1 Topic by reentrant (edited by reentrant 2023-10-30 08:29:59)

  • Registered: 2014-10-06
  • Posts: 701

Hi,
  Today I came across some interesting info. Translated:

I'll give you a better puzzle to solve. At the market in my city, a guy sold Russian games for PSX and PS2, but you could also buy blank CD-R and DVD-R discs from him. These blank discs had something strange, apart from the manufacturer written in Cyrillic, the CD-Rs were copper gold on the bottom and the DVDs were very navy blue. The recording layer, the so-called gold on the disc, was silver The problem was elsewhere, in the package of 10 discs there was an 11th disc with a special recording program, of course in Russian, because every other known program, such as alcohol, etc., believed that the discs were recorded. After recording this disc and inserting it into the console, everything was fine and working fine. At one point I went to a friend's house with a stack of games, a few originals, a few I recorded on regular CDs, a few on Russian ones, and a few ready-made games I bought until I learned how to burn bins and cues onto CDs myself.
My friend, the console was not modified, it read the originals and there were no pirates. Finally, after several attempts to put other pirates in my hand, I came across one recorded on a disc from a Russian, and the disc started running and the game started normally without a modchip. All the discs I bought from this company played perfectly, I checked with a few people and in fact these pirated discs were the only ones that worked on unmodified consoles. The guy was arrested by the police 2-3 months after discovering this discovery and so we ran out of "almost original" records and I couldn't buy them anywhere anymore. I should have one or two of his songs somewhere on his CDs, but I'll ask my friend if he still has the PS1 with the games we recorded on those CDs, there could be some good material on YouTube with it

Reply:
It sounds interesting! It's a bit like they were discs with Sony protection recorded by him. That's why they had a bit of data recorded on them, or simply "embossed" on the inner edge.
Probably the recording program was modified to skip the first few sectors on the disc and start "further".
I suspect that it would be possible to record a similar trick on every disc, if only there was a way to copy this anti-piracy code and then use the program provided by the guy.

Do yo have some more info about it - discs manufacturer / russian software / low level idea how it worked?

2 Reply by RibShark (edited by RibShark 2023-10-30 22:29:35)

  • Registered: 2017-09-29
  • Posts: 163

This sounds interesting. Possibly, these discs were pre-recorded with the wobble that is necessary to validate the disc and a basic loader executable on one session, and then you could burn a second session that would be loaded by the executable on the first session. I doubt this would be possible to replicate on a normal burner, most likely these discs were manufactured with a custom process that included the wobble. I would certainly be interested to see one of these discs though, and analyse it myself.

PX-4824TA (offset +98), PX-755SA (offset +30), ASUS BW-16D1HT (offset +6)