The Great 20 year mystery: Why are PS1 games black?

Google and You Tube only produce Forum topics and no videos about the topic. There's nothing about it anywhere. But if anyone would know it's someone here. I keep forgetting game development is a large part of what this place is (it's why I'm resolved to be less of a dick now) So does anybody know why PS1 discs are black?

 

Cos it's cool?

 

That's the common Google answer that or Brand separation. Another unvarified answer was anti piracy. I wonder if it was for disc rot protection but I don't think disc rot was a concern in 1994.

 

iirc I remember a interview with ken and he said it was for brand recognition and for style...He also stated that they are not black but a very dark purple so there ya go

 

Perhaps that's what I should be looking for. Old Ken Interviews...... that guy was a dick....

 

I remember reading it was to stop piracy but don't know if that's true, If it is true it didn't work.

 

It's just for appearance. It doesn't have any function that I've ever heard of. It has nothing to do with copy protection. They continued with the PS2 ofcourse. The CD-ROMs were blue looking, and the DVDs had a PS logo on them. Again it was for appearances. The logo might have been for making it harder to make an authentic looking fake. The black look on PS1 discs *could* have been to make it harder to make an authentic looking PS disc. But again it's all looks. Functionally the system doesn't care.

 

I know 100% it wasn't for copy protection because the only protection used on ps1 was country code lockout and badblocks that could only be written by special cd writers....that's why mod chips were needed because no cd writer could mimic the badblocks copy protection

 

Not all PS1 games are black. Some of the more recent reprints have the standard silver bottom

 

I'm not sure about the "bad blocks" and the error correction things. I do know that what modchips do is inject a character string such as "SCEA" for NTSC/U consoles to make the CD controller believe this string was read from the disc. The SCEA string is located on the disc in 3 places, and obviously can't be duplicated on a normal CD writer. It could be true that automatic error correction causes this to not be writable but I'm not sure that is true.

 

Detail on the actual Bad Blocks

Sectors 12 through 15 contain a zeroised EDC/ECC checksum (impossible) so if the PSX reads and doesn't see an invalid EDC/ECC then it knows that the CD in the drive is a copy. (The EDC is simply a CRC type hash that is used as a checksum to determine if the sector was read correctly. The ECC is used to recreate the sector data). The entire range of sectors is written in a RAW format (2352 bytes) and is completely zeroed, even the XA sub-header and EDC/ECC are zeroed. When it is copied on a CD-R, these sectors are exact, except for the EDC/ECC code that is (correctly) written as 0x3F13B0BC.

With a modified bios is should be possible to make an exact backup without the need to modify the Playstation. This way it would not automatically 'correct' what it thinks to be corrupt sectors with invalid EDC/ECC codes and using a copy method of writing the first track in RAW mode (2352 byte sectors, CD-DA) and then force the table of contents to report the track as a CD-XA track.

 

Disc rot happens on the other side of the disc. Only way to prevent it is using two layers of plastic like in DVDs and quality materials that can't corrode. Just like those vinyl-like CD-Rs, PS1 discs are black because it looks cool.

 

I agree, it's most likely just for appearances. Which also answers why CD-ROM PS2 games are blue.

 

Yeah, I always thought it was to make them unique. That supports a lot of functions. It makes them stand out and you immediately know what system its for. Also it probably makes laypeople think that they are not normal discs.

 

The Dreamcast Gameshark/action replay were also on Black/Purple discs oddly enough.

 

Oh really? I didn't know that. Hmm, any others that you can think of?

 

None that I can think of no.

 

As far as I remember, the area that the console reads to check if the disc is legit or not is impossible to write to with a standard consumer CD/DVD writer, even if you modify the BIOS as it is "factory written" (ie. CD-Rs already have "info" in there and cannot be re-written) or something like that.
I guess I should go look at the information/source I have before talking... lol!

 

http://wololo.net/2012/12/10/how-ps1-security-works/