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After 23 years, developer reveals he snuck a cheat code past Sony that turns a cult-classic horror game into a godsend for retro enthusiasts (www.gamesradar.com)

submitted 11 months ago by squirrel@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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Article about a recent revelation by the Youtube Channel Modern Vintage Gaming: The game "Alien Resurrection" by Argonaut contains a code which allows to run burned CD copies of Playstation 1 games.

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[-] affiliate@lemmy.world 16 points 11 months ago

i don’t really know, but an educated guess is that it has to do with how old the console is, and how micro optimized/hacky things had to be at the time. for example, morrowind would reboot your xbox during loading screens. there was probably quite a lot more control given to developers in the olden days, whereas now things are more sandboxed. but i would be happy to be corrected on anything i’ve said here.

[-] someguy3@lemmy.world 11 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

“There’s been great tricks that [Xbox] taught us,” Howard said. “My favorite one in Morrowind is, if you’re running low on memory, you can reboot the original Xbox and the user can’t tell. You can throw, like, a screen up. When Morrowind loads sometimes, you get a very long load. That’s us rebooting the Xbox. That was like a hail Mary.”

That's interesting but that's still in that one game. This thing sounds like it allows you to play burned roms forever afterwards, which means it really affects the system itself.

[-] mateomaui@reddthat.com 8 points 11 months ago

It’s essentially the same as using a boot cd before using a copied game, which also was a thing then.

https://consolecopyworld.com/psx/psx_utils_bootcd.shtml

[-] andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works 3 points 11 months ago

As I understand it, it has lax checks if all disks are original. Some games required many, Pt.1 was on one, Pt.2 was on another, and a memory card sewed this monstrosity together whenever you switch disks - as it had no HDD, no install options.

Designing a game around that was hard and probably meant frequent checks, delays, and also a player having incomplete game if only one disk is missing or scratched if they want to play again - and you swapped them back and forth. So that dev implemented zero-check on a second disc after the first one is checked, a command to kill a game and start anew, and with that you can put whatever you burnt on your CD, leaving the console clueless it's not your actual disk 2. It still needs you to boot with original Aliens first and put code, so it's not exactly stealing anything directly, but oh god it's an interesting vulnerability.

I haven't heard of something akin to that, besides weird cartridge combos on old consoles where you put one into another or other heresy like plug-in cartridge readers, hardware extenders, etc. It seems Sony was convinced the first check is there, and it's ok, but never thought you can abuse it up that great, and had no further investigation was put.

For a console that aged, that had hardware jailbreaks and emulators for years, I don't feel they'd hurt him now. Twenty years is too much even for them. They'd still sell mini-PS1 without any problem as it has no disk reading capabilities and won't care.