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1. Ruby Rhod (feld@bikeshed.party)'s status on Thursday, 18-Jul-2019 23:11:53 UTC Ruby Rhod

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   Playstation 1 was amazing. Sony had to get clever because CD burners were becoming commonplace. This page [1] covers the history of PS1 better than I can remember. I had every version of the copyprotection defeat. We went through multiple consoles, too.
   
   My friend's dad was a hacker. I don't think he ever realized it. He worked at a power plant as an engineer, was a musician, and did electronics repair in his free time. I remember the stacks of TVs and VCRs in their basement from the townfolk who paid him a pittance to fix their crappy electronics. He loved doing it though! Bonus of having these skills was that he always had the best music gear because he bought "broken" stuff off eBay and repaired it. Crazy expensive amps, mixers, etc etc he'd pick up for pennies and restore to working condition.
   
   He also loved computers. And videogames. He's the one who opened my world to hardware hacking and piracy. I was never big into hardware hacking itself other than console modding, but without him I'd never have learned about the internals of computers the same way.
   
   Early models of the PS1 had a parallel port. This allowed us to use a simple dongle to defeat copy protection -- our burned CDRs worked!*
   
   Eventually this was detected and new methods had to be devised. People were anxious to play imported games on their region locked consoles. You could buy a legit Playstation 1 disc from Japan that was a "loader". It bypassed the copyprotection stuff at boot, then triggered the mode where the PS1 asks you for the next disc like in a multi-disc game. You could swap in the imported game you wanted to play and it would execute the game binary on that disc and just work.
   
   Later you had to combine this with a modchip. The AR dongle got you past the boot, but games would ask for the boot string multiple times ("Licensed by Sony Computer Entertainment America") and if the system received it more than once it knew there was a modchip because it shouldn't have been possible to get that response again unless a modchip was doing a MITM.
   
   These PS1 modchips were really not that difficult to install. They didn't use many wires. It was quick to mod and flip consoles which is was a side hobby of my friend's dad. Later when games were detecting the modchips you had to get a stealth one that would only respond to that boot string check once per power cycle. It may have become more advanced but I'm pretty certain that there were no console button hacks on the PS1 to change modes.
   
   We only had dialup in our town at this time, so we didn't download games. My friend's dad was on a forum where he traded burned games with others. He'd receive packs of like 50 games in the mail from somewhere in the US and then he'd burn us copies and make some for himself so he could prepare packages to send out in trade with others.
   
   * If you burned them right! It was important to burn at SLOW speeds, have a CD burner with the right capabilities (usually a PlexStor), and use specific software. I can't remember the software right now and it's probably lost. We didn't use ISO files. I remember they were BIN and CUE files. This was important for track alignment or something to that effect. Getting fuzzy on that but I remember if your alignment of track(s) were wrong the game just wouldn't work.
   
   
   [1] http://wololo.net/2012/12/10/how-ps1-security-works/