My people. I only aspire to be this damn clever. It's why I surround myself by people smarter than me.
I got the idea from a great book "Security Engineering" which IIRC mentioned some people in Africa doing the same trick with electricity cards or something. Might have misremembered.
That book had a foreword saying something to the effect of "Should this book be written? Some say people will use it for nefarious purposes, however..."
Sorry authors, I used it for nefarious purposes. :D
For anyone else:
The lid of the PS had a small protusion which pressed down a button when the lid closed. The game could not be started with the lid open. So a piece of blu-tac was used to depress that button.
The first thing the PS did when loading a game was to check somewhere on the game disc for some code. This code confirmed the disc was genuine so the trick was to put any genuine game in the drive, use the blu-tac, start the console and at a certain point, after the code had been read but before the game loaded and at that point pull the genuine disc and insert the pirate disc you had.
Once PCs with writable CD drives became more affordable the catalogue became less relevant and you’d just rent titles from Blockbusters and copy them instead.
By the time the Xbox 360 and PS3 were out, the pre-owned market was strong enough that you could buy a game on release and trade-it in at practically no loss once you were done.
Confused... so you'd pull out a spinning CD? And the insert one while the spindle was still spinning? And you'd do this safely, and fast enough that the game wouldn't have time to start reading the disc contents before the swap? And you'd do this every single time you're trying to play the game?
This sounds pretty impossible to pull off without hurting yourself and damaging everything... what am I missing?
The PSX's 2x drive can spin, at most, at about 1,000 RPM. There just isn't much momentum (kinetic energy) there. And IIRC, the wobble-track detection happened at 1x (or a maximum of about 500RPM).
There was nothing particularly iffy about the hit-swapping with PSX's CD-ROM. It could have, at most, less than 0.2 Joules of stored kinetic energy. You can just put your finger on it and stop it with no particular danger.
The PC drives, meanwhile, generally topped out at around 8,000RPM.
That's getting into the realm of scary, with something in the realm of 64x the kinetic energy -- which is more energy than a rather competent air rifle might provide.
(Beyond 8,000RPM, CDs often had disintegration issues, and exploding CD-ROMs were also sometimes reported at somewhat slower speeds. But at 500 or 1,000 RPM? Nah. It's a really boring amount of kinetic energy.)
I think the 72x drives were really just another example of "big number marketing" that was even more prevalent in desktop PCs back then than it is now.
Kenwood did have drives (which others also sold derivatives of) that would, ideally, do 72x at peak. That was a thing.
They did this by cheating: They would read more than one track from the CD-ROM, concurrently, and in parallel. This is a proper hack, and it worked: It could read a CD at a faster rate, with a slower rotational speed, than many other drives.
I never owned a drive that used the Kenwood method. (I never wanted one; my ideas for high-speed CD reading centered around getting good reads from audio CDs, which was still hairy around that time.)
More-common "52x" (or more) drives just spun the fuck out of the CD. Mu circa-1997 girlfriend had one of those drives in her desktop tower PC, and it always sounded like it was going to disassemble the whole PC when it managed to get spun fully up.
But they never really exceeded 8k RPM. It was just a difference of read methods.
There was CAV, CLV, partial CAV, and other methods -- both for reading, and writing. In reader-space, the documentation wasn't always complete in describing the methods -- it became universal that "faster is better".
My own peak CD-ROM time happened with a Plextor PR-820 burner and a "24x" Plextor reader, both connected with parallel SCSI.
It was very fast for the time, but I was never successful with direct high-speed disc-to-disc copies with this rig. Even with IBM UltraStar 9ES ultra-wide SCSI disks and plenty of RAM, and plenty of time for tweaking -- I just couldn't a a reliable copy possible. (And all of my reported-successful burns were proper, and that was important to me.)
So I rolled on with this rig for a couple of years, when a friend brought over a new pile of PC parts to have me assemble.
And I did assemble the things, and then we did the requisite copying of the Windows CD.
He wanted to copy it at max speed. I was sure it would fail.
Except: He had a fast reader (>32x), and a "32x" burner (which isn't really a thing), and... We put the source disc in the source drive, and the blank disc in the target drive, and it just fuckin' worked. I timed it, and it took 2 minutes and 43 seconds. Both drives spun up like jet engines, and the progress bar just spooled across the screen without a pause in Nero Burning ROM.
It was amazing to observe. And it probably did not exceed 8k RPM on either drive, despite the necessary read/write rates.
(That was early in 2002, as a reference.)
I'm not sure on the why? But the tray eventually would eject with the CD still spinning? Bad braking system?
You could hear the drive go nuts and speed up to weird speeds and one day a disc exploded inside.
Remember the warnings about not inserting X format discs into Y drives.
Does anyone know why this happens?
Look up for example Philips SBC444A test CD for the kind of things CD players were required to handle for certification.
It can nevertheless be true that the CDs were failing all the time. So robust error correction is real to achieve the degree of functionality that we did enjoy during the heyday of CDs, and despite this, the fragility of CDs as an information medium meant that they were still disappointing us.
When authenticating it slows down considerably then displays the PS logo screen. You would watch it slow down then speed up then slow down (happens for a few seconds) and you'd simply grab the disc and replace it.