How good is PSX change 2 for booting burned CD-R's? I can't seem to find much regarding the quality of booting cd-r backups with this.
I have no clue about this product. But why do you not use a chip? probably cheaper, and works perfect?
I have one similar, but not the exact same. Works fine for the most part but depending on the TOC of the game you want to play and whether it uses CDDA you may have some issues.
There are other ways to perform a swap trick to boot CD-Rs. Any Action Replay cheat cartridge can do it. This disc you mentioned is useful if you are using a 9000 series or PSOne series system where you lack the parallel i/o port. However you might be able to accomplish the same thing with the CD based GameShark discs. And as gladiator said, you're better off installing a modchip. Based 4 wire modchip code can be put on a 12F629 PIC if I remember right. You can easily install that with basic soldering skills. It probably costs less than getting ahold of one of those PS-X-Change discs.
Use to have one. It works fine but if any game uses cdda music won't play as it messes with structure.
Speaking of Gameshark & Action Replay CDs has anyone had ahold of any russian boot cds similar to PS-X Change? Maybe try your luck finding those (if super duper lucky) or better yet try buying one of those PS1 developer/test units instead if you got enough.
A relatively recent addition you may not be aware of. Unirom flashed to a compatible cheat cartridge performs on par with a modchip and one step above swapping if you have a fat ps1 with a parallel port. You also avoid ToC problems of swap discs and the swapping part of course (just press R2 with the cdr in the drive). I don't have ps-x-change myself, but from friends that had one back in the day there were problems with multi disc and anti-modchip games. I think it was still possible to play those games, but required more steps.
The last time I checked UniROM had trouble when loading certain games (including Final Fantasy VII). However the implementation of the drive unlock does work and by using a copy of the GameShark Lite CD or some other boot disc can solve the loading issues. But you are correct, it's much better than using any Swap Trick method such as PS-X-Change. You will not have any issues with ToC meaning games that use CD audio tracks will work just fine. However you can still run into issues with anti-mod games since the behavior is not going to match a legit disc exactly. Some games with less advanced anti-mod checks might work ok. But others will require a patch or gameshark code. The ToC issue with Swap Tricks actually can trigger the Anti-Mod screen too, which explains what you mentioned ploder. I still recommend either an original 4 wire modchip or a stealth modchip if possible. After that a cheat device with UniROM is not a bad method however it's not quite as seamless. It does have the perk of not needing to modify your console and using it in whatever console you happen to have around. The swap trick methods like PS-X-Change or just doing the swap trick at boot up I consider to be a last resort method to boot something that I think should be avoided if at all possible. One reason you might use a swap trick would be to run the program to reprogram a cheat device with UniROM. But other than that I wouldn't mess with it.
Just one other note for anyone wanting to try this - the CD-ROM drive unlock that Unirom uses does not work on any revision of the Japanese region consoles. This is not a problem in the coding of Unirom, the function is simply not implemented in the mechacon chip.
Not just Japan, I heard "asian consoles" in general won't work. And it's not that the logic isn't there from what I remember reading, just that the flag never gets set or is ignored. Like they disabled it on purpose.
