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

I actually asked the question at a trade show a number of years ago and was told that it was easier on the laser. Probably just sales patter though.

 

I'm sure even today you can find CD-R or DVD-R's in multiple colors even with the playstation style black color. So I don't think it's any kind of copy protection. Just for style. Black colored disks look so fine compared to silver ones.

This might be kind of offtopic, but I think currently there's no "perfect" PS1 game copy/bootleg in which it will work in a system without any kind of modchip isn't it?

 

Yeah there's just something about a PS1 disc even though they aren't there's something about them that makes them feel more durable.

 

Actually I rember reading somewhere that the president of Sony wanted to use high quality discs for the ps1 but ken kutaragi convinced him to use a cheaper type of cd to save costs.

To be honest I always felt ps1 discs felt real cheap. They scratch do damn easily!!! Plus I rember borrowing ff7 from someone and one disc had a slight chip on top. Tried to buff it a little on the bottom and the disc easily split in half!!!

I do miss how Sony packaged games in the us, putting a sticker on top of the case like a dvd or cd telling you the product info. Even the console was packaged like a consumer electronic. Now everything packaged as cheap as the consoles are.

 

its actually a very dark blue, and it makes a bit of sense, as its perfect to filter anything beside the infrared from the laser.
and the slight purple comes from the pink print on the disc, really a pure dark blue.

 

Could be true. I'm by no means a guru when it comes to disk and laser talk. But I do know that when PS2 Lasers are going out, a lot of time they can still boot PS1 disks. (but can't read PS2 disks.)

 

Its simply 2 different lasers in one assembly. also you can run then still the few PS2 CD Games, not just PS1 CDs.

 

Usually we don't even get those anymore. Other than a couple Wii colors and the Halo 3 360, I can't think of a recent mass release that was a different color than white and black.

I've always felt the opposite about discs in general. You have to be relatively careful, whereas carts can and have been dropped off bloody buildings and still worked.

 

There was a red 360 bundle, but even red is a rather safe color.

 

But it's not about "bad blocks". The CD-ROM controller just wants to see the proper string of characters before it will allow the console to read from the disc. Clearly the strings of characters on the disc are stored where conventional CD-ROMs and writing equipment will not normally have this data. If you look at the functional code to a typical modchip, it just injects a four character string of data. It doesn't do anything about EDC, ECC, or anything else really. It's just giving the CD-ROM controller the magic word to unlock. The Sega Saturn has a very similar system. The CD-ROM controller again checks discs when inserted for some string of data before unlocking. If it doesn't find what it wants it will prevent reading from the disc. Modchips again just inject the magic words to make the system happy.

 

when psx piracy was in it's peak, the cards for the parallel socket (I/O) made it much easier, BY ACCIDENT!
...
way before i EVER saw 'chips' DEFACING the console interior, the various cards was the method.
a spring was used to hold the pressure switch/lid open...getting off track here.
...
normal cd's was hit or miss, but for 100% foolproof results, the black TDK's with red and black check pattern on label side, the ONLY disk that worked all the time with password card/disk switch sprung.
hell, even the a1200 was used to write the dumps to disk...
slow, but effective. (then again, writers of the day was slow, regardless of computer)
...
didn't need many of those disks at the time, got most retails cheap enough, and for the hit/miss ratio of writes, only the quality media warranted it. (almost as costly as original then) can't really find them again, and if i understand economics, TDK is in different hands and the media quality took a shit...same for a LOT of other manufacturers. (i'm talking about backing up my own stash and playing them)
...
never did try them on other consoles, just amiga systems as flac music disks and data/cd32 games. (doesn't really count) probably would be a good choice for the sega systems?! :smile-new:

 

That is only the first step of the two step copy protection the ps1 has...The next step checks the executable file itself before it boots the code looking for intentional bad blocks/sectors, this process happens at the PS logo screen.

 

I know later PS1 games used a protection called libcrypt, It hid data in the padding bytes at the end of one of the CD's sector's. Old CD Writers can't read or write this data, later writers can as long as the burning software supports it, I think CloneCD was the first software to do this.

 

i have one PS runtime library disc is Black

 

That clashes with the statement that not all retail games have the "bad blocks". Can you explain that? And you didn't address the modchip either. The modchip works and all it does is execute a timed loop sending the 4 letter code strings, endlessly. And this works.

 

The only thing I wonder about the "black discs" (btw I think it is called this because of that audio track on Castlevania SoTN) is if they are actually different. They seem more durable than normal CDs, in that they can look almost destroyed and still readable in Playstations or CE CD players.

 

Sorry my explanation is hazy.....1st step checks for region scee, scea, scei and scew (the 4 strings a mod chips sends) when this is passed the 2nd step is on the executable itself to see if the boot text matches up, it's not 100% clear in my head as it's been a number of years since I've even played a ps1.

Sorry for any confusing information I've given out.

 

You're probably thinking about the boot ROM region check that's in some consoles (most Japanese ones and the PAL version of the PSone, but not in any US or Asian models). That wasn't really copy protection, though, since all it checked was that the license data matched a copy in ROM, and a CD-R would pass that check with no problems. If you were burning CD-Rs, then you could just patch the image with the correct license data for the console (even if it didn't match the data on the disc) and it would boot.

About the only thing it did was prevent people from running original imports, which seems like a strange thing to want to do. It was fairly quickly patched around, anyway.

 

I don't remember if I read it in Reiji Asakura's Revolutionaries at Sony or in Ryōji Akagawa's Shōgen - “Kakumei” wa kōshite hajimatta PlayStation kakumei to gēmu no kakumei-ji-tachi, but a Sony employee told they chose to put a color on the CDs because music CDs and PS games were made in the same factory(ies) and, obviously, they wanted to avoid mistakes.

 

When the ps1 was in its heyday I always heard that the black (actually super dark blue) discs were easier for the laser to read. I never put much into that, considering i had many backups that were on plain silver cd-r's that seemed like the system had an easier time reading than the retail black discs.