Yesterday I went to my favorite electronics junk store, looking for video game oddities. I got these two different items for the PSX that appeared to be a vcd add-on. Upon further inspection of these, it appears one of them is a gamars psx-003, and the other one which looks exactly like it, ecept it has different markings on it, it seems to be made of a cheaper plastic, it's lighter, and it has "P. MODEL" written in what appears to be sharpie marker on the bottom of it. I'm assuming "P. MODEL" is production model. The most info I could find in English was this: http://www.trhonline.com/obscure/psxvcd.htm Anyone know what this thing is or have any instructions on how to use it? Any resources in English I could read up on?
ooo i had one of those back in the day.. remeber all teh HK VCD discs i got wrecked my poor ps1 laser though haha
It's a device to watch Video-CD movies on your PS1. Video-CD is a precursor to DVD movies. It's on a CD and uses a different codec but it's still a similar concept. It's pretty much just a novelty and pretty useless now. It's not worth watching a movie on a VCD anymore. There was a time when DVDs were pretty new and it was still too expensive to buy DVD-Rs. So I got some DVD player which was pretty nice because it played VCDs, SVCDs (Super), and XVCDs (non standard). The reason I got it was so I could burn movies and videos to cheap CD-Rs and watch them. SVCD actually uses MPEG-2, the same as DVD movies so the quality on SVCDs could be quite good actually. Anyway there is little point to the device now. I've heard it works by having you insert a disc, probably a large disc like Final Fantasy 7, have a spring on the lid sensor, turning on the system so it reads your legit PS1 game and OKs it. Then you do something to make the disc motor stop so you can remove the PS1 game and put in the VCD and play it. From what it sounds like to me some of these besides having a movie player function also work like all the plugin cheat devices that would allow you to do a swap trick to act as a "modchip" even though that's not really the case as a modchip is good while the swap trick sucks.
Yeah it does require a spring and game swap, the spring on mine was attached to the device with some black elastic. It was very much the novelty factor and came WAY before DVD did, it did suck pretty hard though in all honesty, i remeber clearly that mine never actually allowed for a whole movie to be played, it would start skipping and teh whole thing including teh disc would have to be let to cool down before continuing the movie. Still nice find though, when i had one i remember a lot of my buddies were quite envious at the time, certainly an obscure item to add to your collection.
From what I remember, those PSX VCD addon's were more of a "Me too" gimmick as the PSX was never really envisioned to do that. They were not very good build wise and decoding wise they sucked as well. The Saturn on the other hand had the daughter port which was suitable for a VCD card (probably since many companies who signed up for Saturn hardware also had a hand in creating VCD technology). The Saturn's VCD cards are great and works like a treat. Of course, I'm not talking about "HK BEST" brand cards or any crap like that.
XVCD isn't even a standard. It's just a way of saying your not following the VCD specifications. So as to what settings XVCD's are encoded at, or what players will run them, that's a crap shoot. But I will say that the Saturn VCD cards can accept bit rates as high as 2500 before studding (i've tried).
My first dvd player played vcds. It was a sony. However it could only read regular dvds, dvd-r, and cd-rw's. So if I wanted to burn a video cd I had to use a rw. At the time it was the only affordable way to watch burned video clips on a player as dvd-r's were quite pricey. I agree though now video cd's are pointless and are not worth the effort considering how cheap dvd-rs now. Anyone know how good the quality was of the 3do video cd add-on?
Those did have some sort of cheat system in them or at least the one i had many years ago included a cheat device in it although i never used it so can't say if it was any good or not and i actually found these devices it to be pretty useless and not really anything special.
that's what I've read as well. I'm unsure about the production model. Anywho, I'm not a collector at all, so these things are about as useless as tits on a bull. Do you think they'd be sell worthy here, or should I just unload them on a game shop?
To be honest the quality for the PSX VCD add-ons were pretty craptacular. Not sure how much you could get for them. Sega Saturn VCD cards are awsome (quality wise) and even those (Unboxed) sell for about $20 bucks.
The cheating system in the GAMARS VCD Card for the PSX is an action replay cheat code thing (probably cloned or something) if I recall correctly. But I do not know what VCD player thing DevHackr has. So I think if the cheatcode thingy can be used in some kind of homebrew stuff going on, then it could be used in more interesting ways.
\ Yeah, the saturn VCD is amazing. I finally got a vcd working on this thing and it's grainy and looks like ass. It kinda looks like the sega cd "make my video" series if anyone else had the misfortune to buy those as a kid.
Lack of standard MPEG support on the PSX would do that. i think these add-ons simply emulated or only had the PSX CPU do some conversions for output. Anyway. I remember they came out with a VCD addon for the PSOne system. You had to solder it all in. I should have bought one back in the day.
I used VCD a LOT. Before DVD burners were affordable, I would get movies downloaded and burn them to VCD. a standard movie is on 2 SVCD because of the length of them. I used to burn all my short films to VCD. My first DVD player could play them. I'd also back up my DVD to VCD. Sacrafice quality. lol.l I picked up WING COMMANDER and KICKBOXER on HK SVCD at a goodwill a few weeks ago.
I have a ps1 vcd card which the box calls "Fighter Movie Card". You need to boot the ps1 with a real game (doesnt matter the size) in order to be able to swap the disc for a movie, unless your system is modded, then you can just put the vcd in to start and no problem. VCD decompression is ok, it can sometimes have audio/video desync problems which of course depends on the quality of the vcd. I also have the JVC vcd card for my japanese saturn. I honestly have to say its the best vcd player I have ever used. Not only does it produce the cleanest video quality but its fully compatible with vcd 2.0 menus which other systems lack. Sadly unless you have a japanese system or some sort of region hack the saturn vcd card will not work on a usa saturn.
I have to agree with you on the JVC Saturn card. I have one of hem plus a Hitachi one in my Hi-Saturn. The JVC card is fantastic plus even supports E-Books.
JVC cards support Kodak Photo CD's as well. Although you need a special Kodak mastering software to create them which only film developers got. I've created some Photo CDs before using a leaked kit, but it's nothing special.
