Gooday Gaming Guests - Sony PS1 Disks History

Episode Date: January 17, 2025

The Black disks looked better.

All right, so I'm doing my podcast late today. It's actually 430 at night. I should be in bed by now. But we're going to do one. I had a nice long eight hour, eight and a half hour live feed today. Playing around with apples in the morning and all kinds of candy. So it's a long, long video. So that was my best one yet. And I had the most amount of people for that. I mean, people just come in and out, but still. It's like 2K, I think. And I did. I brought up all a bunch of my different Tandy 200 laptop came in. And my 16K RadioShack TRS-80 came in. So I can do those tomorrow and finish up with my 1200HD Tandy. So we'll have lots of cool things for tomorrow. So let's go to my chat gpt so yeah today was a long day got all my orders done i guess it's a long weekend i didn't realize that going to a long holiday weekend and the president's inauguration next week so all i can say is hold on to your hats after that happens oh my goodness so we're gonna do PS one disk drive code process so the PS one code process refers troubleshooting PS1 uses a combination of hardware and firm and firmware to read game data laser assembly reads data from the disc spindle spins at various varying speeds

tracing motor the motor lasers as it reads the different parts of the disc goes back and forth and then a disc controller ic processes commands from the motherboard to the drive. So this is the first time I've done anything with a disc drive. We've been doing just cartridges. And I also want to talk about the Nintendo Switch 2. I've seen some advertising. It looks pretty cool. Although I am bummed. I would rather have a switch box or a whole completely new sort of generation but we'll take it looks pretty cool significantly

bigger it's almost the size of a laptop or not a laptop a tablet all right so code process for disk drives when ps1 power is on receives receive the signal from the disk, the laser focuses on the disk surface so usually the coating is on the underneath of the label therefore the if the top of the label gets ripped the code no longer works. PS checks for regional coding has a license using anti-piracy wobble encoder in the inner track. That's why I got some early PS1 mods with little wires

on them. I guess that was to bypass that. Data reading, table of contents on the CD. Error correction. ECC. Game execution. On the the CPU so I'm not sure what a ps1 CPU is yet I'm gonna find out in a minute troubleshooting repair code issues modification upgrades all right so interest in proving and modernizing your ps1 psIO device, a mod that allows games to be loaded through

the SD by passing a disk. The PU18 and PU20 motherboard work. Understand how the disk drive connects to specific PS1. Let's see what that is. I figured out what the CPU is in this. So the CPU in a PS1 I remember doing this one. Is a LSI LR

333 100 R3000A SILR33300. R3000A. A MIPS RISCA. Reduced Instruction Set Computing Processor. Clock speed was 33.8688 MHz. Architecture is 32 bits. Key functions. Game execution execution works with graphics processor renders 3d graphics

Manages communication between system and disk drive Technical it's four kilobytes of instruction cache one kilobyte data cache CPU directly accesses 2 megabytes of RAM and 1 megabytes of VRAM and direct memory access offline rendering CPU commands to the GPU via a geometry transfer engine GTE which is part of the R3000A processor sound processor unit SPU BIOS the CPU interacts with the BIOS to initialize has well or was well optimized for 3d graphics so that's when your 3d graphics were much better compared to the older Helens we went

through so let's ask that question the game code is on the bottom bottom of the disc label yes game codes to be printed on the bottom of the display near the inner near the inner ring of the CD this code serves as the unique identifier prefix a ps1 game format platform sometimes in region for S-L-U-S, S-L-E-S, S-C-E-S. North America used S-C-U-S or S-L-U-S. These antivirus specified region and power was S-L-E-S or S-C-E-S. And then Japan was S-L-P-S. That's the code. Example codes. North America Games.

S-C-U-S-94426. European was S-L-E-S-12345. And Japan would have been S-L-P-S-01234. dash one two three four five and Japan would have been SLPS dash zero one two three four so it's that first four letters it tells you region locking compatible I check for modifications where to find the code on the disk near the center of the printed label on the shiny side often listen in the manual I've listed on the first few pages where to find the code sometimes printed on the

spine on the back also the actual code there that we were just talking about so that's ps1 so that's disc how is a copy disk bypassed. Copy Disk Protected PS1 has the wobble groove they call it. Originally just used a unique wobble in the inner ring of the disk. Contains module signals that authenticate. Region locking. Also has a region. How to copy. How to copy how just copies bypass mod chips swap tricks uh swap trick booting the console with an original disk waiting for the console

to authenticate the disk then swapping it out with a copy disk without resetting the console that's something pretty simple uh Special boot disks developed to bypass the system. Custom firmware. Soft modding. Emulator. Modern solutions using devices like PSIO and SD card based solution. Backup copies.

Alright, so let's see. Let's find out the game library of PS1. It's got to be huge. It's got to be in the thousands, right? 7,000. Yeah, I was going to say.

Whoa. Released in 1994 in Japan. 1995 worldwide. Because we're on the 30th anniversary. My PS5 boots up to the PS1 logo, which is fantastic. The PS1

7,000. Of course, I'm thinking Final Fantasy the PS1 is 7000 of course I'm thinking Final Fantasy Resident Evil would probably be my most Legend of the Dragon Action Adventure, Tomb Raider series they just remade those too

Fighting Horrors Resident Evil, of course, Silent Hill, Dino Crisis, which was actually pretty cool too. Sports, we just skip over all that. Then the Syphon Filter was one. And then the other one,

I can't think of right now. Oh, Metal Gear Solid, of course. It's a classic. Pioneering, Survival Horror, Castlevania. Revolutionized, Metroidvania genera. Symphony of the Night. Libraries was in North America, Pal, or Japan. Best selling.

Gran Turismo, huh? 10.885 million copies. Gran Turismo. I didn't think a racing game would be that popular. Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy 7 was only... 10 million. Gran Turismo 2.

Tekken 3. Blah. Fighting games. I hate fighting games. Crash Bandit. No. No. No Resident Evil. Oh, that. Fighting games. I hate fighting games. Crash Bandit. No, no. No Resident Evil. Oh, that's

really interesting. Alright, so let's do Rare. We'll do Rare copies. Rare. Because after you get to like PS1, there's normally no such thing as Rare PS2 copies. Is there?

Or like Rare. I can't say. Oh, was there a Rare PS4 game out? Or Rare PS3 game. I can't say. Oh is there a rare PS4 game out? Or a rare PS3 game? I don't think that will ever be a thing. What? I don't know. I don't see that happening. Just like there's so many of them.

How could it be rare? But PS1 is different. Rare PS1 games. Often sought after. Let's see. Sidukin 2. S-U-I-K-O-D-E-N. Sidukin?

I think that's how you say that. Klondor dorofentamol that's a weird name c-k-l-o-n o-a then dor to fantomile

uh tuma, tuma 2 evil swine returns uh Tuma Tuma 2 Evil Swine Returns Valkyrie Profile That's one of those RPG ones Persona 2 Eternal Punishment Nothing else

There's a Castlevania Symphony of the Night black label. How did I find a black label? Misadventures of Tron Boney.

What? A spin-off of Mega Man series. Tale Concerto. I have one that's called Spiders. That's pretty cool.

Again, the graphics were really awkward then. Teen Buddies. Elementary Gearbox. Assassin's Case Edition. $1,500 to $3,000, that one. Adventures of Lomax. Spin-off of the Lemming series. LSD Dream Emulator.

Huh. That sounds psychedelic. This game is inspired by a dream journal. Rez. Japanese version. PS1 Rez. Res was originally in Japan. Intelligent QB.

I've never heard of Wild Arms 2. I think I've heard of Wild Arms but it's a black label. Let's see. It's PS1. What about the discs? Was there any PS1?

This is... Was there any PS1 cartridges? I don't think so. No, there was no cartridges. Why did they use cartridges? But the back port, you could put stuff on that back port. So CD could hold a lot more storage, 700 megabytes of data, where a cartridge is only 4 to 64 megabytes. Cartridges like peripherals, memory cards, yeah. Then the game enhancers, that's the ones. I have one that does something else.

It plugs in the back, that parallel port. In the early models, you used to do cheat codes. Yeah, that's what I was thinking of. Oh, yeah, then there's the Sony cartridge post PS1. PlayStation Portable PSP using UMD's Vita introduced.

This is how fast does the spindle run to read the game code? Just curious. Let's do it then. Spindle on a PS1.

This is due to adjusting its speed dramatically based on the location of the data being read on the disk. This is due to the constant linear velocity, CLV mechanism. It shows the data rate remains constant regardless of where the laser is reading. Speed range.

Spindle motor speeds between 200 RPM outer edge and 500 RPM inner edge. It spins faster when reading data near the inner track of the disc closer to the center and slower on the outer side. Reading the game code, the code region and authentic wobble is equivalent to the data rate of 150 kilobytes per second. This is slower than a later CD based system but it's sufficient for the PS1. How the spindle motor affects gameplay. Changed speed during common issues the motor war gets worn out it's just a moving part inconsistent speeds fixes all right so that's pretty much

the ps1 let's see what else we can talk about the motor and then I had the... I'm trying to think what else the PS1 did for the discs. I don't know. It wasn't... Oh, I know what I wanted to ask. Why are some black discs and others shiny? Remember those two different kinds of PS1 discs the difference between the black and the shiny

discs is due to the material choices made by the manufacturer so the black is more aesthetic and branding chose black discs a brand unique

black underside because itet features a ps1 anti privacy measures simply the blackest were meant to deter piracy as they stood out from traditional shiny CDs however this wasn't a robust any part because the black coating did not add significant protection. The actual anti-piracy mechanism included in the wobble groove. Black coating is

primarily cosmetic. Worked the same as the shiny, although lots of times shiny discs are industrial standard. Lack the instinct black coating pirate appears when often found on shiny discs performance and compatibility uh the color of the disc did not make a difference although some read better uh

black discs were more durable than shiny ones. Scratches and wear affected both equally. That was the next thing I was thinking of. Later generations and black discs. Black discs I was unique to PS1 and discontinued with PS2.

I still think the... so yeah that's right that's the other extinct thing I remember about PS1 games as well as the fact that they scratch up really bad alright so that's my thing for late today

so tomorrow I'm going to do a whole bunch more stuff live and I'll do some videos too alright so you guys have a good night and I'll going to do a whole bunch more stuff live and I'll do some videos too alright so you guys have a good night and I'll talk to you tomorrow alright bye