoding" needed to be replicated too... Well, we know in history that modchips or swapdiscs/tricks won and especially in europe playstation and piracy went hand in hand in a lot of places. Even Ape Escape's PAL version has unique copy detection code in PAL version alone.

I remember when they made a Chrono Trigger port for PlayStation with all kinds of new anime cutscenes on it, but they only released it in Japan. Needless to say that is when I learned about disc swapping. 🤫

RE cd tracking: The lens assembly is 'floating' (actually more like cantilevered I guess, its held up by stiff thin plastic or metal arms), inside a set of magnets (source for strong small magnets btw). The lens assembly also has a set of coils. Driving these coils moves the lens assembly in the X and Z axis (and a little bit Y, but since Y is in the direction of disk rotation it is effectively a timing problem of when the pit (pip? bit, data) is in the light field of the laser, not where the laser is in space). Thats closer or farther from the axis of rotation (X, or track, cylinder), and closer or farther from the disk surface (Z, or focus). They basically work like speakers to move the lasers focal spot instead of move woofers. In the laser sled there is a beam splitter tthat shaves off a bit of the reflected light and sends the light to a photodiode array. This photodiode array is divided in to 4 sections, 2x2. Thus one quarter (1/4) of the spot should equally illuminate the photodiodes, if it were to go out of focus or X position the spot would unevenly illuminate the diodes causing them to pass less or more current. The optics of the system cause a cross shaped focusing error at the focal point, so and focus error registers as opposing photodiodes to pass more or less current. Now here is the clever bit, you take opposing diodes (ones across the point from each other, at 45 degrees) and subtract their output from the other set of diodes (invert one side and compare, or compare the total value +/- from 0), feed that analog signal into a little booster amp, and 'play' it back in the laser assemble coils! BAM, you are literally playing the low frequency 'sound' of the disk wobble. The PS just added a T off that signal and read it to see if the wobble matched the key. Oh also, X has an extra set of photodiodes that look at the next and previous tracks, if they see them (or dont see them if the laser tracking dots are just inside the track radius) the X coil correction signal stays the same, as one side or the other detects a difference (ie, drifting under or away from the next/prev tracks pips) the X signal changes, and the laser moves in X to keep the reading area under the data track being read. The distance the laser assembly coils can move the lens in X is wider than the step distance of the sleds X axis motor. So once the system sees its X tracking signal correction is above a certain level (or receives an instruction to seek to the next/prev/some other track) it will step the sled motor, all the lense assembly sees is a drift off track, and drops the signal to the coils accordingly. Laterally all automagically! Its crazy how simple and stupid-smart CD laser tracking is! Youd think its complex circuitry, but nope just basically some op amps resistors and capacitors!

I think they meant the black cds helped with people selling illegal copies of games as legitamite.

I think when they said that the black color prevents piracy, they meant that there was now a way to tell if a CD was a genuine disc or not.

I grew up near Paraguay... we just had to cross a bridge, and believe you me, there were TONS of cartridges copied. I for instance had a "Family game console"... which I later found out was a copy of NES... with all its games and then some. I used to buy Sega Genesis games and they were all copies (didn't know when I was a child)... so yes... cartridges were easy to copy as well... Cheers

I'm becoming addicted to your videos. As information soaked as they are digestible, each video has the perfect touch of humor that keeps me engaged. Thank you for all of these!

10:00 God that sound is as wonderful today as it was back then. Probably my favorite console startup sound of all time, followed by the OG Xbox, but not closely

It looks to me like the tray was made unusually large so that removing discs would be easier on your thumbs, especially since up until this point, most gamers had only dealt with carts. A bit of an "entry user friendly" aesthetic, one could assume.

Very informative channel. Very clear, concise explanations that are easily understood. I Remember people using a mod chip they called a "Mach Chip" for the PS1. An interesting topic I haven't seen covered much, but you mentioned briefly, was the "pirating" of cartridge games. Although specialized equipment was needed to do such a task, I would love to see you do a video on the "Dendy", aka the Soviet Bootleg NES

Not sure if it was mentioned before in the comments, I'm sure it was, but an important note to remember is that original PS1 games didn't use the Jewel Case at first. Not sure if the OG case would have fit a larger disk, but there is an early gen of games that were not in Jewels, but what I remember being a larger more proprietary black case. Specifically I remember the original Twisted Metal being shipped in this case.

"The first commercially successful game console to use the compact disc..." What a polite way to say "haha suck it NEC, Sega, Amiga CDTV and 3D0".

Having worked in CD mfg in the late 90s, tooling up to produce a 15 cm disc wouldn't have been that difficult. Many places probably still had equipment around that laser discs had been produced on. I know we did. Granted it was old equipment but we still ran some of it for large slow batch orders. The MET and PC machines just used a smaller mask. Honestly the worst of it would have been the screen printing machines, they had been changed over to only work with normal sized CDs at that point. But for a company like Sony to kit out a plant to be able to produce 15 cm discs wouldn't have been a big deal at all. That said, I'm glad they didn't, a friend and I had a hanging business chipping consoles on the weekend. He was still in highschool so by Friday we'd usually have 5-20 consoles delivered to us. We'd spend Friday night and part of the day Saturday chipping them. It was cash up front. Really good money for a couple of kids, after the first few batches we invested I a programmer and ordered chips from Digikey to save and profit more. A few years later we rolled that same process into chipping DirecTV receivers after "Black Sunday" .. Those were the good old days!

Our PS1 discs broke so often that we started copying discs and using the swap trick just to preserve our games. I still remember the disc of need for speed just exploding to bits inside the console at one point; games weren't exactly cheap to replace, cd-r's on the other hand ...

Technology Connections: You'd be staring at this loading screen for a while. Me: Laughs in GTAV.

I remember one day, would have been about 4 or 5, I came down stairs to jump on the PS1 to find it gone - obviously causing me and my brother to freak and think we'd done something wrong.... Nah, my dad just sent it off to get it modded haha

This guy is great! And I especially appreciate his admitting an error with humility. I'm subbing this channel on this one video presentation alone!

I just discovered this channel and I'm loving it. The idea of a bigger disc seems a good one. But eventually even mod chips could possibly defeat this security measure. Still, I think the main reason to not implement it is the prohibitive cost that it implies among the other reasons noted in the video.

All I know is that when we were copying PS discs back in the '90s and early '00s, we told the cd burning software to NOT ignore the errors. Most CD copying software would ignore all errors it came across, so you got just the data and only the data. I still have my copy of Tekken 3 on a Kodak gold disc that works 100% on an unmodded playstation, and I also used to play the disc on the software called 'Bleam!'.

“There was no copy of cartridges” My 25yrs old chinese super nes to floppy disk copy system: hold my beer

9:48 while they were being lazy , it was actually the most genius way to detect modchips by game makers , the game will try to grab the region code from the CD after boot (usually at press start screen) and theoretically it should fail , if it can get region code then there's a modchip installed , Spyro and the year of the dragon is the best example

I'm sorta new to this channel. And at first I thought this was another person. Great to see you evolved, not just a channel but as a person!

love your videos. I like that you dive deep into the topic.

In the 90's I had an early CD writer with some expensive DOS based bit level copy software. I used to recoup some of the cost of this setup by duplicating Playstation disks for people at work. The software would copy what appeared to be error sections as well. I did hundreds of these copies over time and everyone seemed happy. They provided the Playstation disk and what they did with the copy was up to them.

Dude this is the best channel I've found in a while. I just binge watched through all of your videos over the past few days. Keep up the great work!

Always love your explanation on thing. Even if they need minor corrections later. Thank you good sir for your history on stuff.

Excellent video as always (actually the first one I saw on the channel, years ago). But thinking about it, I disagree on one point: larger discs wouldn't have helped. You underestimate the effort that the pirating scene can deploy. They are the kind of guys who would hand-mofify a standard cd reader/burner to be able to handle a larger disc, by actually modifying the hardware and re-writing the low level software, to have a Frankenstein cd reader, and then strip out useless stuff in the game (cd music, some cinematics...) So it can fit back in a standard CDR. But man, going back to this video after seeing other ones and also many other from your channel, I have to say I am a huge fan, your explanations are incredibly detailed yet easy to understand! Excellent work!

I always wondered how CD-R/RW discs contained the information about what they were. Are you interested in doing a video on disc burning? I’d be really interested in an explanation on how it works, the history, materials used, why new burnable discs suck, how the black magic of rewritable discs worked, why nobody ever actually reused a rewritable disc, and how overburning and non-standard formats could be used to store more data on discs.

Or economic policy.... BEST THROWAWAY LINE EVER

Phillips?? So you're telling me Nintendo sacrificed their Sony partnership for the CD-I???

As others have noted, and it is surprising that this is not mentioned in this otherwise great video, is that there are always ways to bypass protections and to make the receiving end think that the incoming data are from a legit source. For example, in exactly the same way as the mod chip, a system hack would allow that security check bypass, regardless of a larger physical disc or not. The hack game is always a loop of discovering vulnerabilities, using them, them getting patched/fixed, finding new ones, using them etc. Back then, these responses were very limited and slow. Today it's the opposite, mostly due to online security checks and patch deliveries.

That impossible to make anything including "economic policy" was the moment i needed to make sure i liked this video 👍 Thanks for the chuckle bro Cheers

I always thought it was weird that of all companies Sony, the king of proprietary storage mediums, just used a standard CD .

Great video, lots of fantastic & interesting information, well presented, easily understandable keep it up.

The slow read time of optical is a lot more evident when comparing the PSP to the DS. It's also interesting that a number of bootleg cartridges do exist. They were often different colours, and didn't always work. For example, I have a fan translation of Mother 3 on a GBA cartridge, and it works perfectly in my original GBA (AGB-001), but in my DS Lite, it often mistakes it for an attachment, such as the piano, Guitar Hero grip, or other such peripherals that used the GBA slot. It's interesting to see the different approaches.

I remember wanting to copy the contents of one of these PS disks on my computer to see what's inside. My friend would argue that the computer disk drive might damage the black disk... Because it looks different. I didn't know any better and didn't want risk loosing the game so I didn't. So I think the color did something to discourage piracy. As a side note, I did experience my friend's PC game disk explode in the drive once. The drive was reading at 52x speed.

One possible reason for the black die is to hide the (probably intensional looking) wobble from someone looking at the tracks through a microscope. Using the IR material means needing an IR capable camera (and light) attached to your microscope which is a bigger step than just a microscope.

Great video,I like it. I know how this copy-protection work before, but good work and explanation, man :)

Good explanation, I remember hot swapping a disc one time and all the bearings that held the cd fell out with it. Very worn old unit.

I can remember putting the PS1 game discs into a CD player and the game music would actually play.

I can't believe I didn't know of this channel before, great content, extremely interesting and easy to understand! Awesome work!

Looking back, I think this was the first TC video I ever saw. Oh how far this channel has come. And oh how high the snark factor has grown. :P

Fascinating information. Never been a big gamer. so I almost skipped this one (back in the computer gaming renaissance I was more intently focused on the multi processor & multitasking OS designs that fostered the invention of multi-media with the "game changing" Amiga meta computer, as well as it's CD32 predecessor to the PS1 and Sega Genesis). Wonderful detail on how all optical devices actually compensate for the physical imperfections of disc media. The Sony DRM (Destructive Restriction Mechanisms) taking advantage of those compensation mechanics is a wonderful bit of evil genius. :-). Kudos on the research an clear presentation!

Oh brother you never lived in South America. The only games we had there were pirated games. We got Nes, Snes, Sega etc. all in pirated cartridges even before the American market. We also had the Japanese games too. Official cartridges were expensive as hell and only certain rich kids would own one. But yeah cartridges were super easy to copy over there.

2:21 *Sees the back of the disk* ..aaaah the memories..

Even if they had made the disc's bigger, a mod chip would probably have removed that protection anyways. I remember having a Power Replay which used the disc swapping feature. It came with a spring which sat between the lid and the switch. Worked like a charm. I'm thinking their biggest mistake was probably that serial port on the back, and not reading the wobble more often than just at start up.

I love how you have grown keep up the great work

3:30 dude i loved that sound because you knew the game is loading and the level is coming up :)

The black dye is more forgery protection than copy protection. It prevents copied discs being sold as genuine.

That makes a lot of sense. I've even got a copy of Dark stalkers from early in the PS1 history that came with a case that's much bigger than a regular DVD case.

I subbed just because you are not someone who can't admit they made a mistake. This is my first video of yours so I don't know about that incorrect statement, but you acknowledging the mistake and researching the correct answer earned you my respect. Kudos. As for the bigger CDs I think you're underestimating humans here my friend, I'm sure someone would've figured something out to play burned CD's or to burn larger CD's for that matter :)

Remember when Sony thought it was a good idea to put root kits in their audio cds?

I just watched all of this and really enjoyed it great vid

Wow that was so informative about a lot of things 💯👊

Great explanation, thanks! I've learned a lot!

Nothing stopped you from taking the soundtrack from the games files and making your own cd👌

I don't get why people are complaining about the length, before arriving at the main point. There's alot of context, and interesting tid-bits that fleshes out the video-subject.

Great video was always curious how the mod chip consoles worked.

Awesome video man thanks for the content!

It seems to me that the larger "hole" for the CD of the Playstation allows room for fingers to get in there and pick up the disk by the edges like you are supposed to, not so much to accommodate a larger format that never happened. It would be a whole lot harder to get discs out if the hole was much smaller.

i like how professional you present the content, thank you !

Great videos! You have a new suscriber here :)

thanks for bring back memories of the load screen with disk sound. good times!👍

3:19 i love this sound

You say it couldn't be done, pirates of that time would say: Hold my beer. xD If anything, I'd say Sony was lucky they didn't do a whole new format for PS1 and PS2. I have no way to prove this, and perhaps some might be able to disprove my theory here... but I bet the success of both Playstation 1 and 2 had LARGELY to do with piracy. Like, not even a tiny part... the majority of it. And by extention, I also posit that the popularization of games into a full blown industry that is larger than Hollywood also has majorly to do with piracy. As much as Sony and the usual industry associations will never ever give away officials statistics or admit it themselves, the only reason why consoles like Playstation, older cartridge based ones, and portables like DS were ever huge successes, was exactly because of piracy. Perhaps not so much in the US, but in some countries where piracy was rampant most definitely. And they were not few. Probably over half the countries these consoles were ever sold, officially or not. Companies don't even touch the subject much outside giving distorted statistics and hillarious assumptions using piracy as scapegoat because it's a convenient target. But I bet all you want the growth of several mediums have all to do with piracy. Because piracy enabled an unsurmountable ammount of people to get access to something they couldn't afford. And that's how games really got popularized. I for one wouldn't be here watching this video and talking about games if it wasn't for it. I'm not sure I'd even have gotten into computers if it wasn't for it. I can speak of my own - Brazil. Consoles were imported here pretty fast, demand on the gray market was so big that it was partially responsible for funding entire cities economies. But since NES times, piracy was were you got the games themselves. Importation taxes plus currency exchange rates always made any sort of electronic (up to this day) a luxury. It's basically double the price what you pay in US, and then you apply currency exchange... it becomes an investment. If after buying a console you'd still need to pay double the price for each game, tons of people wouldn't be able to afford it. By tons, I mean, the vast majority. Only the 1% rich in Brazil would be able to get it. But pirated games were everywhere... NES, SNES, Genesis... can't remember if it goes back as far as Master System, but yeah, possibly. By the time Playstation came, you had hawkers selling those in streets of every major brazilian capital, stores that sold only that, fixed shopping malls where you could probably find a bunch of stores, in major capitals you had commercial districts where you could find several stores, people who serviced game consoles who knew all the modchips, hacks and charged a reasonable price to install and every other trick in the book. :P Yes, there were several attempts of crackdown, along with other types of piracy - music, movies, series, etc - but it was useless. It became big business that sustained tons and tons of people in an informal economy that had multiple layers behind it. Like, in Playstation 1 and 2 days, it'd probably be easier for police to find, arrest and extinguish drug cartels and traffic rather than the piracy business. That's how big it used to be. So you see, a larger disc would make it initially harder to pirate. Potentially not worth it. But if pirated cartridges were made, I don't think it'd be too much of an obstacle to overcome, really. Pirates would find a way. They either hack the console, or even start pressing discs themselves. Like I said, it was very big business, so it's not completely out of the scope. People eventually figured out a way to crack even the infamous GameCube copy protection... though that one never got popular enough to justify scaling things up. Well, not as much as PS1 and PS2. So while people who really don't like piracy might be angry with me for saying all this... it is my opinion, but I think it's just logical. I mean no disrespect or ill intent towards the industries that gave us lots of entertainment, no revolt or bad feelings towards the studios and developers that gave us great games, music, movies and overall content... but the reality of it is, if there was no piracy back then, the vast majority of people would not be able to have access to all this content. Forget the fallacy of lost sales RIAA, MPAA and other organizations always pulls out of their asses. One pirated cd or dvd would never translate into one original copy sold. Because the vast majority of people paying for those could not afford it. I know for a fact that piracy made kids learn english, become computer fans, become gamers, become developers themselves, made games, music and movies part of their culture, grow up to be avid payers for official content, become more aware of american culture, and the chain reaction goes on and on. I have never met a single gamer in a group, particularly around my age, here where I live who can say "I have never played a pirated game in my life". Might be annedoctal, but I feel it's representative of my entire country, and several other countries in the world.

I remember at some point you didn't even need a chip. There was a card you had to insert into the memory card slot and a small spring had to be put onto the closing mechanism, worked like a charm.

Great video. I never actually know how was the copyright check of psx. It was actually really smart.

There are numerous possible reasons for the size of optical drive bay on Playstation, such as aesthetic, to make the disc lid cover the system creating a pleasing shape where a circle and rectangle merge, manyfacturing related, air dynamics related, as when you put a moving part too close to a stationary part or especially an air gap, there can be a whistling sound, and keep in mind the console spins discs faster than devices before it, by a factor of 2 and might have initially aimed at the factor of 4.

KZfaq can't have enough quality informative content such as this. Keep it up!

First video I saw from this channel, and I subbed instantly

Oh wow! You have come a long ways on your weight loss, I'm impressed. Keep it up!

Despite what some people believe, piracy helped PS1 and PS2 in a big way. Many people bought the playstation, including myself, knowing that they will easily pirate games and Sony knew it. They intentionally made it easy for modchips to bypass the protection because they only cared to outsell their opponents and dominate the market. Third party developers were also complaining to Sony about this poor protection.

i freakin died when it said ''PaRappa the Rip-off'' lmao

Wow, this is good stuff. I remember I had a GameShark and a spring to do the disc swap instead of the mod chip. The ending comment about using a larger disc I wouldn’t be surprise if Sony did it. Remember when Sony has MiniDisc player to combat mp3?