Making Playstation 1 Modchips (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Making Playstation 1 Modchips (2018)

blog.kchung.co

110 pointscwaffles44 comments

I used to program PSX mod chips and install them 20 years ago from my door room in Jester Dormitory at UT Austin. I printed out an ad, taped it on my door and waited for the knocks to do business. Back in those days, I would burn chips with hard-to-find .bin files using generic EEPROM programmers that used a printer parallel port. And I never had to buy any chips because, at the time, I'd request samples from the big silicon distributors (e.g. DigiKey / Mouser) and they'd send me dozens for free.

Great story. How were sales? Did anyone else on campus compete with your business?

I did maybe a half dozen or so - nothing crazy. A lot of people were understandably scared to entrust me with a soldering iron on their expensive toy. Then PS2 came out and modding became much more complex. I do miss the satisfaction of putting in a chip, loading a burned game and seeing it load after a long anxiety-provoking black screen.

I had a friend in undergrad that was moving a pretty significant number of modded (original) XBoxes at a pretty significant markup...but it turned out that he also offered a particular service that was largely driving sales: a larger hard drive filled with ripped DVDs from the 'Red Light District' adult film studio.

I did the same while in high school. Someone asked me to mod his PS1 so I copied the pic12c508 he provided to me so I could do it again for cheaper.

For the sales, it was actually a rather good business, I had between 1 and 3 console a week to mod, for almost a year, and I didn't even put an ad.

It ended because someone with the latest model (SCPH 8xxx if memory serves) inisted I try to mod his PS1 despite me not having proper equipement to solder at the needed accuracy. It did failed obviously. I had a hard time making it work again, it was so stressful that I ended up stopping it altogether except 2 or 3 times after that for some close friends.

Author here. I wrote this awhile ago so I wasn't expecting to see this here today but glad that it is. Happy to answer any questions.

The most fragile part of the PlayStation, just like the GameCube and many other consoles, is the optical drive. I don't know what the AFR is for a typical CD-ROM drive, but when you consider that the PlayStation hardware is 20 years old, it's unsurprising that so many of them have failed.

So I think flash card readers for the PlayStation are a much more interesting technology.

I recall having 'burnt out' two optical drives on hand-me-downed PS1's.

Instead of needing a mod chip, you could jam the internal open/close switch mechanism closed. Allowing you to open the disc tray while it was still spinning. You'd let a legitimate game boot up to pass the DRM, then swap in a burnt disc. I wondered if it contributed to the drives failing.

Also to your point, is Disc Rot itself attacking original discs.

Used to do this trick. Its called the double swap trick.

I did this too but I thought I also had a module that I had to plug into the back to make this work. This was 20 years ago of course so maybe I am remembering this wrong.

You had an older model PSX with the parallel port and a Gameshark Pro or similar device.

All these disc swap techniques work the same. The PSX only authenticated discs on boot or after the cover was closed, the latter being easily defeated with a piece of tape. If you could swap an authentic disc for a burned one after it had been authenticated, but before any of the actual data had been read, the PSX would run it. The cheapest option was to just force the motor to stop spinning by hand and swap discs at the correct time in the boot process. Cheat discs/devices like the Gameshark made this process easier because they would spin the drive down once you reached their menu and were designed to launch another disc when commanded so you didn't have to precisely time the swap.

-The cheapest option was to just force the motor to stop spinning by hand

Ah, yes that's why I recall thinking doing the trick caused the disc drives to fail.

At least in the USA, most drive failures of early models (the ones that the swap trick worked on) were due to poor quality plastic carriages. Flipping the system upside down would help... for a time.

The best way to do this trick was with a Gameshark/Action Replay disc. After the Gameshark booted it would let the drive spin down until you told it to launch the game. You still had to jam the switch since the PSX reauthenticated the disc when you closed the lid, but you didn't have to worry about damaging the drive or swapping discs at just the right time.

The drive failure comes from the burnt discs. Pressed discs (PS1, CDROM, etc) have pits and a reflective layer that reflect almost 100% the light from the laser. Burned discs have a thin layer of ink. They simulate those pits when they are burned. But since the light has to pass through a layer of ink you lose about 30-50% reflectivity. Those early lasers weren’t designed for CD-R. And to compensate for the loss of reflected light the CDROM controller would pump up the light output. And eventually burn out the laser. And one day you’d be unable to read discs. Then you’d hop on eBay to find hundreds of replacement laser modules for sale because it was super common

That's interesting. Any source on this? Because CD-R specs says:

>After recording, the CD-R disc satisfies the specifications as written in the chapter DISC SPECIFICATION of the Red Book.

Why does that matter? That doesn't mean that Sony's non-RedBook drive laser can read CD-R for 20 years

Presumably Sony had no reason to design to full spec compliance.

“ Some hardware compatible with Red Book CDs may have difficulty reading CD-Rs and, because of their lower reflectivity, especially CD-RWs.”[0]

Also it was common knowledge in the modder community that playing with a modchip burned the laser diode. The theory was the CD-Rs reflectivity made it overdrive. It could also be the modchip itself caused the laser to burnout. Most chips were soldered directly to the CDROM controller. And may have been inadvertently overdriving the laser.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-R

I don't have a concrete source for this handy but I don't think this is totally accurate. For one, the plastic rails on earlier PS1 disk drives wear out and can be a source of error. Secondly, you still see failed disk drives on consoles without modchips.

I think burned discs are probably one factor but I think general hardware failure or dirty lenses are a more common cause.

Seriously - even when they were current it was common for PS1s to have dying CD drives. I and many others needed to turn their systems on their side to keep it reading discs properly.

Iirc that was because the spring loaded lens mount was losing its strength and the lens wasn't able to focus properly anymore

I remember getting a dead PS2 to fix. It wasn't dead though, it was a staff unit at a pizza shop, full of flour, and just needed the lens cleaned with a cotton swab and alcohol.

I wonder what part of the optical drive is failing.

Not my finest moment, but I once did the opposite.

The PS2's optical drive was clearly failing, it would work with some discs but not others. Cleaning the lens didn't help. The Internet told me it was possible to use a screwdriver to turn something in the console to increase power to the laser (iirc). I tried this, but I ended up bricking the PS2. Oops. No big deal, replaced it the next day.

And yes, I'm very much a 'software person'. You know what they say about the one thing worse than an electronic engineer with a C compiler.

I recall that when replacing it, the electronics exchange place I went to would only sell a used PS2 when bundled with a controller, you couldn't buy the console on its own. I did the obvious thing: I sold them a controller for store credit, then bought a PS2 bundled with a controller.

Many consoles already have optical drive emulation mod, e.g. GC Loader for GameCube.

To further what neetrain said, there is also some cool unexpected stuff to come out of it as a result.

The Dreamcast had a ROM-based arcade equivalent, the Atomiswave. A dreamcast-talk forum member, "megavolt85", has started to convert the Atomiswave games over to the Dreamcast optical drive emulators (like the MODE, which is a drive emulator for both the Saturn and Dreamcast).

https://www.retrorgb.com/atomiswave-dreamcast-arcade-ports.h...

Another issue was that the intended purpose for the CD-ROM was to load some data for a videogame level, and maybe stream some music while it was played. But Crash Bandicoot came in the first year of the console's life, and it used non-stop disc access to continuously load data into RAM. A single playthrough of Crash Bandicoot surpassed the drive's expected lifetime.

> Andy had given Kelly a rough idea of how we were getting so much detail through the system: spooling. Kelly asked Andy if he understood correctly that any move forward or backward in a level entailed loading in new data, a CD “hit.” Andy proudly stated that indeed it did. Kelly asked how many of these CD hits Andy thought a gamer that finished Crash would have. Andy did some thinking and off the top of his head said “Roughly 120,000.” Kelly became very silent for a moment and then quietly mumbled “the PlayStation CD drive is ‘rated’ for 70,000.”

https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/video-games/making-crash/

Wow, this brings back memories.

I had my Playstation 1 hard modded, at a local shop near the Tacoma Mall.

I "convinced" my dad to buy a CD Recorder because I could "copy my own Playstation games." It was an HP 2X external burner that connected via the printer port.

Our AST Pentium (overdrive) 83mhz didn't cut it, and would produce 1 good copy for every 3 attempts. My dad went out and got a COMPAQ 333MHz Pentium II.

This brings me back. I had a friend in high school who offered to mod my ps1. He put in some sort of mod chip and had to solder things if I remember correctly. He later on inspired me to attempt things like that myself. I mean he was some 15 year old kid soldering mod chips on peoples ps1. I always thought that was cool. Fast forward 15 years and I was doing the same to xbox 360. I don't condone piracy but I also have 2 ps4 games that have stopped reading for me. I wouldn't feel bad if I could play a ripped copy of the game I already bought.

I would recommend looking at the PSIO if you're wanting to mod a PSX today. It's a bit on the expensive side, but it allows you to insert a SD card instead of having to use CDs. Over time discs degrade and become unusable, as well as the optical drives of the playstations themselves.

RetroManCave on YouTube has a good video on the PSIO:

https://youtu.be/u4_ic5tKdQ0

The PSIO is no longer recommended. TerraOnion's MODE for the PlayStation will be much better.

https://stoneagegamer.com/blog/mode-comes-to-playstation/

"Will be" is the important phrase here, since it also means "isn't yet". I can get PSIO today.

Even the XStation is better than the PSIO: https://castlemaniagames.com/products/xstation

The PSIO has compatibility issues and is rather slow. Here is a good comparison video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYs_7V2Xh1k

I own a PSIO myself, bought it years ago and I definitely respect it and the person who created it. But it's been topped for sure. Granted, the XStation is currently sold out, but I see no reason to go with an inferior product.

"Sold out" still means "I can't get one".

There is no point in a better product that you can't actually buy.

On a related note the firmware of the PlayStation's CDROM controller has been successfully dumped by No$ and other reverse engineers: http://www.psxdev.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=557

The microcontroller is a well documented off-the-shelf part, so I attempted to emulate it: https://gitlab.com/flio/psx_cd

It's not complete yet unfortunately, I hit weird timing inconsistencies that require more debugging, and then real word got in the way...

The license string described in TFA is emulated here: https://gitlab.com/flio/psx_cd/-/blob/master/src/cdc/cxd2545... and here /https://gitlab.com/flio/psx_cd/-/blob/master/src/cdc/cxd2545...

(2018)

author's modchip ebay store is no longer active.

Author here. Sadly this is true. I don't sell modchips anymore because it wasn't very economical or profitable.

I did come up with ways to assemble the chips faster but I couldn't optimize it enough so that I could remove myself from the equation. I ended up selling enough to get rid of all of the inventory I purchased and making enough profit to cover any tool/equipment purchases.

If anyone knows how I could streamline the whole modchip creation process I would be very interested!

I had a boot disk and a spring, because I had the fear to brick my PSX.

I used the double swap trick to play pirated games without a mod chip.

I remember feeling distinctly as if it were one of those fake internet things and I was about to get trolled when I was about to try it for the first time. And then it worked.

Same here.

Funny thing was that it also worked with the PS2 later.

There used to be a web site named modchip.com or something like that which sold mod chips for various video game consoles.

Why bother with PSX systems when you got PSX emulators for the PC that can display in a higher resolution?

Running them on PC is not the point :)

Installing these and burning games is what paid for my beer in college for a couple of years. Good times. I did brick 1, bought a used ps1, modded it and threw in a few free games to the owner.

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