Summary
- Simple methods like disc-swapping and paperclip tricks could easily defeat early console anti-piracy measures.
- In the case of the PlayStation 1, a marked section on the disc determined region and copyright legitimacy.
- While these methods were crude, they had limitations like inability to play CD-based music tracks and introduction of glitches.
Back in the day, consoles were primitive machines compared to what we have now, especially in a technical sense. While the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Nintendo Wii generation strengthened things somewhat, consoles before that were largely plagued with piracy to varying degrees. The original PlayStation was one such funny example, where a paperclip, some tape, or even a wedge of paper could be used to defeat all of its anti-piracy chops in a way that Sony couldn't really do anything about it.
Sony's anti-piracy checks were lacking
All you needed was to hotswap a disc
In the case of the PlayStation 1, its DRM check was particularly trivial. The region check and the anti-piracy check were done in the same part of the launch sequence, where a marked section at the beginning of the disc contained the region of the disc. This information had the letters SCEx, where the X would be replaced with a letter denoting the region.
- SCEA: North America
- SCEE: Europe
- SCEI: Japan
- SCEW: Development units (Net Yaroze)
While this marked section contains the region information, it also serves as a copyright check as conventional CD burners aren't capable of creating the physical mark that the PlayStation uses to check to ensure that it's a legitimate disc. While this is colloquially referred to as the "wobble groove," a patent filed by Sony that is largely believed to refer to the PlayStation 1 security check sheds a bit of a different light on things.
In essence, the "wobble" appears to be a specific series of tracking corrections that are interpreted by the PlayStation as data, which a conventional CD burner cannot do. This series of tracking corrections is done around the table of contents of the CD. This means that the PlayStation reads the region data, the table of contents, verifies the game is a legitimate one, and then the user can swap the disc for their own, burned disc.
However, there was one more obstacle. Opening the PlayStation lid stopped whatever game was running from continuing to be read so that you couldn't swap out or remove a disc. The way around this was to keep the lid sensor depressed at all times so that the system thought the lid was closed. You could do this with a paperclip or a wedge of paper. You could easily verify if it worked by seeing if the disc would spin while the lid was still open.
Modchips were better anyway
Hotswapping worked, but it wasn't perfect
While this method worked as a crude way to pirate PlayStation games, it wasn't perfect. If your game has CD-based music tracks on it, it won't work, and you could introduce glitches and other problems in the games that you had burned, too. This is because if your game has CD-based music, that gets defined separately to the rest of the game data in the table of contents. The PlayStation won't know where that music is, as it was already told where everything was from the other game before you swapped the CD.
As an example, let's say you use a game that doesn't have CD-based music, but you swap to a game that does. The game that you swap to tells the PlayStation to play track number two, located at whatever position that is. The PlayStation has already loaded the table of contents and sees that there isn't a track two located anywhere, which can cause problems.
Modchips got around this problem, as they essentially injected the correct data into the data stream from the CD reader so that games looked legitimate. There were also swap discs you could use specifically for pirating CDs, where they would try to properly facilitate the launching of pirated games while reading their table of contents. While things did get pretty advanced after a while, the rather primitive disc-swapping method was still a quick and easy way for gamers to pirate games.
Nowadays, consoles are significantly harder to crack, and simple disc-swapping tricks like this aren't ever going to be close to working. It's a tough job out there to prevent game piracy, but it used to be even harder back then.
