Sony's Clever but Flawed PlayStation Copy Protection--And How They Might Have Fixed It

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The original PlayStation is a pretty neat thing. Using the CD as a storage medium was a smart move. But, Sony needed to add anti-piracy features to the disc to prevent miscreants from making bootleg copies of Crash Bandicoot. This video tells the story of how that works, why it wasn’t infallible, and also proposes a potentially impervious solution (24 years late, though).
Here’s that paper on reading optical discs. It’s a good read:
pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f772...
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[@whiterunsteward7477]

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.

[@MadMamluk88]

The thing is back in the day, I’d say super early 2000’s, places like Walmart were selling black inked CD-R packs.

[@Tismtay]

@@MadMamluk88 So it was a failed attempt at security theatre.

[@purwantiallan5089]

@@Tismtay yes. Security device must've been broken.

[@purwantiallan5089]

@@MadMamluk88 what? Walmart created those?

[@YesIAmSmarterThanYouPleaseCope]

@@Tismtay Copy protection and counterfeit protection have different purposes, and neither of them have anything to do with security. As counterfeit protection, the black coloring still works well because nobody will think your Walmart disc is a genuine Sony product.

[@matt_b...]

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

[@CybrNight]

matt b well it’s the only game to play if your vision is failing

[@joergn83]

remember the book of cheats, you could get free in mags. trading cheats in school. a while ago. something lost from the genre. even with all the cool graphics

[@lister_of_smeg6545]

Yeah, it was just a shoddy rip-off of "Mockup".

[@TheDeeplyCynical]

The Sequel was much better.

[@MarkTheMorose]

There are thousands of copies for sale on eBay. Each one describing it as 'rare' and charging a fortune.

[@jimsnotreal]

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.

[@grahamkelly8662]

When my friend showed me this I was so happy.

[@rhomis]

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.

[@mahmoodmawed4347]

You have a very smart kid

[@rhomis]

@@mahmoodmawed4347 - Smart, yes. Breaking discs at 4 and 5 years old, expected.

[@notme5744]

@BenBenson I'm guessing they interpreted the word "cracked" to mean that the kid had cracked the copyright protection

[@doltBmB]

@@notme5744 *copyright

[@notme5744]

@@doltBmB Thanks, I don't know why I spelt it that way

[@Aix_Plainer]

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.

[@Baigle1]

thanks for insight

[@Alex-ki1yr]

Addressed that at about 13:00 min in

[@delulu6969]

@@Alex-ki1yr That's why the title is a click-bait. The solution he said isn't a feasible solution or even defeats the purpose of making the PlayStation (cheaper manufacturing compared to other consoles).

[@irgendwer3610]

@@delulu6969 did you even watch the whole video? 13:00

[@ZeldagigafanMatthew]

burned, or pressed?

[@GaleonXZ]

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

[@ohnoitisnt]

Mate that was a banging game

[@arktos7444]

Gran turismo mode engaged

[@crf80fdarkdays]

@@arktos7444 gran autismo mode engaged

[@eboone]

@@crf80fdarkdays :/

[@scalp340]

"crack crack crack the egg into the bowl.....stir and mix the flour into the bowl"

[@Lily-gr1ct]

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.

[@OfficialUknow]

That’s hilarious lol

[@StoutShako]

Is there a video of that on UA-cam somewhere??? Omg.

[@NiVoldiza]

I remember this too, but you are wrong. This has nothing to do with burned copied games or copy protection. Copied games don't work without a modchip at all, and when they work they work as the game. You are insinuating that the game was a copy of the original, but copying it somehow wrote the game code over and put piranhas everywhere? No chance that you could have been playing a free commecial demo-version of the game designed to showcase the revolutionary 3d gameplay to potential customers? These demo issues used to come with magazines as freebies, and include many demos of many games that were restricted in some way.

[@Berryturtle1]

@@NiVoldiza tldr. Ur done bud, ur done

[@mastermariogamer1427]

@@NiVoldiza Lots of used PS1s have modchips in them, so they could have bought one second hand and it already had a modchop in it. Also, games like Spyro had code like this to make the playing experience bad on copied games

[@hassaization]

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

[@jacksonpiper8774]

lol lol😊l I’ll l

[@bubbles581]

Wow 5 years since this jacketless video!

[@fdmillion]

What is fascinating is IIRC GD-ROM was actually readable on standard CD drives. All they did was step way outside the specifications for the CD, while still maintaining *enough* compatibility for a standard CD transport to read the disc provided the firmware allowed for those tolerances. The same technique actually brought us the 700MB CD - the original spec only allowed up to 650MB, all they did was shrink the track pitch to the edge of the tolerance to get 700MB. It was actually very similar to how Microsoft made 1.6MB floppy disks for Windows 95 distribution by screwing with the disk format while staying within tolerances of floppy controllers.
I remember some manufacturers going even beyond 700MB. I owned a stack of 90 minute CD-R's that worked fine in most of my burners, but choked on many standard CD players, even ones that could play 700MB/80 minute CD-R's. I believe at least one manufacturer even pushed it all the way to 99 minutes - the maximum the TOC allows for - which is actually approaching the density of the GD-ROM (something like 900MB).

[@fattomandeibu]

@@fdmillion The original CDs from before CD-ROMs were standardised in '83 were "only" 550mb, but at the time that was a mind-bogglingly impossible-to-fill amount of storage with your average computer having 64-128kb of RAM.

[@MegaLazygamer]

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.

[@-DeScruff]

I imagine it also would be used as a visual aid to say "This is a PS1 Disc, don't stick it in a CD Player." (Or another console)
If you put some early CD games like the ones from the TG16CD, Sega CD, or Sega Saturn in a computer, or a CD player, youll usually find an audio track saying "This disc is for use in ____, it contains computer data, which may damage your equipment." - If it looks different, you might not stick it in the CD Player.

[@ReeseRiverson]

@@-DeScruff There were still plenty of PS1, SegaCD, and other console titles that still had audio tracks that would play on a CD player just fine. :)

[@-DeScruff]

@@ReeseRiverson Yeah there were a lot of Redbook audio CD based games. I love those cause these days its super easy to rip the music! :D
However Ive heard early CD players would try to play the 'Computer Data' track as audio and it will sound like really loud static and garbage..
And I think newer players would recognize that the track was computer data and just skip it, or stop playback after the warning. - But Im not sure about that.
Nobody seems to agree if it will or will not damage your speakers... But everyone agrees whatever it is, its unpleasant.
I'd hazard a guess that CD players that didn't skip Computer data tracks (or whatever) were common enough that such a warning was needed.

[@thehearth8773]

A number of actual PS1 game releases did in fact have conventional silvery discs. Final Fantasy Chronicles and Final Fantasy Anthology both did, for instance.

[@defiraphi]

Cd-Rom's were the same . You could put those in a CD-Player and listen to the music.
Biggest example is the game for PC "Tunnel B1" put the CD-Rom in your CD-Player you have all the CD Album there so you don't need to buy the official CD album from the game . It's very neat imo.
Also today you can easily get the right codecs thru internet .

[@flar7684]

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

[@kalle1453]

Haha smart guy =)

[@HeadNtheClouds]

I copied everything. YO HO YO HO THE PIRATES LIFE FOR MEEEEE ☠️

[@MILSPECMOM]

I was a manager at one here in Canada, let's just say they may not have paid much but I made it up in copying our entire stock over the course of a year. lol

[@craig158yt]

Flar ha ha, those certainly were the days! 💰💰💰

[@bentosan]

That’s where I got my copy of Diablo 1 from :D

[@boogiedaddy3434]

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.

[@georgf9279]

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

[@nthgth]

Lmao right

[@robcuijpers1079]

😃

[@blacklabel130]

Developers: Incognito Entertainment, Eat Sleep Play, SingleTrac, 989 Studios, Stormfront Studios... where is your sony bar you are talking about -.-

[@DrDoomBloom]

😂 yeah I peeped that too

[@megarollxrgmbroadcasting91]

@@blacklabel130 989 is sony

[@CamilleonProductions]

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

[@zatty232]

Yeah wtf

[@cloneskiller]

Its a viral video, ppl just dislike things early because they were impatiant.

[@suprememasteroftheuniverse]

Conciseness is a mark of superior intelligence

[@bean_man8752]

George ツ you’re **

[@KyonXyclone]

@@suprememasteroftheuniverse Your comment is not relevant here. It's not as you imply, i.e. that verbosity is necessarily a mark of lower intelligence. This guy however isn't being particularly verbose he's just explaining lots of things in detail which naturally means it won't be simple or short. That's not the same as being inconcise.

[@10p6]

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

[@rhettorical]

Maybe, but later models of the PS1 didn't have the larger area. It would have saved a fortune to have made the space slightly smaller, and thus the entire console smaller, thus saving a bunch of plastic on each console (which is one reason why later models are smaller).

[@defiraphi]

I don't like the later models from the PS1 . They looked cheap and not that "Revolutionnary Looking Design" the first models looked as for the nostalgic purpose the first model is "The Real PS1" .

[@sellers737]

@@rhettorical I always figured the parts inside dictated a wider area. Back then PC parts were (relative to now) pretty big. Also parts that get hot need to be far away from one another to keep everything cool. Once parts started to shrink down in size, the rest of the console could shrink with it

[@rhettorical]

Another reasonable assumption, but no other DVD or CD players at the time or even today have caddies that large. There's no real justifiable reason for making the caddy larger unless they planned to make the discs bigger.

[@defiraphi]

@Rhettorical
Exactly all new generations seems to forget that the Playstation 1 doesn't offered all these features . Which i'm really fed up to hear about not needed complains about that console .
The Playstation 1 ( PSX ) first model offered everything to the peoples dreamed for in that era . " the hell with space ecology from today which people don't even understand why it was made for to begin with "
Strange from it all you could easily put CD-Rom's into your standard CD-player to listen to the full soundtrack from the game ( easy example Tunnel B1 game from Ocean ) no need to buy the separate CD since it was on the CD-rom itself .
So for me the revolution part from the Playstation 2 being able to read DVD's was passé since Computers were ahead of their times by miles .
And last paying so much for a console today is still way too expensive . Even as games that aren't even finished and falls directly into being "Beta Versions" no wonder PC games gets the final product and has mods is a fact .

[@landsystems5807]

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!

[@cursedaudio984]

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

[@raven-a]

I remember back when I had an R4 for my Nintendo DSi every new game would have some hideous crazy antipiracy, and then days after launch you would have new versions of the game patched by the hacker teams, then you would start playing and maybe stop half way because of another copy protection that went undetected, then maybe a week later you would have to download the ROM a third or fourth time to be able to play it, some games weren't even cracked properly, it was a crazy time (and even though I thought I would eventually brick my DSi with some ROM running on the R4, I never stopped trying to play the new games, I just couldn't afford any 😂)

[@egon3705]

@@raven-a flashcarts can't brick the dsi, they don't have access to its internal memory

[@Myriachan]

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.

[@carl-henrikkristoffersen2313]

Very interesting! Thank you for the insight.

[@bittasweetsymphony726]

hello, i am owner of sony, my lawyers will be in touch with you.

[@ianludwig6382]

Wow you saved me 14 minutes of this guy

[@hatoftricks7132]

@@ianludwig6382 now Probwem

[@MichaelPohoreski]

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!

[@TorutheRedFox]

whoa

[@meneldal]

So you used the loading trick to test if your game worked on a real console?

[@dee_fox]

@@meneldal no, ps1 devkit consoles read cd-r without a modchip or the swap trick

[@throttleblipsntwistedgrips1992]

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

[@SuperHns]

I honestly think Nintendo indirectly killed off Sega with that move... PS2 is also one of the reasons the Dreamcast failed.

[@CyberdustStudios]

@@SuperHns It really was Sega's fault the Dreamcast failed, and it really wasn't the Dreamcast itself. Sega's long string of bad decisions with consoles, trying to keep the Genesis alive with not so good add-ons, and giving up when add-ons and consoles were tanking. These really made people lose hope in sega and was, In my opinion, the point when sega was starting to hit rock bottom. I think of Sega in the late 90's as a drive-by shooting; the 32x, CD, and Saturn as the intended victim of gang members, with the Dreamcast being the innocent bystander. All of which led to Sega's 3rd party conversion, and near bankruptcy.

[@MartyMacgyver]

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.

[@enkiimuto1041]

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...

[@alswo9628]

Enkii Muto “Supply by demand”

[@davidgn40]

@@alswo9628 you mean supply "and" demand?

[@alswo9628]

@@davidgn40 No you read it right; when there's a demand, there's always some chinese sellers on ebay/ali/taobao that selling that item.
In this case, some clever chinese guy would've made a special CD burner for 15 cm discs because there's a market.
And now it's pretty much confirmed that my joke was a shit.

[@davidgn40]

@@alswo9628 ahhh my bad

[@antus666]

Sega dreamcast had the 1Gb GDROM, pirates used the console itself to read the disk and re-encoded video and audio with slightly lower bitrate (or removed it, if it wasnt part of the main game) so that the game would fit on a standard size cdrom. Sure a 15cm disk would have prevent copys of store borrowed games, but it would not have prevented piracy of pre-ripped games, and copies of copies.

[@tiagosoares8790]

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!

[@jasonobrien1004]

Tiago probably just idiots who didn’t understand

[@romxxii]

I wouldn't be surprised if he got brigaded by pro-piracy kiddies.

[@philsurtees]

@@jasonobrien1004 No, probably because he's an idiot who is wrong, and idiots like you who don't understand why he's wrong, consequently think the video is good.

[@Doomblud]

@@philsurtees And how is he wrong?

[@andromedajunky9215]

@@philsurtees Well, if he's so wrong, share your wisdom as to why, old wise one. Instead of just spouting your opinion like it's fact with nothing to back up, and acting like that entitles you to throw around insults like a 12 year old. Or am I giving you too much credit and you are just another lame troll?

[@Deagoldpp]

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.

[@popstar_pills]

idk look what it did for the dreamcast (not much), they didn't even need a modchip they could straight up just play burnt discs (I think later models fixed this, been too long lol)

[@MillTurnBR]

It's exactly what Autodesk did with Autocad

[@pong9000]

Sony grew huge by selling piracy equipment. Why else would you buy a cassette recorder that inputs all audio media, and even copies the copies?

[@philroo1]

@@MillTurnBR they put the boot into their customers though, check your licenses and uninstall when handing down workstations to accounts dept. etc.

[@scottex.]

​@@MillTurnBR yup, and now they cut it with needing proof for the student thing

[@aaronriggs4430]

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

[@dwaindibbley1965]

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

[@Sindragozer]

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

[@serpentine1983]

Sindragozer nah, I bought CD-R's that were black back in the days... They said that the black ink helped the CD drive read the data easier if it was scratched... Do not know if this is true or not, but black CD-R's were sold xD. and were not more expensive than normal CD-R.

[@GabrielFranco]

Yes, i had a Red CD-R with Castlevania Burned lol

[@BlazeRhodon]

Today BD-R discs are black (original pressed BD-ROMs are silver just like original DVD-ROMs and CD-ROMs). I don't think that layer's color matters with reading discs. My BD drive read original BD-ROM and burned BD-R discs with the same speed.

[@AndrooUK]

It was a great touch to discs. I found it very nice to have that unique look, no matter what the intention.
There's no substitute for the feel of physical media, even for digital information. Books, photographs, CDs, USB drives... they all have a special something.

[@spoada]

And your thinker are is working better than his, thats exactly why the deep purple. Plus to hide scratches better imo.

[@nexigram]

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. 🤫

[@gamelaine]

weeb

[@mandi8345]

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!

[@SumeaBizarro]

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.

[@rhettorical]

Usually yes, but I've owned plenty of PS1 and PS2 games that lack the dark coloring and I know they were genuine because I bought them brand new at the store.

[@micglou]

Like others already said, not all discs were black, some were the standard shiny silvery ones, I've also seen blueish/greenish ones. And if I remember correctly rental versions of PS1 games had a reddish/pinkish color, later Sony used the same color for their rental DVD's. But also black colored discs were not exclusive to Sony PS1, they also sold black writables, they called them 'carbon' or 'vinyl' discs... I still have some albums burned on those discs buried away in a box somewhere.

[@reifenabhobeler4331]

Nah, I have some Black CD-Rs from different brands like Maxdisc and Intenso. The black colour means nothing

[@panthermodern64]

"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".

[@TechnologyConnections]

I approve this comment.

[@bernoulli3023]

It’s like Sony giving an up-yours for cd games for a gaming console to Nintendo...

[@Dragonfire511]

And the fm towns marty

[@Tempora158]

But the PC Engine CD format was successful (in Japan), and the Saturn came out before the PS1 and that succeeded too (in Japan), so the PS1 was really the third successful console to use CD.

[@seanseanston]

Also the Amiga CD32, which was so unsuccessful you forgot to even mention it :'(

[@nahuelnunez2]

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

[@CorruptPianist]

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

[@SandTurtle]

yep but it was a pretty bad deal as while nintendo would make a lot of off the hardware they made basically nothing off the software, and nintendo realized that philips were trying to pull the same thing but they already had the rights to the trademarks and even though they canceled, so even though nintendo was probably screaming their heads off how bad those games were they couldn't do a thing.

[@ultrairrelevantnobody1862]

@Sand Turtle
I've yet to find proof that Nintendo thought their games on the Philips CD-I were bad, even in retrospect, but I did find something interesting.
According to the guy who was responsible for the little sculptures for Zelda's Adventure, he said some of Nintendo's members did visit to check how it was turning out and were overall impressed with what had been done and Viridis' ambitious use of the Zelda license.
One thing to note is that the games were well received at the time, especially for their use of the CD technology.

[@MansakeLabsOfficial]

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.

[@situationalawareness]

People used removable discs for music far before this, they weren't ignorant to it. In fact, it's the reason most people went with it so quickly.

[@spazzwazzle]

@@situationalawareness Yes, but kids were definitely not familiar with it. They also have clumsy hands, so it would make sense. The PS2-4 all are designed so you don't have to pry the disc up with your hands, as are most consoles; the Gamecube is a top loader but it uses small discs, has plenty of room, and a button to press.

[@jitsmapper4438]

my thoughts as well. the rest of the video was interesting though

[@robertt9342]

They would have had just thumb divets or at least not require such a large space. Also, for clumsy kids, they have smaller fingers even requiring less space.

[@darylg.4270]

They made the load area larger for Shaq. You didnt know that??

[@aidanarguin2485]

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.

[@IWasAllLikeG93]

I remember owning and using CD-R discs that were in all sorts of colors, including black, around the time the PSX was out. They were called "cool colors" by memorex and are still sold today. Personally, I think the black discs were purely for the cool factor. 8 year old me certainly thought they were.

[@dylanharding5720]

Some Jeep Guy I think Sony said that to mislead pirates.

[@SchlossRitter]

Sadly, perhaps to counter the cost of coloring the disc plastic, my Cool CDR seem to have been made with the cheapest possible method of keeping the data layer directly under an easily damaged label (commercial CD-ROM normally put the data layer between two fused layers of the plastic afaik). Even a slight bit of water on the label was enough to cause the label and data to peel away, as I found out when using some failed burns as coasters.

[@trashboi-bk]

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.

[@timmytatoe4248]

The 1st version of resident evil was as well

[@Broeils]

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 ...

[@amcghie7]

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

[@burtdanams4426]

ur comment is unintentionally written like an MF DOOM rap flow, nice

[@micglou]

A neighbor a few doors down from where I lived back then modded PS1's as a "hobby" and sold all kinds of games that usually weren't released to western markets... he made a lot of money off it... enough to drive a very nice car and go on expensive vacations.

[@DasAntiNaziBroetchen]

@@micglou Considering that that is still a business nowadays, the guy must have made a killing back then.

[@mikel9567]

I never got my PS1 modded but I modded my others. I have a modded xbox360, wii and I had a modded PSP but it got stolen. Also have an original xbox development console. Ah the good old days.

[@energeticyellow1637]

Awesome dad

[@vincentt2309]

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

[@diablotry5154]

Not cartridge...

[@beefcakeandgravy]

__

[@behindthemask5477]

スライアチン Nice MJ profile pic.

[@micglou]

Yup... seen those. Also seen a system for the snes with pirated games on some kind of memory card which was used in tandem with an original cartridge to make them run, I think it was some kind of hacked Super Gameboy system. Also counterfeit cartridges were sold for both the NES and SNES. This dude needs to brush up on that I guess...

[@nelsonantunes5099]

@@diablotry5154 actually, yes cartridges... Half of my snes cartridges were pirate copies. Pirated cartridges were fairly common in the street markets in Brazil. Downside of pirate cartridges was that they weren't cheap. They sure were cheaper than the originals, but they weren't cheap...

[@coryulrich6489]

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

[@mercynotfakebutvhs]

I’m 6 I like the Xbox one it was a fun game

[@tld00]

Well, cloud simulator got fixed now :D

[@Sharpless2]

@@tld00 and oh boy that took a while. For a modder. A modder that illegally RE'd the game and in the end got paid by R* for fixing their own game.

[@jaydubaic21]

Apparently disliking this video is a part of the hiring process at Sony.

[@killerpoopguy]

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

[@nekomasteryoutube3232]

Well its a standardised format that most factories should be able to produce, aside from the extra protection that sony put into them.

[@Ice_Karma]

You remember that they were instrumental in creating the CD format, right?

[@trashj8778]

KooriShukuen same with Dvd right?

[@tomservo5007]

and minidisc and memorystick ... sony loves to come up with new media tech

[@Tatsh2DX]

They did and for some reason decided against creating their own file system until IIRC PlayStation 3.

[@bullhornzz]

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!

[@methodamericon]

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!

[@bloodySunday77]

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.

[@sunnohh]

Or economic policy.... BEST THROWAWAY LINE EVER

[@pipo8561]

sunnohh
He’s good at that and it’s why I like his videos.

[@LukeCleland]

I only looked in the comments to see if someone had mentioned this. nice

[@williamreid6255]

Luke Cleland I don’t get it

[@canyouwishuponacar5044]

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

[@ray73864]

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!'.

[@david4599]

Hey, AFAIK, the errors you are talking about are related to Libcrypt which is a protection that uses modified subchannel Q with wrong CRCs that burners correct automatically when copying discs and can be defeated by copying in RAW mode. But this is different from the special wobble protection made in Sony CD pressing factories which uses CD drive tracking errors to encode the SCEx signal. This signal is what authenticates the disc that the modchips send but it can't be replicated exactly with burners.
Can you provide more information on your Tekken 3 copy playing on an unmodded PS1? If that is true, the burner firmware had to be modified and used with special burning software in order to "simulate" the SCEx signal. Do you remember what burner and software you used?
I am actually working to bring back this hack that seems to have disappeared from the internet apart from some rare comments like yours. I have interesting results with a burner firmware I am able to modify slightly but for now, my PS1 struggles to read the custom pattern I burned and stops. Any info is appreciated!

[@carvis3290]

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

[@BIGBOICOMBO]

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

[@RedS_DEV]

If game started console not gives country codr but modchip gives, this is awesome way for devs

[@ultrairrelevantnobody1862]

Spyro: Year of the Dragon is a masterclass in collectathon platforming game design.

[@alihasanabdullah7586]

First, this prompted modchip manufacturers to create 'stealth' modchip that passes the auth at boot and then deactivates itself. Quite an easy modification.
And second, that's not the copy protection method Spyro 3, and many other later games used, since it was defeated quickly after it came out.
Spyro used Libcrypt from Sony which requires you to get a cracked version with libcrypt removed rather than copying files yourself. But more importantly, it had CRC checksums embedded into the code and the way the code was written meant it was very hard to find in an editor. You could of course still find all of them and have them patched to give you the desired value that passes the check, and that's what the scene did. Paradox released a new crack that passed piracy checks in around 3 months. Ahh those were good times :)

[@thecianinator]

@@RedS_DEV did you have a stroke

[@knucklecorn]

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

[@lucasrem]

knucklecorn
Black is developers PS light edition.ネットやろうぜ Netto Yarōze. CD disk can be in all colors, laser reads the 0-1 data in gabs and spaces, dynamic, round disk, so the lasers length need to be variable!
Please stop saying weird shit, why you need UA-cam?

[@fargeeks]

even the ps2 recognized these as Black disks

[@DlcEnergy]

fargeeks of course anything else did, you're missing the point. the point is to protect what's going in the ps1, not anything else. even though all the black ink is for, is to know the disc is genuine. and it's not like it worked on xbox. sony would clearly know what works on their ps2. lol

[@DonKing86]

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.

[@matthewzepess5721]

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.

[@palibakufun]

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

[@geo2819]

Same. Except I still get a little confused when it says SCEA, I’m used to seeing SCEE..Sony Computer Entertainment Europe. My brain just doesn’t compute it for a split second every time and thinks it’s wrong somehow 😂

[@caspianchan2371]

"Wanna play a skirmish in Twisted Metal 4?"
Hell yeah, I do.

[@mattsparks3546]

Even with a 15cm disc, mod chips could have worked. The games would have been reduced in size by modders and or pirates, but it would have worked nonetheless (similar to how the dreamcast's copy protection was defeated)

[@Movie2Documentary]

13:32 "simply couldnt exist"
I m sorry, but this hastened ´conclusion´ is really dummm.

[@ZaCloud-Animations___she-her]

Couldn't the disk basically have instructions to seek for blocks of data that extended out beyond the copy-disk's physical space though? So if it'd hit nothing but air, that'd signal it that it's not a full-sized disk, thus not legitimate (or, only attempt to treat the disk as an audio CD at that point, if they'd even still decide to also make it play music CDs).
Also, if they did go through the trouble of making proprietary-sized disks, they'd likely also have the data grooves further apart, & the console's laser set to only read such spaced-out grooves.

[@joylox]

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.

[@tyronenelson9124]

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

[@bdel80]

Tyrone Nelson That happens with pc-cd rom disk too. If it has cda music files.

[@TheXFalzar]

Take a shot every time he says wobble

[@nobodys_winds6580]

I like my liver to be functional, thank you very much

[@CurtisLittlechild92]

Dies of alcohol poisoning.

[@johnjohnson8669]

Take a shot everytime he almost gets to the point of the video but doesn't...

[@MoisesSoto]

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.

[@chadkrause6574]

Similar method: make the CD hole smaller or bigger or an odd shape. It would fit in the case and I suspect the retooling wouldn’t be too difficult. Although the molds aren’t cheap, they’re not expensive either in the grand scheme of things

[@CJ-442]

Yeah, but then you have the same issue as making bigger disks in that you end up spending more money retooling your industrial process to make it physically unique. The whole point of using CDs to store game data was that it’d be cheaper since Sony was using a product that they were already making and that could be used for things other than game disks.

[@circuit10]

@@CJ-442But they dyed it a different colour anyway so it wasn’t exactly the same anyway and I feel like it wouldn’t be too hard compared to changing the size of the whole disc as the actual pressing part should be the same. I think the bigger problem is that normal CDs wouldn’t fit any more so it couldn’t be used as a CD player

[@smallmoneysalvia]

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.

[@TechnologyConnections]

I will be doing at least one video on a certain type of rewritable disc--though I can't yet say how deep of a dive I'll go

[@smallmoneysalvia]

CRVdisc?

[@KuraIthys]

soupisgdfood CD-R sucked already in 2000. I have far too many disks ftom that period that delaminated themselves in less than 2 years...
100 year lifespan. HAH yeah right!

[@duraker1]

Lightscribe tehcnology was a mighty interesting gadget back in days.

[@phantasos12]

At least 4 layers deep please. ;)

[@colemanadamson5943]

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!

[@rascaltheferret8151]

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.

[@NCXDesigns]

Now explain what caused the discs to get perfectly circular laser-like cuts through the discs. I went through 3 different copies of MGS because of this. You could put the discs up to the light and see the “scratches” were totally through the disc. But that was because the data is technically on the label side of the disc not inside the plastic like people think. So if the label were to get scratched as well, it will cause the laser like cuts. Thanks for coming to my TED talk!

[@NCXDesigns]

Another thing besides having to buy a mod chip was so people could play import games. It was later discovered that GameShark skipped the initial boot process that made disc swapping even easier. Another accessory that was very convenient to have if your OG PlayStation had the serial port on the back, was a device that attached to that port and it had built in cheats and it enabled other features like a mod chip would have. Eventually Sony got rid of that port on later versions of the same design. But I remember to this day having to put a spring inside the lid so that the trigger wouldn’t tell the console the lid was opened. Not a Sony fan anymore but we all have to admit the PlayStation was a big part of our lives growing up in the 90s.

[@KingFahtah]

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

[@vaxjoaberg]

And I have never trusted Sony since.

[@davidrobertjones2097]

@@vaxjoaberg Because they still use it in EVERY single game they release even on steam

[@unusedaccount9130]

Oh wow I didn't think a PRETIGOUS company would need that!
Wow I officially hate Sony :)

[@JNCressey]

Sony = virus?

[@akaniotevanos9861]

Hmm? Gotta look into this.

[@mikeb1013]

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.

[@hello-word-youtube]

did such a copy work without a mod chip?

[@CJinMono]

​@@hello-word-youtube Early systems could play imports and backups with a swap trick.

[@moparkr]

got a mod chip in my ps1 back in 2000 while stationed in korea. $25 got you the chip installed and 10 copies of games, what a deal. had a cd burner as well, while having to copy at 1X it got you a playable copy in no time.

[@Skinny_Popeye]

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.

[@r1w3d]

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

[@chrrmin1979]

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

[@paigem]

I'm glad someone else caught that lol.

[@stephengnb]

That's the same time I checked to make sure I liked the video. 😆 I have never NOT liked a video by TC, but I always have to double-check.

[@thisoldboy4111]

A larger disc would've also saved sony the hassle of dealing with emulators like bleem

[@BrooksMoses]

Since a CD-R writer is following an existing track in the unwritten disk, would it be possible to manufacture blank CD-R disks with the region-coding information embedded into the existing track, and defeat this copy-protection that way?

[@HunterKnightCustoms]

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.

[@Ark_Strike]

Yeah, south american here, I even played the original super mario bros and zelda on a pirated catridge and I think my brother got a copy of Contra from a friend. My PS1 game collection was of over 150 games and I still have the box sealed in my closet. 6 years of my childhood, thanks to piracy.
Also a cousin of mine had a dreamcast and yeah, none of his games were original copies.

[@Mike-ff9ji]

Agreed, every plaza in my country had a pirate store where you asked the dude at the back to burn any game you wanted for like 50 cents to 2 dollars for the new ones.

[@SomnusLucisCaelum]

hunterknight4 remember how fake NES consoles were called Familys because they were actually japanese Famicom clones? Amd you grew up thinking it was fake until you saw an original famicom? Ah the good times.

[@reboomer8369]

Leslie Montserrat Uribe Cruz
Now they aren't even called 'Family's, i only see that they call them 'Alien' for some reason

[@ggvaldez]

I remember opening them and installing the batteries so they could save games :P

[@soulagent79]

Ironically, illegal copies are what helped the PS1 become that successful as a system after all.

[@pelgervampireduck]

exactly, ps1 and ps2 won all over the world because you could get cheap games everywhere.

[@BionicTenshi96]

That's why i don't get the thing about Dreamcast failing because of piracy...

[@pelgervampireduck]

but dreamcast used a propietary disc. sure, pirate groups made cd versions compressing, ripping or rearranging files so the 1gb games could fit a 700mb disc, sometimes they used 99minutes 800mb cds, but average user couldn't do it. a normal pc cd drive can't read dreamcast gd-roms, but ps1 cds and ps2 dvds can be read on any pc drive.
maybe the extra step prevented dreamcast games to be as massive as ps1 and ps2 games?.
but I don't think that was the main reason anyway, lack of trust in sega, ps2 and dvd killed dreamcast.
imagine a dreamcast that used dvd, it could have lasted as long as ps2.

[@lucasrem]

soulagent79
Ironically???? family systems, family people buy disks!
Market was dead! Only PC then.
Now they are able to do good console's, back then, only crap! Now, good AD cheap systems, now it's just a cheap PC! running PC titles!

[@patsfan4life]

That's ridiculous.....

[@JasonMeeks79]

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

[@roserichardson9480]

Would a larger disc have been CD standard compliant? I can't imagine Sony would want to risk not having that nice little logo on the box.

[@ratchet1freak]

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.

[@chitlitlah]

I would think by the time you were zoomed in enough to see the pits, the wobble would be too big to fit in the field of view. It would be like trying to see crop circles while you're lying in the field.

[@ratchet1freak]

@@chitlitlah you would only need to see the tracks and then rotate the disk, I'd think the simple fact that the tracks wouldn't be parallel to each other would be a big giveaway.

[@XSpImmaLion]

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.

[@joshuaharvey3631]

I wish more people could see this. It's so easy to talk theoretically about things they understand, but you're perspective given here is something I'd never have even imagined.

[@serge2sb]

Thank you! The very same for Russia.

[@KOLINAUT]

A larger disc would increase the cost for SONY by a ton! And there'd have been custom CD burners then anyways...

[@Helheaven]

True, in Brazil almost 100% of the games were pirates for sony video games, overall it formed a big fanbase, and it was possible to increase sales of original games from 2008 onwards.
Today piracy is being used more to preserve the existence of games that are simply no longer sold (Konami stop neglecting Silent Hill fans).

[@davidnotonstinnett]

I think you over estimate the amount of work the average consumer is willing to put in.
Like I've done some piracy on modern consoles but I also know that I'm the only person in my entire family that has been willing to the do that to get free video games.
So let's say I have 100 people in my family, that's 1/100.
Assuming I'm a representative sample that's what? 100/3500000, or simplified to 1/35000 people willing to do the work to make piracy workable.
The first system I ever pirated in was PS2 and if I didn't have some help from a similarly nerdy friend I would have never put forth the effort, and it involves getting a specific fame and then switching to another disk and saving files to a memory card. It involved mutilating a plastic credit-card-type-thing.
I just don't buy that most people would be willing to go through all these hoops and assuming my experience is representative (and I assume so due to the anthropic principle. I have to assume it's more likely my experience is closer to the norm rather than assuming it's some rare outlier because in the event of lack of evidence this is the safer bet) then most sales of these consoles were legit and to play purchased games
I'm glad that these systems were open enough to allow some people the ability to tinker and hack their way to computer science knowledge and I hope the industry moves towards a more open model to allow this more in the future

[@UpTown209]

I'm curious to know (during the PlayStation cd manufacturing process) how Soni would press both the wobble groove and region code on the lead in sections of the disk?

[@stevecleaver8933]

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

[@AwesomeVidzChannel]

I never owned an original PS1 game, all the games we had were burned.

[@zefanyalt5944]

AwesomeVidz same here, the only original ps1 game i have is the demo disc

[@-KidTrash-]

Oof

[@-KidTrash-]

Who wants Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2?

[@uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh0]

Burned like fire or pirating

[@Lightblue2222]

You should be in jail.

[@NikoKauppi]

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.

[@nitramsk8]

Niko Kauppi One time I played a cracked music disc in my PS1 and it actually played

[@SpearM3064]

Yeah, that can happen if the CD is unbalanced. Start with a minor vibration. At 1x speed (300 rpm), it's no big deal. But run it at 52x (15,600 rpm) and the wobble is amplified. If you've ever had a CD that was so noisy it sounded like the computer was trying to blast off into orbit, that's why.
Back in 2003, the Mythbusters modified an angle grinder to spin a CD at speeds in excess of 76x (~23,000 rpm) and even a nearly-perfect CD would shatter. Physically damaged and unbalanced CDs made shattering more likely. The result of their experiment? Yes, it's possible (it's actually happened to me once), but *extremely* unlikely unless the CD is already damaged. And if it does happen, you're even less likely to get injured. The sides of the drive (and the sides of the computer case if it's a desktop computer) are more than adequate to protect you.

[@kricku]

It happened to us too. The funny thing is that the brand was called Xplosiv.

[@nathansmith3608]

heat cycling never helps plastic's structural integrity either..

[@wilkinlow]

My sonic adventure dx literally exploded in my pc and I fucking cried because you can't play the game without the disc. Fuck the old times.

[@BazzaroPlays]

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

[@V4mpyrZ]

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!

[@foxpup]

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.

[@TechnologyConnections]

Even with an extra 1.5 centimeters on each side of the disc, there'd still be plenty of room left to spare. It can nearly accommodate a 7 inch vinyl record (45 RPM single).

[@Ice_Karma]

Pardon the pedantry, but sub-5¼" floppies are a little bit of a different case, because there was initially no clear standard, with manufacturers experimenting with everything from 2" to 4" disks, in both floppy and hard shells. Eventually an industry consortium got together and standardized on the hard-shelled 3½" disk, which skeuomorphically lives on as the Save icon...

[@MaddTheSane]

KooriShukuen I think Sony also formalized the 3-1/2 inch floppy format. I’m fairly certain that Apple used Sony drives in their Macs until they dropped it.
There’s a story out there where a Sony employee had to hide from Steve Jobs.

[@Ice_Karma]

Sony invented a 90 mm disk format, very slightly over 3½" and first marketed in 1981, but it was not quite the same as the format the Microfloppy Industry Committee endorsed in 1983.

[@mikeall7012]

The psone version of the PlayStation has a much smaller hole but still gives plenty of room for your fingers. I always wondered why the hole on the original was so big and this is the best explanation I have heard.

[@saiyansnake]

Playstation... one on Nintendo's greatest creations.

[@David.L291]

????

[@saiyansnake]

@@David.L291 Back in the days of the SNES Nintendo partnered up with Sony to release a CD based system. At the very last minute Nintendo backed out of the deal and partnered up with Philips instead. Sony was going to scrap all the work but Ken Kutaragi asked his superiors if he could use all that research and development to create a gaming system and *BOOM!!* the PlayStation was born.

[@David.L291]

@@saiyansnake I know some guy had to make a really quick prototype as Sony wasn't convinced at the time why they should even have something that connects to a TV to play games because they couldn't see why people would want to do that when they could already play games on the PC, I really hate playing games on the PC so truthfully thankful for that guy to show them it was possible and to bring about the PlayStation amazingly looking at how far it's come now

[@shockthetoast]

@@saiyansnake People seem to forget that the reason Nintendo dropped Sony is that Sony was suddenly demanding a portion of the profits from every game sold. However, it seems like Nintendo handled that very poorly by not notifying them before announcing their partnership with Philips. So Nintendo is by no means blameless, but they didn't just randomly drop Sony unprovoked. BTW it was Philips and not Panasonic, which is how the Philips CD-i got those terrible Zelda games that should never be spoken of outside of this particular discussion. Lol.

[@kenshinflyer]

Let's just say both parties had their mistakes.
However, with this experience, Nintendo thought they were invincible--they just found out with the PlayStation that they're not.

[@dragonmaster613]

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

[@Daggeira]

I always thought the color of the plastic was to make it work better if it got lightly scratched. I've noticed that a PS disk with light scratches compared to a PS2 disk with equivalent wear read better, but that _might_ be more to do with the hardware. Idk.

[@Yasokuhl35]

isn't it more likely that the switch from CD to DVD caused that?

[@Daggeira]

@@Yasokuhl35I'm not sure. Both formats work by shining a light through the plastic and bouncing it off the reflective layer, so a darker material color _could,_ in theory, affect how that process works and diminish the distortion caused by scratches. Given, I am not a disc technician (if that's even a thing), but the theory seems sound to me.

[@bobby4500]

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

[@benwyatt7619]

I will always remember that sound

[@Skip6235]

Pretty sure the PS2 did the same thing. I remember a friend of mine had a modified PS2 that could be opened when the disc was turning. He then had a disc that would trick the system into thinking it was playing a US game, and then we would switch in Japanese games that weren't ever sold in the US. I didn't know how it worked, but this is pretty plausible

[@LonelySpaceDetective]

The PS2 did indeed have wobble-based copy protection, but it also had more going on. MVG has a video on the PS2 copy protection IIRC.

[@aabeceedeeeff6076]

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!

[@ahkeen]

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?

[@MamaAki]

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.

[@gamingforpizza5142]

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.

[@lucasrem]

Gaming For Pizza
To make a system popular, you need cheap titles, the AAA titles, not cheap games!
That's why they giveaway shit now....
You ever pause for a Pizza, can you open a window to get service in, needing to go downstairs for it? Any Street level communications?

[@tinchovm85]

Piracy seems to have not been of enough scale to kill earning of software developers, somehow. The amount of titles published in PS1 were enormous due to the huge popularity of the system. In the end, it was a win-win situation for both hardware and software developers I guess.

[@animanga87]

CD-R's and burners weren't that cheap in 90's and also weren't as reliable as they are now. I had more coasters than I'd need in 3 lifetimes from PS1 discs that didn't burn properly.

[@vivisect53]

That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. They didn't want people modding shit....they even removed the parralel port early on. FFS that was a stupid comment.

[@arxaaron]

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!

[@yookalaylee2289]

There is also the consideration that a larger diameter disk physically makes some data further away adding to
loading and seek times.

[@christiaanbezuidenhout6984]

Oh the old "pencil in the console to keep the lid open" trick. Memories...

[@white_african_9731]

im Bezuidenhout too .

[@3DJapan]

I had a spring so you could close the lid but when you opened it the button stayed down.

[@supimzazz]

Twisted metal will always have a place in my heart

[@reifenabhobeler4331]

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