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.
Huh, I have this game and a unmodded PS1 lying around. I be sure to try this after the holidays.
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
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.
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
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.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.
No, the point is to use a legit copy of this game to run burned copies of other games.
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.
Kinda fitting to have resurrection in the game title!
Not all heroes wear capes.
How exactly can a code on a game affect the system itself?
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.
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.
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.
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.