In this report, we will talk about the challenges of Sony to protect its games from pinch, the terrifying nightmare that threatens PlayStation and Sony devices and causes them to lose a lot of profits, so Sony was putting a large part of its money and developers in developing and innovating high-tech and smart to protect PlayStation devices from piracy And the beginning was with the Playstation 1, which brought CDs into this industry from its widest gates.
A glimpse of the past
When Sony introduced the PlayStation 1 in 1994, the idea was at the beginning to present this technology to Nintendo, which in turn would take over the device, attribute it to it and release its games to it, but for unknown reasons this partnership ended before it even started, which prompted Sony to rely on Herself launched her own device, which she called Playstation 1, and that was in 1994.
Sony made a major shift in the PlayStation 1 device from that that was offered by Nintendo, the queen of video game markets at the time, where Sony used larger and stronger patches, including using CDs to store and play games while Nintendo was using large cartridge containers with Space is limited, but here was the first challenge facing Sony in order to withstand the market and this challenge is not in front of the competitor Nintendo, but against the pirates.
CDs were reproducible, and the PlayStation 1 content can be easily copied to a personal computer and then copied to a commercial disc and placed on PlayStation 1, but the surprise is that the burned disc will never work and here Sony's intelligence appears to protect itself from the copied games, so how Was this ?!
The truth of the black disk
In the beginning, let me touch on a fact that may be painful for some, as Sony used original black discs and some thought that this black substance had one purpose which is copy protection, but unfortunately if you believe this truth until now it is completely wrong, the black color that Sony uses it in PlayStation 1 discs, it is only a color only and has no effect on protecting games or any other role except that it is just a color.
How does the protection system work?
Let us now enter with you in the facts of the protection of PlayStation 1 discs from piracy. In the beginning, for the tenth of that era, do you remember when we were putting the disc inside the device and running it? If you put your ear near the device, you would hear that the rotation of the disk was fast in the beginning and you hear the movement of the laser drive and It moves quickly, then after the famous PlayStation icon appears, which confirms that the disc has been played. The device returns to quiet mode ?! Here was Sony's smart move to protect games from piracy, as secret tracks were used on the original Playstation discs, specifically in the outer edge of the disc. When the drive starts playing the game, it goes directly to those tracks and makes sure that it exists and begins to read quickly and when it makes sure The presence of the corresponding secret fingerprint returns to the regular game files and begins with the player's reading
The original disk reading screen
In the case of copying the original Playstation 1 disc to another disk, the copying devices cannot access these secret tracks, and therefore do not copy them and only copy the game files. When using this copied disk on Playstation 1, the disk reader will start searching for these tracks that he will not find Of course, here you will see a screen to read disc failure and rejection
Region Lock Fact
Also, there is another fact that I want you to know, especially you, veterans who lived in the first device of the PlayStation family, where Sony was using the Region Lock or Region Lock system, and the disks were divided into American, European, and Asian as follows:
- A for america (SCEA)
- E for europe (SCEE)
- I for japan (SCEI
For example, if you received a gift for a PlayStation 1 game from your friend or relative who was residing in America and you had a European PlayStation 1 device and put toys in the device, you will be very disappointed because the device will refuse the game even if it is original and the reason is Region Lock But how does this system work?
We return to the same idea of protection that we talked about at the beginning, where Sony uses the same secret tracks that are located on the edge of the disk and places the fingerprint of the region in turn, the CD reader will search for it and match it with the device area, and in the event of a match, the game is played, but if no match occurs The disc is rejected.
How hackers circumvented the intelligence of Sony!
Of course, the pirates, I see them like the parkour athlete, do not know the barriers or obstacles that appear in their path and always reach their goal, and as the saying goes “If the cause is known the wonder hero” Pirates were able to discover Sony's trick and they overcome it by making an additional piece Modchip is placed Inside the device so that when you place a copied disk in it this piece interferes at the moment of checking for these paths and instead of being read from the disk the Modchip piece gives a signal to the processing unit with a fingerprint identical to the code in these secret tracks and thus the disk reader goes through the step of reading secret tracks and Switch to reading the files A game that will be completely located on the burned disc and the game starts.
Piracy will never end. My feeling is that it was much, much, much worst at PS1 times. The digital games era made it harder to pirates, but never impossible, right!?
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