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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 10 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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[-] Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world 136 points 10 months ago

To be clear, when a developer submits a finished game for publication, it's supposed to reveal all of its cheat codes, but this particular one was never disclosed for the simple reason that Sony would've undoubtedly kicked it back to development for removal. Apparently, Piper isn't too worried about letting his secret out into the wild more than two decades later.

There's a bunch of debug/dev features hidden in production software that I stay quiet with from companies i worked for. Revealing them would probably make me unemployable. Or worse, slapped with a lawsuit.

So I'm glad this guy was probably retiring or switching careers.

[-] Telorand@reddthat.com 49 points 10 months ago

We have lots of software that "just works" at my job, that do things the "approved" methods can't achieve. Sometimes, you gotta do what you gotta do so you don't wind up wasting a lot of time later.

[-] blanketswithsmallpox@lemmy.world 14 points 10 months ago

Reveal them. I'll give you one Christmas cookie.

[-] WarmApplePieShrek@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 10 months ago

Reveal them anonymously.

[-] Hubi@lemmy.world 130 points 10 months ago

Huh, I have this game and a unmodded PS1 lying around. I be sure to try this after the holidays.

[-] 9point6@lemmy.world 87 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Good luck getting a copy if you don't already have one, scalpers have already raided everywhere.

Edit: apparently the Christmas drinking has affected my reading comprehension

Still a warning for anyone else thinking the same

[-] Hubi@lemmy.world 68 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Holy fuck, I had no idea. I just checked the prices online and they are absolutely insane. Why is it so expensive? I got the game and the console for like 20 Euros about 10 years ago. It's not in great condition though.

Edit: Oh, it's just so expensive because of this video? That's pretty crazy.

[-] Norgur@kbin.social 85 points 10 months ago

Because scalpers expected this to be in demand after the news broke and set their bots to buy every cheap copy by unknowing private sellers in order to create a oligopoly and heavily gauge pricing

[-] JanoRis@kbin.social 19 points 10 months ago

But isn't the whole point to play a burned copy of the game?
This seems like scalping concert tickets to a concert that allows you to copy tickets in the printer.

[-] loutr@sh.itjust.works 58 points 10 months ago

No, the point is to use a legit copy of this game to run burned copies of other games.

[-] BreakDecks@lemmy.ml 9 points 10 months ago

Which is silly for scalpers to try to profit off of this. You may get some short-term profits, but there are plenty of ways to circumvent copy protection on PS1 that are much cheaper and easier to work with than this.

It's also seemingly just an experiment that a dev decided to sneak into the game, so there's no guarantee that the loaded game will actually play reliably.

I'll wait for the hype to cool off and some real data about performance to exist before I consider buying it.

[-] 9point6@lemmy.world 6 points 10 months ago

Oh yeah, this is a bubble, but fwiw, there should be minimal compatibility issues possible from my understanding as this is essentially the change disk mechanism we see in several games, but without the check that the correct disk has been inserted. Of course there'll be edge cases (and I'm gonna imagine there might be some late stage additional copy protection in some games that doesn't rely on the boot up checks), but on hardware as simple as the playstation it's going to be pretty much: if you're running the executable, you're running the game as if it's passed the checks

[-] PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world 23 points 10 months ago

No, the legit copy of the game allows you to play pirated copies of other games. It bypasses the piracy check in the console and allows you to swap discs to a pirated copy of whatever other game you want.

[-] Fiivemacs@lemmy.ca 8 points 10 months ago

Loads emulator and laughs.

[-] PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world 12 points 10 months ago

While I agree, there are entire communities built around retro consoles. But that also means legit copies of retro games can be difficult to come by.

[-] themeatbridge@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

Sure, but at these prices, it's less expensive to get a modded PS1.

[-] IWantToFuckSpez@kbin.social 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

The price is only high because the scalpers set the price that high. Whether they can find a seller is another question.

This like when a penny stock suddenly jumps up because one idiot bought it at a high price when supply was low.

[-] yamanii@lemmy.world 6 points 10 months ago

Reminds me of cube ninja at the beginning of the 3DS homebrew.

[-] TedZanzibar@feddit.uk 46 points 10 months ago

This reminds me of working for a UK developer back in the PS2 days. From what I remember, one of the coders there wrote a tool that enabled the comparatively cheap QA test kits that would only boot from a CD/DVD to appear to dev PCs as full blown dev kits (that cost 4 or 5 times the price) and boot code pushed to them over the network.

They didn't have as much memory or processing grunt so there was still need for a few proper dev kits, but it saved them a fortune in hardware costs. Pretty sure it was an open secret that Sony reluctantly allowed, and most of the UK dev studios were using it at one point.

[-] PrincessLeiasCat@sh.itjust.works 35 points 10 months ago

Not all heroes wear capes.

[-] ULS@lemmy.ml 28 points 10 months ago

Kinda fitting to have resurrection in the game title!

[-] someguy3@lemmy.world 13 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

How exactly can a code on a game affect the system itself?

[-] kn0wmad1c@programming.dev 68 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

When Playstation reads a disc, it looks for a special sequence on the disc that tells the Playstation "hey, this is a Playstation game. You should load it."

That sequence is proprietary and isn't on burned copies of games. This is anti-piracy protection, and makes sense from a monetary standpoint.

When you put Alien: Resurrection in the console, which has that sequence, the Playstation is told that "hey, this is a real Playstation game. You should load it." The game loads, then you can put in the cheat, which tells the game to stop loading from the disc momentarily while another disc is loaded (think "please insert disc 2 from final fantasy"). At this point, you can pop in your burned copy of the game, then press a button to continue loading from disc, at which point the game tells the system "hey, this new guy is with me. Let him through", and the Playstation loads the new game from the disc.

[-] 30021190@lemmy.cloud.aboutcher.co.uk 19 points 10 months ago

Importantly and how it's different to FF is that it boots the content without calling the disk reset and if you keep the disk button wedged then that reset never triggers, so that copy protection isn't called, where as FF basically triggers a drive reset which is why you couldn't use that.

[-] affiliate@lemmy.world 16 points 10 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 10 months ago* (last edited 10 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 10 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 10 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.

[-] Takumidesh@lemmy.world 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

https://youtu.be/uRB7iUCX4KQ?si=4tJcrjmnaSSRfdyf

This video does a great job explaining how it works.

It has to do with system calls for stopping the disc that multi disc games would use.

Edit: I'm a dummy and didn't realize this video was posted in the op.

[-] Serinus@lemmy.world 15 points 10 months ago

The PS disc copy protection is only checked when the system is booted. You can load one legit disc and swap it live for a burned disc, but it's difficult because the disc is spinning the whole time.

This cheat code on a legit disc just stops the disc from spinning for a short time, allowing you to much more easily swap to the copy.