She is throwing red herrings!!! I believe we CAN decode a message. Come on, it is a video about hiding data inconspicuously, I bet it is morse code or something
More like another video where skipping and watching 5 minutes of it and ignore the rest is the best case scenario. Her breathing into the mic and weird accent pretty much gave me an headache too. How people like these get 50k + subs is the biggest mystery to me. Looks like social media is filled with lost idiots and doesn't look it will get any better soon or at all but only worse.
Dummy files carried over to the PS2 era. In fact, there's weirder dummy files than this one (though much less profane). One notable example is that all PS2 copies of Digimon Rumble Arena 2 contain what essentially was a fully playable early build of the game hidden inside a file named FILL.FIL. There's a few other PS2 games that also have dev builds used as dummy files but the DIgimon one is what stuck out to me.
I think you're right about how the kid found the file. What you described was really common, I remember doing it many times. I assumed it was a feature, honestly. Also a lot of 90s games basically encouraged you to look through the games folders. A lot of pc games came with extras, mostly wallpapers, that you could only access by going into the disk and looking for the folder. Usually named "extras" or flat out "wallpapers". So kids back then were a lot more likely to stick a game into their computer and see what they could find.
"She found me and binged my channel" I feel like that sums up most of the subs that got an unassuming video about a GameCube Demo Disc in their recommendations. This video was a blast, I love how this channel can show me Nintendo, DankPods and Top Gear pretty much back to back. Also, I made a playlist of DankPods BGM on UA-cam which I'm now just going to assume you probably came across in the wild.
This might be the single most brilliant piece of media I’ve ever saw on UA-cam. One hour of non-stop, filled with shockingly golden details, content. This shit HAS to blow up, props, fr.
Within seconds of this video I already predicted it’s definitely going to be about the South Park pilot. What I didn’t expect was a further explanation of the actual game files on the PS1 CD. Thanks for taking us knee deep into the rabbit hole as well.
I can believe that a programmer used a random South Park clip they liked in order to test the CD writing abilities of the development libraries, and just forgot to delete it afterwards...
13:18 Here in Germany they also replaced in Command & Conquer the soldiers with "robots". Difference were the icons in the build menu, an oil stain instead of a blood and a "soda can" crushing sound when they where crushed by a tank. This was in a game with 640x480 resolution for "soldiers" with like 8 pixels as bodies...
They also replaced drivers in Flatout 2 with crash dummies, and somehow that version got to italy via FX Interaktive and it's really difficult to find nowadays
>be f4mi >possessing one of the unassuming rarest original copy of PS1 game ever >doesn't want to destroy the disc because her external drive is making "Skrillex bass" >proceed to use PS3 to "read" the disc This is the peak "Sometimes my genius is almost frightening" moment
This just unlocked a memory I forgot I even had from when I was super young, putting games like Wipeout 2097 into our old eMachines and ripping the soundtrack onto Windows Media Player. I don't know if it was super common knowledge that you could do that back then, but I doubt if I was tech savvy enough to figure it out by myself at the time, so I probably heard about it from somewhere. Makes me think that kid probably wasn't the first person to ever find the dummy file, just the first to really publicize it.
During my years at school it was pretty common knowledge, but it wouldn't work on every PC. Back then you needed a cable between the drive and the soundcard just for CD Audio.
The PS2 actually had a button to let you play the tracks from the browser I think it was if you press square or something That's how I learned about it haha
Wtf, why is this video such a banger? I genuinely don't understand how this channel isn't bigger, the production value on these videos is insane. Edit: wtf, you got hbomberguy to voice stuff, god damn Edit2: dammit, now I gotta search for the links
30:53 Wait, people were actually alive BEFORE SiIvaGunner was invented? How did they manage to do that? I thought it held the fabric of reality together!
42:18 This part is interesting since you can see the effects of what would've happened otherwise when games later in the gen/next gen started to learn to stream game data from the disc in real time. One of my friends had a super scratched Starsky and Hutch disc for the Xbox for example. It's a driving game with an open world that loads as you go through it (as expected). So since it has trouble reading the data in time, the game wouldn't stutter but you'd end up driving into a part of the world that hasn't loaded in and fall off the map. Other games have failsafes for this like the original NFS Most Wanted. If the game can't keep up due to a scratched disc, the game will stop and pull up a transparent loading screen before you would otherwise drive into the abyss.
This is why I love this channel. Hour of content. Not padded, beautifully edited, lovely references to (not only?) Portal, kept going deeper and deeper and had me hooked on every second of it. Here's a comment for the algo overlords!
I imagine that lawyer retelling the story of how he saved EA and the ESRB from Hillary Clinton with three words to his grandchildren at an old age and how he watched trucks on trucks offload hundreds of thousands of copies of Tiger Woods '99 into a pit in the Chihuahua desert and and the grandchildren thinking that grandpa has gone demented.
GRANDPA MILLENNIAL HERE................BACK IN MY DAY WE never seen videos of this quality and depth. this is like OG youtube glory jacked up with modern overstimula hyperdrive with like 'get out the popcorn for david attenborough' vibe. praising the internet gods for the existence of yr channel and wishing many moons of happiness and hype 4 u
i just watched the entire 1 hour instead of doing something else i should've done, super interesting!! kept me hooked at all times and i really enjoyed it, thanks f4mi :)
Speaking of dummy data on CD. In 2006 year in Russian released “LADA Racing Club”. The game was talked about a lot in magazines and on the Internet and was shown at exhibitions. In addition to the fact that it was literally garbage, it was on 4 CD and when installed on a computer, unused data was copied.
That was quite the journey. I also like how former employees were represented by gray kittens. I'd love to have gray kittens working at my company (if I had one)
i mean, i've only been here since the $9 japanese DSi, but your channel is one of the most underrated on here. Every video is interesting, information-packed, long and lots of work. Thank you for producing such high quality content, and letting us watch it for free. :P
50:14 Oh shit... doubt you're gonna see this Fami, but that guy who made the forum post (TriMesh) was one of the engineers at Sony who worked on the CD drive. If my memory also serves me correctly, he also helped crack the PS1 to make the first few PS1 modchips with his experience... but I can't recall. We used to talk quite a bit in the Assembler Games' chatroom, but I've lost contact with him. He'd be a great source on any video on the PS1.
Some Beatmania game on the PS1 had partial source code for it in it's dummy file... gotta wonder if that was a genuine mistake or a disgruntled employee. Since it's Konami the latter is definitely not unheard of...
I am commenting for the algorithm. But also because I love how creative some of the bits are in this video and I appreciate how much effort was put into it. Thanks f4mi!
Just watched the whole video and realized the Auto Modellista clip and the ost from the game, finally someone using Auto Modellista something that isn't a video with a title like "JDM LEGEND GAME (JAPANESE)"
I will never understand how 0's & 1's can be turned into what we see on our Computer, hear as music with our ears, and how we can make inputs with our controller's to make changes to games in real time on a display screen that's also changing in real time. CRAZY
I remember also killing time as a young'n with no idea what I was doing by browsing random files in my games. Including such logical thoughts as "I don't know where the activation key is for this game. Surely it's got to be on the CD somewhere! How else would it *know?!*" and then spending way too long opening things in notepad. I recall we had some Nero suite on our XP PC at the time, and we had Sonic Heroes. The cutscenes for the game were just in the data folder. No idea what format they were now, but Nero set itself as the default handler for the file type, opened the video, played one frame, then blue screened. It would not surprise me if an old media player set itself as the default handler for .dat.
i didn't realize that the skit that led to south park was published on a TW game, the skit is actually older than south park itself however. if i remember right, matt and trey wanted to do a show about mr hanky, but comedy central wanted specifically a series based on this very skit in question.
I didn't have in my bingo card to watch a almost a 1 hour documentary about an EA cover up history involving South Park, but i'm glad i did it. also kudos to LowSpecAlex and the rest of youtubers to support their fellow growing youtubers.
Oh man the extras on discs when you put them into your pc takes me back. I remember cds of Gorillaz and Aqua having games on them, was such a nice surprise. Also wallpapers with alot of games.
I have no idea how you're able to consistently make such high quality videos that go on for this long, straight up some of the best content out there! Looking forward to see what you've got in store for us next! (But please try not to burn yourself out making all these!)
Hey erm it's worse actually. Even well into the XP days Windows media Player was set up to autoplay video CDs. Since this is the first top level file on the disc and a nice DAT file. I"m 99% sure this would either autoplay or at most ask if you wanna play the cd or open it in the file explorer
I put a rare DVD in my disk drive recently and you won't believe what I found on it. Printable drawings of pigs and chickens for children to colour in.
RE: Discs are written starting from the center out to the edge... Did you know that on the original Xbox games, the discs were written backwards? -- starting from the outside, and working their way to the center. -- If you rip an ISO with a regular drive, you need to use a special tool to reverse the data tracks.
Amazed at the quality of the video and research. But wow, the editing/transitions/references AGAIN blows me away like the Maxell logo guy. Thank you for doing this. Thank you for taking the time needed to do quality work and digging further than most people, it's very appreciated. Note 1 : It's also useful to put the files in the order/sequence they will usually be read to reduce the head movement between files, thus saving more precious seek time. Note 2 : There's only 33 employees of Adrenalin Entertainment on Linkedin, and just a dozen in engineering roles. On Mobygames for Tiger Woods 99 there are only seven engineers listed as having worked on the game directly. Somebody has got to know if it's an accident or not! Note 3 : I wonder what the people from South Park thought about this. Pretty sure they had a good laugh and appreciated the unconventional publicity stunt.
Yeah, we really did do that lol. I also remember just looking around at random files out of boredom too. We weren't all strapped into an attention economy back then; computers were fascinating, but you sorta had to find your own fun most of the time. It's how I got into modding tbh
now this is the content i signed up for, just discovered the channel and i absolutely adore everything from the jokes to the editing. high quality content like this deserves all the praise. Thanks for sharing your discoveries with us! (great references too! especially that dankpods segment)
less than 10 minutes in, I'm a big fan of the blink-and-you-miss-it government warning telling us to subscribe (with pixelated seal of the 'f4mi department of one time jokes'!!!! ) these videos are such a haven for people who like internet rabbitholes (and people with ADHD) (the overlap is quite large)
This video, more than any other video you've ever made, is a magnificent tribute to so many pieces of pop culture media and more niche stuff that I've ever grown to love as a person born in the middle 90s. Internet culture, videogames, retro aesthetics, all delivered with egregious pacing and god-like editing. Not to mention how brilliantly this whole investigation was conducted and presented. It took me just a few minutes into this video to declare you my personal queen of "rabbit hole exploration" YT videos - the king being hbomberguy after his MASTERPIECE "ROBLOX_OOF.mp3" - and it turns out he's featured here as well! This is ecstasy. Please never stop doing this. Even one video a year can do as long as it's THIS GOOD. This is already my favorite YT video of 2023.
The thing about Animal Crossing being able to run without a disc, is due to that the fact that the Nintendo GameCube holds 24 MB of RAM. Most of the code for animal crossing is around.. 16 mb uncompressed, which fits perfectly in the RAM size of the console The game is basically an N64 emulator (emulates the graphics and the audio) so it can be able to run fine in Gamecube, they adapted some of the code that uses N64 low level stuff to work with Gamecube buut it's basically the same as the N64. That's why it development time was quite short, it was translation and porting everything to Gamecube. Honestly, Animal crossing is quite fascinating :) I really am investing time to check the insides and understanding how the game is coded, which is fun I really enjoyed the video, I'm a big fan of video documentaries of anything :3
Your entire description of the "Nintendo Playstation" situation is incorrect. The deal dates back to 1989 when the SNES was still in development, Sony (specifically Ken Kutaragi) created the soundchip for the Super Nintendo. A clause in that agreement stated Sony had exclusive rights to create a CD based add-on for the console at some point in the future. Nintendo was really not particularly interested in the CD format at the time and didn't actually believe Sony would ever follow through on making that add-on. Obviously they were wrong about that. The problem wasn't that Sony made a piece of hardware that was "too good" as you stated, but that the fine print in that old agreement Nintendo thought Sony would never actually follow up on stated that Sony got all the software licensing revenue from said add-on. Meaning that not only did Nintendo stand to make no money at all from a console bearing their name - they would actually have to pay Sony for the right to put out a CD game on their "own" console. Effectively this would have handed Sony their entire business on a silver platter. Obviously they tried to renegotiate to no avail, the only out they had was to publicly embarrass/insult Sony with the surprise announcement of a simultaneous Philips deal. Nintendo never seriously wanted to work with Philips - those shitty CD-I Zelda games were the price they had to pay to get out of the horrendous bind they were in with Sony.
My favorite story of discovering music on a game disc was DEFINITELY from the Sega Saturn game SCUD: The Disposable Assassin It had some genuinely killer tracks and the Dungeons and Dragons sketch from the Dead Ale Wives. My young mind was blown - the game was pretty meh - but that turned it into one of my most treasured discs.
I'm not sure if any other commenters have mentioned it, but another benefit to the dummy data standard is prevention of software piracy. Game code often referred (refers?) to particular hard offsets in the disc to read particular data, which /u/MiniRat alludes to in their comment. If files weren't laid out exactly the way they were on the disc, the game wouldn't run. Therefore, you couldn't just make a copy of a game by popping the disc in, dragging the files to your desktop, and burning them on another disc - that destroys the necessary file structure.
I was definitely the kind of kid that would scour a disc. Give me three months in the summer with no school no job and nothing to do, and yeah, my curiosity will absolutely take hold. What happens when you put an audio CD in a computer and type DIR? What happens when you put a PSX disc in a CD player? And, of course, what's this big file suspiciously called "ZZ Dummy"? Particularly media files, since music and video on computers was so new and novel at the time. I used to hoard all the MID and WAV and AVI files I found on install discs. I can't imagine that, if I had a PlayStation at the time, I wouldn't have looked at every file on every disc just to see what was there. Definitely something a kid would do, that someone with a full schedule (at EA, Sony, etc.) never would've even thought to try.
this was wonderful. even though I am familiar with the general outlines of the history around this, I had no idea about this coverup at all and you did a phenomenal job with outstanding editing to cover every single detail, even finally telling me who has wondered why we can mash a bunch of gamecube games into one wii DVD so easily with "compression", which is because of all this dummy data used to make disc go vroom vroom. i really love your dedication to high effort editing on stupid meme jokes. the american psycho sequence with smash mouth is a chef's kiss moment, especially getting the exact model of CD player to display on the screen. just absolutely stellar, please never stop. I have turned the subscriber bell on because you're amazing!
My father won this game being the ninth caller on a AM radio morning show in 99/00... Played it20minutes on a too slow pc I threw the cd away about 2 years ago...Damn,,,, That just strenghten my Diogene syndrome
well, that was amazing, so much great detail that I knew in principle because I'm geeky, but hearing it all explained in context and for others to understand and knowing exactly what you were getting at - pretty neat!
"here's a bouncing DVD logo in case you need something to keep your attention span going for a few seconds" My ADHD ass : i'm in this photo and i don't like it
I'm at the Nintendo and Sony story part, it's absolutely not what happened for what I remember, yes the partnership was indeed to make a SNES-CD, but while doing it, Sony started improving it, working on the "Play station project", they even created a new format of CD (the Super disc) to circumvent the contract with Nintendo that where giving them (Nnintendo) control over the games published to the console, Yamauchi (CEO of Big N) discoverd what SONY was planing on and was furious and in the back of SONY, went toward Philips to talk about a deal and cover their backs, in june 91at the CES, Sony presented the "SNES CD: play station", it was almost as ambiguous as the announce of the Wii U, as SONY almost presented it as a console of them running Nintendo games on CD while they where originally only working on a "adapter" or "extension" to the SNES, the day after this presentation, still at the CES, it was settled, and the CEO of Nintendo US announced "we are doing a partnership with Philips to bring CDs to the SNES", making SONY looks like fools 1- because it was canceled in a day, and 2- because they left a japanese company for a European one. Yamauchi was a freakin shark and was never afraid to say what he think and act solely for his company interest, acting in the back like SONY did was not something he wanted for Nintendo, history proven this decision "wrong" financially, but it might have been the best any CEO of Nintendo ever made, Nintendo was not afraid of a "too god product", SONY acted like they were owning the product while they where tasked for a job. But anyway, the video was really great, as always !
my source for that was the book Revolutionaries at SONY by Reiji Asakura, which is based upon the POV of Sony employees, so it sorta makes sense that there would be discrepancies between the two versions of the story
@@f4micom Both sides had their fault in this story, Nintendo was the monster freak that it was during the "seal of approval" era, because of Yamauchi which probably freaked SONY, that caused them to act like snake and create backdoors for their technology and their shares, creating the same royalties system put in place by the "seal of approval", so they have the majority of the shares on the media sale. Whats funnier is that SONY and Nintendo "tried" again to make this partnership, but the deal with Philips was there, so they canned the Philips deal and said yes to SONY, but SONY just disapeared out of nowhere, the only remains where the contract that let Philips use Nintendo characters for a number of games on the CDI.
This represents how much technology and software/games development evolved in every aspect from that year to the present! It was an Age where important games developers forgott to remplace the placeholder file to fill the left space in the disc to take the size just before they released it! it's reminds me when i created my own CD's and game disc in my first WIN2000 and left all sort of random files in the disc only to fill the space and not waste any MB of memory in It! What a memories!
And I thought that one time a dev studio threw an entire game's beta ISO into their newer game as a dummy file was a big oops, wish I remembered what game that was. I do remember a friend of mine had a pirated copy of Crash Bandicoot that had all three games in one disc back in the day, so I've been aware that something funky was going on with file sizes even back in the day, even tho it took me years to learn that they were literally filling CD's with trash data. BTW as a millennial I should point out that back in the day the "dealers" of pirated stuff were usually just either or parents or some other adult relative that knew their way around computers. Nobody gave a f*ck about the questionable legality of it, at least not in my country, I even remember teachers telling us to just pirate the software needed for some classes.
I just found your channel, and I'm beyond impressed with much depth you went into regarding a filler file in a golf game. I'm excited to see what else you put out before EA finds you.
I feel like more than half of this video was dedicated to explain something the majority of people already know. Or at least it's something I already understood as the reasoning behind this is fairly obvious and common knowledge
Already liked for Auto Modellista footage and use of the soundtrack in the video. Now to finish the other 47 minutes. EDIT: Also mentions for Top Gear UK and Daft Punk. How dare you be this cool.
I like rambly videos. I ramble in my videos a ton and it’s super interesting to listen to people talk about random things loosely correlating to what they were previously talking about.
YO this was amazing! enjoyed ur video very much 😆 thank u for solving this mystery that i never knew about before once and for all, i can finally sleep yay
The second half of the video is just a technical deep dive into the first half, which covers the social importance of why this file was such a big deal to EA and the whole games industry sorry your brain shuts off if someone doesn't mention a file extension every 30 seconds
This has been in the back of my mind since I watched it, and I’ve been on the lookout for a copy of the game with the video since. I found it about a month ago for $7 😎
Is it weird to say part of the appeal of your content is that you sound different from every other channel I watch? It reminds me of when I used to cover martial arts and talked to fighters from Europe. I just like the differences, like "dis" instead of "this." Also your humor is on point - arguing with yourself and cursing yourself out cracks me up!
The part with the animal crossing bit... i had to go back and re read the text... lol i know it was edited in there but atfirst i was like oh god please tell they did not put something like that in a kids dialogue! 😂
Oh shit you’re the one who did the Homebrew Channel music video. That’s amazing. I wonder if there’s a project to dig through the dummy files of all PS1 games to see if there were any others with strange contents. Also, that outro is definitely Morse code but I’m too lazy to transcribe it
I never had a disc-based console til the GameCube, but can confirm "put things where they don't belong to get music" was a thing. I would put the PC games I owned (Sonic CD, Lego Island, Frogger, etc) into a CD/Tape combo boombox to listen to the OSTs and add tracks to cassette tapes for use in my portable tape deck. I remember doing this specifically around New Year's Eve before Y2K, because everyone in my family was convinced the computer wouldn't work after midnight and I wanted to be able to listen to those tracks anywhere. Hell, I even stayed up playing Frogger, which I had just gotten) trying to beat the game before midnight (I did beat the game...at 2 am). Also, PC games specifically had all sorts of extras on disc that were fun to play around with. I'd bet good money you're right that just looking for music or extras is EXACTLY how the kid found the file.
Standing ovation to you f4mi. This video is pure gold really and I admire your resolution and determination. Plus your edits are amazing. I love this investigations and trivia!
I can't believe how interesting this video is and how funny you are at the same time. Almost an hour long and it's not just some technical talk the whole way through. Underrated channel!!!
![The Story of the Playstation (Complete Series) [feat. Drunk Metroid]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/53yK3giVO1Y/mqdefault.jpg)
ignore the sounds you hear after the outro btw they are totally random and... a render error or something
ooooh an ARG by f4mi? I'm gonna enjoy this!😍🤑
no
@Luna elaborate
She is throwing red herrings!!! I believe we CAN decode a message. Come on, it is a video about hiding data inconspicuously, I bet it is morse code or something
@thatoneluna I think she mentione micro / U cause it was common back in the day.
"What company would publish something evil like this?"
What mother would buy her son a GOLF game?
Who thinks South Park is a "kids cartoon"?
That being said, EA is evil.
Just not for this reason.
@@roxassora2706 this was the late 90's, South Park wasn't nearly as known as it is today
@@roxassora2706 yes, it was the pilot of south park
@@Immadeus True
An hour-long video explaining the origins of a padding/placeholder file in some old golf game? Sounds fantastic!
YUP!
💀
More like another video where skipping and watching 5 minutes of it and ignore the rest is the best case scenario.
Her breathing into the mic and weird accent pretty much gave me an headache too.
How people like these get 50k + subs is the biggest mystery to me. Looks like social media is filled with lost idiots and doesn't look it will get any better soon or at all but only worse.
exactly my thoughts ! which is why i am going to watch it now. riveting stuff
Exactly, but yet I've watched the whole thing, well made for sure!
Dummy files carried over to the PS2 era. In fact, there's weirder dummy files than this one (though much less profane). One notable example is that all PS2 copies of Digimon Rumble Arena 2 contain what essentially was a fully playable early build of the game hidden inside a file named FILL.FIL. There's a few other PS2 games that also have dev builds used as dummy files but the DIgimon one is what stuck out to me.
Loved the editing on this, awesome work!
what
Michael, your videos are great
wait why are you here-
@@iraitsjffskts to watch a video
@@iraitsjffskts you do realize that people who create content also watch content?
I think you're right about how the kid found the file. What you described was really common, I remember doing it many times. I assumed it was a feature, honestly. Also a lot of 90s games basically encouraged you to look through the games folders. A lot of pc games came with extras, mostly wallpapers, that you could only access by going into the disk and looking for the folder. Usually named "extras" or flat out "wallpapers". So kids back then were a lot more likely to stick a game into their computer and see what they could find.
tbt to when a dreamcast game was mastered on an infected computer and shipped with a particularly destructive virus embedded in a bonus screensaver
I remember putting discs into anything that would take them. CD’s in the PlayStation, PlayStation games in the stereo player, you name it
Yeah, I did it as well. I remember finding music and cutscenes. One of the Civ games just had all the movies for the 'council' in a big file
Ah yes. nothing like buying a good old videogame and putting the disk into your pc to find goofy stuff!
FR
"She found me and binged my channel" I feel like that sums up most of the subs that got an unassuming video about a GameCube Demo Disc in their recommendations. This video was a blast, I love how this channel can show me Nintendo, DankPods and Top Gear pretty much back to back. Also, I made a playlist of DankPods BGM on UA-cam which I'm now just going to assume you probably came across in the wild.
Hello fellow dankpods enjoyer
This might be the single most brilliant piece of media I’ve ever saw on UA-cam.
One hour of non-stop, filled with shockingly golden details, content.
This shit HAS to blow up, props, fr.
Okay but calm down lol
@@MaxwellVador lmao fr its good but damn
this is the quality of f4mi :)
Love this vid. First one of hers I’ve found big fan. @Paoletti also check out “actionbutton’s doom review” for more retro obsessive journalism
Within seconds of this video I already predicted it’s definitely going to be about the South Park pilot. What I didn’t expect was a further explanation of the actual game files on the PS1 CD. Thanks for taking us knee deep into the rabbit hole as well.
You missed the thumbnail?
I can believe that a programmer used a random South Park clip they liked in order to test the CD writing abilities of the development libraries, and just forgot to delete it afterwards...
Forget to delete happens a lot in development. That's why cut content exist in games.
amazing video. subbed!
Thanks man! Really appreciate hearing this from you
13:18
Here in Germany they also replaced in Command & Conquer the soldiers with "robots".
Difference were the icons in the build menu, an oil stain instead of a blood and a "soda can" crushing sound when they where crushed by a tank.
This was in a game with 640x480 resolution for "soldiers" with like 8 pixels as bodies...
Implied violence counted too. Devs had to be VERY careful not to cross any lines.
Yeah and the TF2 characters with robots
@@nxx99 are you talking about mvm?
@@bcfed censorship in germany
They also replaced drivers in Flatout 2 with crash dummies, and somehow that version got to italy via FX Interaktive and it's really difficult to find nowadays
>be f4mi
>possessing one of the unassuming rarest original copy of PS1 game ever
>doesn't want to destroy the disc because her external drive is making "Skrillex bass"
>proceed to use PS3 to "read" the disc
This is the peak "Sometimes my genius is almost frightening" moment
I always love your videos. Just want to say thank you before EA has you disappeared.
2 letters agency
@@f4micom Experts in Assassination
lol oh no
@@f4micom expert assassination
This just unlocked a memory I forgot I even had from when I was super young, putting games like Wipeout 2097 into our old eMachines and ripping the soundtrack onto Windows Media Player. I don't know if it was super common knowledge that you could do that back then, but I doubt if I was tech savvy enough to figure it out by myself at the time, so I probably heard about it from somewhere. Makes me think that kid probably wasn't the first person to ever find the dummy file, just the first to really publicize it.
During my years at school it was pretty common knowledge, but it wouldn't work on every PC. Back then you needed a cable between the drive and the soundcard just for CD Audio.
The PS2 actually had a button to let you play the tracks from the browser I think it was if you press square or something
That's how I learned about it haha
@@LiEnby IS THIS FOR REAL
Wtf, why is this video such a banger?
I genuinely don't understand how this channel isn't bigger, the production value on these videos is insane.
Edit: wtf, you got hbomberguy to voice stuff, god damn
Edit2: dammit, now I gotta search for the links
30:53 Wait, people were actually alive BEFORE SiIvaGunner was invented?
How did they manage to do that?
I thought it held the fabric of reality together!
the tomb raider games used CD audio for cutscenes, very funny to be able to hear the whole story play out uninterrupted by gameplay
42:18 This part is interesting since you can see the effects of what would've happened otherwise when games later in the gen/next gen started to learn to stream game data from the disc in real time.
One of my friends had a super scratched Starsky and Hutch disc for the Xbox for example. It's a driving game with an open world that loads as you go through it (as expected). So since it has trouble reading the data in time, the game wouldn't stutter but you'd end up driving into a part of the world that hasn't loaded in and fall off the map.
Other games have failsafes for this like the original NFS Most Wanted. If the game can't keep up due to a scratched disc, the game will stop and pull up a transparent loading screen before you would otherwise drive into the abyss.
Love this video wish it was longer. Some day I will need to fill up data on a disk and I'l use this video.
This is why I love this channel. Hour of content. Not padded, beautifully edited, lovely references to (not only?) Portal, kept going deeper and deeper and had me hooked on every second of it. Here's a comment for the algo overlords!
Looked through a few listings on Ebay, and found a copy with those numbers on the disc! Picked it up, always love having a piece of gaming history.
I think the process of using FTP on a PS3 is the "sophisticated computer technique" that EA lawyers is referring to. 🤔
Gotta give them credit, that process was pretty sophisticated in 1999 indeed. Just getting the damn time machine to work alone could take ages!
I imagine that lawyer retelling the story of how he saved EA and the ESRB from Hillary Clinton with three words to his grandchildren at an old age and how he watched trucks on trucks offload hundreds of thousands of copies of Tiger Woods '99 into a pit in the Chihuahua desert and and the grandchildren thinking that grandpa has gone demented.
GRANDPA MILLENNIAL HERE................BACK IN MY DAY WE never seen videos of this quality and depth. this is like OG youtube glory jacked up with modern overstimula hyperdrive with like 'get out the popcorn for david attenborough' vibe. praising the internet gods for the existence of yr channel and wishing many moons of happiness and hype 4 u
i just watched the entire 1 hour instead of doing something else i should've done, super interesting!! kept me hooked at all times and i really enjoyed it, thanks f4mi :)
Speaking of dummy data on CD. In 2006 year in Russian released “LADA Racing Club”. The game was talked about a lot in magazines and on the Internet and was shown at exhibitions. In addition to the fact that it was literally garbage, it was on 4 CD and when installed on a computer, unused data was copied.
That was quite the journey.
I also like how former employees were represented by gray kittens. I'd love to have gray kittens working at my company (if I had one)
Yes, that would be cool
i mean, i've only been here since the $9 japanese DSi, but your channel is one of the most underrated on here. Every video is interesting, information-packed, long and lots of work. Thank you for producing such high quality content, and letting us watch it for free. :P
i swear some youtubers know how to make literally everything interesting this had me hooked on a story about a GOLF GAME for 53 minutes straight
Whoa, I didn't know about the concept of adding dummy data to increase the disc space, that was a neat thing to learn
yeah i had no idea either, super cool honestly (and insane how ridge racer is only 4 mb)
Penguins need HUGS
It also bonused as a sort of anti piracy technique since it meant the games were alot harder to share online
"I now know everything about a videogame I've never played"
story of my life...
50:14
Oh shit... doubt you're gonna see this Fami, but that guy who made the forum post (TriMesh) was one of the engineers at Sony who worked on the CD drive. If my memory also serves me correctly, he also helped crack the PS1 to make the first few PS1 modchips with his experience... but I can't recall.
We used to talk quite a bit in the Assembler Games' chatroom, but I've lost contact with him. He'd be a great source on any video on the PS1.
OH wow that is interesting, also yeah, unfortunately assembler too is only in archive mode rn...
@@f4micom that it is, but he was active a few weeks ago on PSXDev!
Some Beatmania game on the PS1 had partial source code for it in it's dummy file... gotta wonder if that was a genuine mistake or a disgruntled employee. Since it's Konami the latter is definitely not unheard of...
this story always reminds me of how every copy of windows xp actually has a copy of microsoft bob hidden on the disk
Normally I get kind of annoyed when someone fills their video essay with a bunch of pop culture references, but you're good at it.
I am commenting for the algorithm. But also because I love how creative some of the bits are in this video and I appreciate how much effort was put into it. Thanks f4mi!
Your editing, script, graphics, jokes, and voiceover are all fucking brilliant. Loved every minute of this 1hr video of a padding file
A channel with only 50k subscribers makes the best and high quality content ive seen on youtube! Even "hired" a voice actor.
Maybe she should hire a decent narrator.
Just watched the whole video and realized the Auto Modellista clip and the ost from the game, finally someone using Auto Modellista something that isn't a video with a title like "JDM LEGEND GAME (JAPANESE)"
I will never understand how 0's & 1's can be turned into what we see on our Computer, hear as music with our ears, and how we can make inputs with our controller's to make changes to games in real time on a display screen that's also changing in real time. CRAZY
I remember also killing time as a young'n with no idea what I was doing by browsing random files in my games. Including such logical thoughts as "I don't know where the activation key is for this game. Surely it's got to be on the CD somewhere! How else would it *know?!*" and then spending way too long opening things in notepad.
I recall we had some Nero suite on our XP PC at the time, and we had Sonic Heroes. The cutscenes for the game were just in the data folder. No idea what format they were now, but Nero set itself as the default handler for the file type, opened the video, played one frame, then blue screened. It would not surprise me if an old media player set itself as the default handler for .dat.
i didn't realize that the skit that led to south park was published on a TW game, the skit is actually older than south park itself however. if i remember right, matt and trey wanted to do a show about mr hanky, but comedy central wanted specifically a series based on this very skit in question.
Another excellent documentary/investigation vid from f4mi! Exactly what I needed to get through this illness I’ve fallen into.
I didn't have in my bingo card to watch a almost a 1 hour documentary about an EA cover up history involving South Park, but i'm glad i did it.
also kudos to LowSpecAlex and the rest of youtubers to support their fellow growing youtubers.
so happy to see another video from you f4mi. thank you for putting so much work into this, it's a really fun and interesting watch!!
Yoooo an almost 1 hour F4mi video!
already loving it
Oh man the extras on discs when you put them into your pc takes me back. I remember cds of Gorillaz and Aqua having games on them, was such a nice surprise. Also wallpapers with alot of games.
I have no idea how you're able to consistently make such high quality videos that go on for this long, straight up some of the best content out there! Looking forward to see what you've got in store for us next!
(But please try not to burn yourself out making all these!)
Thank you so much for this video. This is was marvelous! My favorite video of 2023 so far.
Hey erm it's worse actually. Even well into the XP days Windows media Player was set up to autoplay video CDs. Since this is the first top level file on the disc and a nice DAT file. I"m 99% sure this would either autoplay or at most ask if you wanna play the cd or open it in the file explorer
I put a rare DVD in my disk drive recently and you won't believe what I found on it.
Printable drawings of pigs and chickens for children to colour in.
your channel is in my top 5 currently, love your videos
RE: Discs are written starting from the center out to the edge...
Did you know that on the original Xbox games, the discs were written backwards? -- starting from the outside, and working their way to the center. -- If you rip an ISO with a regular drive, you need to use a special tool to reverse the data tracks.
Amazed at the quality of the video and research. But wow, the editing/transitions/references AGAIN blows me away like the Maxell logo guy. Thank you for doing this. Thank you for taking the time needed to do quality work and digging further than most people, it's very appreciated.
Note 1 :
It's also useful to put the files in the order/sequence they will usually be read to reduce the head movement between files, thus saving more precious seek time.
Note 2 :
There's only 33 employees of Adrenalin Entertainment on Linkedin, and just a dozen in engineering roles. On Mobygames for Tiger Woods 99 there are only seven engineers listed as having worked on the game directly. Somebody has got to know if it's an accident or not!
Note 3 :
I wonder what the people from South Park thought about this. Pretty sure they had a good laugh and appreciated the unconventional publicity stunt.
Yeah, we really did do that lol. I also remember just looking around at random files out of boredom too. We weren't all strapped into an attention economy back then; computers were fascinating, but you sorta had to find your own fun most of the time. It's how I got into modding tbh
now this is the content i signed up for, just discovered the channel and i absolutely adore everything from the jokes to the editing. high quality content like this deserves all the praise. Thanks for sharing your discoveries with us! (great references too! especially that dankpods segment)
less than 10 minutes in, I'm a big fan of the blink-and-you-miss-it government warning telling us to subscribe (with pixelated seal of the 'f4mi department of one time jokes'!!!! )
these videos are such a haven for people who like internet rabbitholes (and people with ADHD) (the overlap is quite large)
This video, more than any other video you've ever made, is a magnificent tribute to so many pieces of pop culture media and more niche stuff that I've ever grown to love as a person born in the middle 90s. Internet culture, videogames, retro aesthetics, all delivered with egregious pacing and god-like editing. Not to mention how brilliantly this whole investigation was conducted and presented.
It took me just a few minutes into this video to declare you my personal queen of "rabbit hole exploration" YT videos - the king being hbomberguy after his MASTERPIECE "ROBLOX_OOF.mp3" - and it turns out he's featured here as well! This is ecstasy.
Please never stop doing this. Even one video a year can do as long as it's THIS GOOD. This is already my favorite YT video of 2023.
35:28
e-z rollers - retro
classic tune released on moving shadow, big ups. absolutely love it
The thing about Animal Crossing being able to run without a disc, is due to that the fact that the Nintendo GameCube holds 24 MB of RAM. Most of the code for animal crossing is around.. 16 mb uncompressed, which fits perfectly in the RAM size of the console
The game is basically an N64 emulator (emulates the graphics and the audio) so it can be able to run fine in Gamecube, they adapted some of the code that uses N64 low level stuff to work with Gamecube buut it's basically the same as the N64. That's why it development time was quite short, it was translation and porting everything to Gamecube.
Honestly, Animal crossing is quite fascinating :) I really am investing time to check the insides and understanding how the game is coded, which is fun
I really enjoyed the video, I'm a big fan of video documentaries of anything :3
Your entire description of the "Nintendo Playstation" situation is incorrect. The deal dates back to 1989 when the SNES was still in development, Sony (specifically Ken Kutaragi) created the soundchip for the Super Nintendo. A clause in that agreement stated Sony had exclusive rights to create a CD based add-on for the console at some point in the future. Nintendo was really not particularly interested in the CD format at the time and didn't actually believe Sony would ever follow through on making that add-on. Obviously they were wrong about that. The problem wasn't that Sony made a piece of hardware that was "too good" as you stated, but that the fine print in that old agreement Nintendo thought Sony would never actually follow up on stated that Sony got all the software licensing revenue from said add-on. Meaning that not only did Nintendo stand to make no money at all from a console bearing their name - they would actually have to pay Sony for the right to put out a CD game on their "own" console. Effectively this would have handed Sony their entire business on a silver platter. Obviously they tried to renegotiate to no avail, the only out they had was to publicly embarrass/insult Sony with the surprise announcement of a simultaneous Philips deal. Nintendo never seriously wanted to work with Philips - those shitty CD-I Zelda games were the price they had to pay to get out of the horrendous bind they were in with Sony.
My favorite story of discovering music on a game disc was DEFINITELY from the Sega Saturn game SCUD: The Disposable Assassin
It had some genuinely killer tracks and the Dungeons and Dragons sketch from the Dead Ale Wives. My young mind was blown - the game was pretty meh - but that turned it into one of my most treasured discs.
Thank God I completely forgot about you but I'm so happy you finally uploaded!!
I'm not sure if any other commenters have mentioned it, but another benefit to the dummy data standard is prevention of software piracy. Game code often referred (refers?) to particular hard offsets in the disc to read particular data, which /u/MiniRat alludes to in their comment. If files weren't laid out exactly the way they were on the disc, the game wouldn't run. Therefore, you couldn't just make a copy of a game by popping the disc in, dragging the files to your desktop, and burning them on another disc - that destroys the necessary file structure.
watched half the video two weeks ago, finished it just now, amazing work!
when did you get 45k more subscribers??? glad your channel is growing, you deserve it for the work! (and the hitsujigoods crossover was unexpected)
she ZZ on my DUMMY til i DAT
no but seriously i've watched this video like 3 times now and shown it to a bunch of friends. amazing work as always ^^
Really appreciate the effort you put into covering the whole thing! Great video :D
I was definitely the kind of kid that would scour a disc. Give me three months in the summer with no school no job and nothing to do, and yeah, my curiosity will absolutely take hold.
What happens when you put an audio CD in a computer and type DIR? What happens when you put a PSX disc in a CD player? And, of course, what's this big file suspiciously called "ZZ Dummy"?
Particularly media files, since music and video on computers was so new and novel at the time. I used to hoard all the MID and WAV and AVI files I found on install discs. I can't imagine that, if I had a PlayStation at the time, I wouldn't have looked at every file on every disc just to see what was there. Definitely something a kid would do, that someone with a full schedule (at EA, Sony, etc.) never would've even thought to try.
I think you're probably my favorite youtuber I've found in the past year. Any youtuber that talks about obscure gaming stuff always peaks my interest.
what the hell
All the old racing game music in the background is digging at the deep parts of my brain with a Komatsu
Really cool video, really informative!
Very cool story. I love your editing style.
Thanks a lot! ^^
i like to comment on videos and supporting f4mi
the highly anticipated comeback 🙌🏽🙌🏽
this was wonderful. even though I am familiar with the general outlines of the history around this, I had no idea about this coverup at all and you did a phenomenal job with outstanding editing to cover every single detail, even finally telling me who has wondered why we can mash a bunch of gamecube games into one wii DVD so easily with "compression", which is because of all this dummy data used to make disc go vroom vroom.
i really love your dedication to high effort editing on stupid meme jokes. the american psycho sequence with smash mouth is a chef's kiss moment, especially getting the exact model of CD player to display on the screen. just absolutely stellar, please never stop. I have turned the subscriber bell on because you're amazing!
My father won this game being the ninth caller on a AM radio morning show in 99/00...
Played it20minutes on a too slow pc
I threw the cd away about 2 years ago...Damn,,,, That just strenghten my Diogene syndrome
“Even before I was in my dads ba-“ I felt that…
I was barely out by 1 year in 91 XD
well, that was amazing, so much great detail that I knew in principle because I'm geeky, but hearing it all explained in context and for others to understand and knowing exactly what you were getting at - pretty neat!
"here's a bouncing DVD logo in case you need something to keep your attention span going for a few seconds"
My ADHD ass : i'm in this photo and i don't like it
really enjoyed it, I love how deep you go into the story!
I'm at the Nintendo and Sony story part, it's absolutely not what happened for what I remember, yes the partnership was indeed to make a SNES-CD, but while doing it, Sony started improving it, working on the "Play station project", they even created a new format of CD (the Super disc) to circumvent the contract with Nintendo that where giving them (Nnintendo) control over the games published to the console, Yamauchi (CEO of Big N) discoverd what SONY was planing on and was furious and in the back of SONY, went toward Philips to talk about a deal and cover their backs, in june 91at the CES, Sony presented the "SNES CD: play station", it was almost as ambiguous as the announce of the Wii U, as SONY almost presented it as a console of them running Nintendo games on CD while they where originally only working on a "adapter" or "extension" to the SNES, the day after this presentation, still at the CES, it was settled, and the CEO of Nintendo US announced "we are doing a partnership with Philips to bring CDs to the SNES", making SONY looks like fools 1- because it was canceled in a day, and 2- because they left a japanese company for a European one.
Yamauchi was a freakin shark and was never afraid to say what he think and act solely for his company interest, acting in the back like SONY did was not something he wanted for Nintendo, history proven this decision "wrong" financially, but it might have been the best any CEO of Nintendo ever made, Nintendo was not afraid of a "too god product", SONY acted like they were owning the product while they where tasked for a job.
But anyway, the video was really great, as always !
my source for that was the book Revolutionaries at SONY by Reiji Asakura, which is based upon the POV of Sony employees, so it sorta makes sense that there would be discrepancies between the two versions of the story
@@f4micom Both sides had their fault in this story, Nintendo was the monster freak that it was during the "seal of approval" era, because of Yamauchi which probably freaked SONY, that caused them to act like snake and create backdoors for their technology and their shares, creating the same royalties system put in place by the "seal of approval", so they have the majority of the shares on the media sale.
Whats funnier is that SONY and Nintendo "tried" again to make this partnership, but the deal with Philips was there, so they canned the Philips deal and said yes to SONY, but SONY just disapeared out of nowhere, the only remains where the contract that let Philips use Nintendo characters for a number of games on the CDI.
This represents how much technology and software/games development evolved in every aspect from that year to the present! It was an Age where important games developers forgott to remplace the placeholder file to fill the left space in the disc to take the size just before they released it! it's reminds me when i created my own CD's and game disc in my first WIN2000 and left all sort of random files in the disc only to fill the space and not waste any MB of memory in It! What a memories!
And I thought that one time a dev studio threw an entire game's beta ISO into their newer game as a dummy file was a big oops, wish I remembered what game that was. I do remember a friend of mine had a pirated copy of Crash Bandicoot that had all three games in one disc back in the day, so I've been aware that something funky was going on with file sizes even back in the day, even tho it took me years to learn that they were literally filling CD's with trash data.
BTW as a millennial I should point out that back in the day the "dealers" of pirated stuff were usually just either or parents or some other adult relative that knew their way around computers. Nobody gave a f*ck about the questionable legality of it, at least not in my country, I even remember teachers telling us to just pirate the software needed for some classes.
Digimon rumble arena 2?
I just found your channel, and I'm beyond impressed with much depth you went into regarding a filler file in a golf game. I'm excited to see what else you put out before EA finds you.
I feel like more than half of this video was dedicated to explain something the majority of people already know.
Or at least it's something I already understood as the reasoning behind this is fairly obvious and common knowledge
This video confirms that the EA employees on that reddit post are cats.
Imagine how many hundreds of cubic meters of plastic waste could've been saved, if they did just ship games on mini-CDs.
Already liked for Auto Modellista footage and use of the soundtrack in the video. Now to finish the other 47 minutes.
EDIT: Also mentions for Top Gear UK and Daft Punk. How dare you be this cool.
man this video is rambly. you could cut out like 30% or 40% of the video and lose nothing important or relevant to the main topic.
I like rambly videos. I ramble in my videos a ton and it’s super interesting to listen to people talk about random things loosely correlating to what they were previously talking about.
YO this was amazing! enjoyed ur video very much 😆 thank u for solving this mystery that i never knew about before once and for all, i can finally sleep yay
31:50 is when video actually starts...
in that 30 minutes she talks pretty much nothing.
Hard to follow it, jumps across to everything except the actual point, not sure what I took from it really.
The second half of the video is just a technical deep dive into the first half, which covers the social importance of why this file was such a big deal to EA and the whole games industry
sorry your brain shuts off if someone doesn't mention a file extension every 30 seconds
I love this kind of video! The mystery solves! You get me invested in a story I didn’t even know about
This has been in the back of my mind since I watched it, and I’ve been on the lookout for a copy of the game with the video since. I found it about a month ago for $7 😎
Is it weird to say part of the appeal of your content is that you sound different from every other channel I watch? It reminds me of when I used to cover martial arts and talked to fighters from Europe. I just like the differences, like "dis" instead of "this." Also your humor is on point - arguing with yourself and cursing yourself out cracks me up!
The part with the animal crossing bit... i had to go back and re read the text... lol i know it was edited in there but atfirst i was like oh god please tell they did not put something like that in a kids dialogue! 😂
This is a good video, I'm glad the algorithm decided to share your channel.
I remember trying to find sonic songs and discovered the available tracks
Oh shit you’re the one who did the Homebrew Channel music video. That’s amazing.
I wonder if there’s a project to dig through the dummy files of all PS1 games to see if there were any others with strange contents.
Also, that outro is definitely Morse code but I’m too lazy to transcribe it
I never had a disc-based console til the GameCube, but can confirm "put things where they don't belong to get music" was a thing. I would put the PC games I owned (Sonic CD, Lego Island, Frogger, etc) into a CD/Tape combo boombox to listen to the OSTs and add tracks to cassette tapes for use in my portable tape deck.
I remember doing this specifically around New Year's Eve before Y2K, because everyone in my family was convinced the computer wouldn't work after midnight and I wanted to be able to listen to those tracks anywhere. Hell, I even stayed up playing Frogger, which I had just gotten) trying to beat the game before midnight (I did beat the game...at 2 am).
Also, PC games specifically had all sorts of extras on disc that were fun to play around with. I'd bet good money you're right that just looking for music or extras is EXACTLY how the kid found the file.
Standing ovation to you f4mi. This video is pure gold really and I admire your resolution and determination. Plus your edits are amazing.
I love this investigations and trivia!
You know what? Your channel is really bingeable.... It just... tickles and stimulates my curiosity and desire for stories...
A great video about the problem of space and CD speed is, How Myst Almost Couldn't Run on CD-ROM | War Stories by Ars Technica
I can't believe how interesting this video is and how funny you are at the same time. Almost an hour long and it's not just some technical talk the whole way through. Underrated channel!!!