Key findings
- Using simple methods such as swapping CDs or paper clip tricks, early anti-piracy measures on consoles could easily be circumvented.
- On the PlayStation 1, the region and copyright legitimacy was determined by a marked section on the disc.
- While these methods were crude, they also had limitations, such as the inability to play CD-based music tracks and the introduction of interference.
Back then, consoles were primitive machines compared to what we have today, especially in terms of technology. While the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Nintendo Wii generations improved things somewhat, consoles before that were plagued by piracy to varying degrees. The original PlayStation was one such fun example where a paperclip, some tape, or even a piece of paper could be used to overcome all of its anti-piracy capabilities in a way that Sony really couldn't do anything about.
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Sony's anti-piracy controls were inadequate
All you needed was to hot swap a disc
On the PlayStation 1, DRM checking was particularly trivial. The region check and the anti-piracy check were performed in the same part of the boot sequence, where a marked section at the beginning of the disc contained the region of the disc. This information had the letters SCEx, with the X replaced by a letter denoting the region.
- SCEA: North America
- SCEE: Europe
- SCEI: Japan
- SCREW: Development Units (Net Yaroze)
While this marked section contains the regional information, it also serves as a copyright check, as traditional CD burners are unable to create the physical marking that the PlayStation uses to ensure it's a legitimate disc. While this is colloquially referred to as a “wobble groove,” a patent filed by Sony, largely related to the PlayStation 1's security check, sheds a slightly different light on things.
Essentially, the “wobble” appears to be a specific series of tracking corrections that are interpreted as data by the PlayStation, something a traditional CD burner cannot do. This series of tracking corrections are made around the table of contents of the CD. This means that the PlayStation reads the regional data and the table of contents, checks that it is a legitimate game, and then the user can swap the disc for their own burned disc.
There was another obstacle, however. Opening the PlayStation lid prevented it from continuing to read the game in progress, so you couldn't swap or remove discs. This could be bypassed by always holding down the lid sensor so that the system thought the lid was closed. You could do this with a paper clip or a piece of paper. You could easily check if it was working by watching to see if the disc was spinning while the lid was still open.
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Modchips were better anyway
Hotswapping worked, but was not perfect
While this method worked as an easy way to pirate PlayStation games, it wasn't perfect. If your game contains CD-based music tracks, it won't work, and you may experience glitches and other issues in the burned games as well. This is because CD-based music tracks in your game are defined separately in the table of contents from the rest of the game's data. The PlayStation doesn't know where this music is because it was already told where everything from the other game was before you swapped out the CD.
For example, let's say you're using a game that doesn't have CD-based music, but then you switch to a game that does. The game you switch to will tell the PlayStation to play track number two, no matter where it is. The PlayStation has already loaded the table of contents and sees that track number two is nowhere to be found, which can cause problems.
Modchips got around this problem by essentially inserting the correct data into the CD reader's data stream, making the games look real. There were also removable disks that could be used specifically for pirating CDs, attempting to make it easier to launch pirated games while reading their table of contents. Although things got quite advanced after a while, the rather primitive method of swapping discs was still a quick and easy way for gamers to pirate games.
Consoles are much harder to crack these days and simple tricks like this one for swapping discs will never come close to working. Preventing game piracy is a tough task, but it was even harder back then.
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