the PSone might just be my favorite console of all time I'm sure it's mostly nostalgia speaking but that midnight is aesthetic those beautifully blocky pixelated polygons just butters my muffin if you know what I mean oh wait wrong footage while the ps1 in retrospect feels like an early adopter of CD technology game consoles were experimenting with cd-rom as early as 1988 and continued throughout the early 90s and the ultimate in radical technology turbo graphic CD hey you still don't have a Sega CD at the times of those super early CD based systems writing your own CDs was very much out of reach for piracy groups and definitely the average consumer is for this reason that systems like the Sega CD the Philips CDI and the everyone 3do have no copy protection on their CDs about so ever but by the mid nineties affordable cd-rw drives were on the horizon suddenly burning wasn't just what you did with Dave Matthews Band CDs with burners just starting to sneak in under the $1,000 mark it wouldn't be long until the average consumer could trivially make an illegal copy of a game with this in mind both Sony and Sega with their upcoming CD based systems knew they would need protection against inevitable CD piracy the Sega Saturn is a story for a whole other video let me know in the comments if you want to see that in addition to copy protection they would also want a much more annoying form of DRM along sided region Walker or as I like to call it racism region locking has been a part of gaming as early as the Nintendo Entertainment System I have a whole video on that that you guys can check out here Sony naturally wanted to implement these as securely as possible and ultimately came up with a pretty clever way to do both at the same time by taking advantage of the factory mastering process they were able to write data to an area that an ordinary CD writer never could they could then design the PlayStation to read this area as part of the boot process that famous beep sound here on startup is the PSone doing just that and the data that Sony wrote there on every ps1 discs was a fall that occurred that corresponded to the games intended region as a ps1 read this data it would compare it to its own fall that occurred that was hard-coded into its bios it had matched the ps1 knew that not only was the game legitimate it was also the correct region meaning the disk could be booted if not the CD was either a bootleg or the wrong region and the ps1 would refuse to Bruton Sony also claimed the famous black coating on their discs was part of their copy protection scheme to as team in this video from PlayStation underground magazine black ink is added to the plastic to give the CD its distinctive cool PlayStation only look this also helps protect the CD from a legal copy in reality CD drives almost never had trouble reading through the black coding some claimed they were simply trying to throw people off the scent Oh perhaps they meant copy protection in the same vein as there is holographic Windows discs purely cosmetic but extremely hard to replicate outside of the factory and therefore a clearer way to tell whether a copy is genuine or not either way the copy protection really just boiled down to that four-letter code which while simple is an all honesty extremely effective to this day it's still considered impossible to duplicate that four-letter code with any conventional CD burner which brings us to our next logical step if you can't burn CDs is that a play on the PlayStation can you make the PlayStation play burn CDs the downside of such an easy-to-understand lockout system is that it's not hard to think of ways to circumvent it knowing that all the PS one cares about is getting the correct fall that occurred from the disk if we can somehow just give it that code every single time we can effectively defeat the copy protection and region locks altogether which is precisely what a ps1 mod chip does by injecting the correct code into the CD reads stream we can essentially trick the ps1 into thinking that code was read off the disk regardless of what the CD drive actually read easy right well yes so easy in fact it's not uncommon to buy a second-hand ps1 that's already been much Sonne aware of the rampant mud chipping tried to implement much of detection in blockbuster games like diner crisis and spiral Year of the Dragon but hackers responded by making stealth mud chips that disable themselves after the game boots essentially making them undetectable once the game has started Sony learned their lesson and made the security in the ps2 far more complex once again maybe you'd prefer another video sometime so if we want too much of this ps1 where will we get a mud ship from usually console mode chips are fairly complex and have to be printed by legit PCB manufacturers but not this one all we need is an 8-pin programmable pic chip like this which legit only cost about a dollar or two in most places these pins can be wired directly into the board with no other components and just like that the protection is completely defeated now this is a DIY in one chip but we're not actually gonna be writing any code because for the most part that's already been done for us turns out one of the best ps1 mod trips the multimode three is pretty much open source and has been ported to a variety of pic chips just like this one there's also a ps1 much of code for the Arduino called the PS Vita which seems pretty cool but for this video I'll be sticking with the old-school pic method multimode 3 works on almost all systems and is a stealth mode chip meaning it bypasses all non chip detection routines what else could you ask for all we need to do is write this to a pic and we should be good to go the original multimode 3 uses a pic 12 F 508 which is easy enough to find I'm actually using the slightly different pic 12 F 6 8 3 which requires slight tweaks to the pic code but other than that it's identical and all the steps will be the same next we just need a pic programmer to write the code onto the chip here's a fairly simple one they'll do the job and you should be able to pretty much use anything that can program pics obviously getting the console region correct is very important and since I'll be modding a power PS one I'll be using the SCE e region code of the Europe alright ready to go and we're off and that's it I'll run a quick verify just to be sure but otherwise we've already finished making a modchip excellent now we're just gonna get an out it's gonna often be kind of a tedious process because you don't want to bend any of the pins I tend to just leave her it up a little bit on each side until eventually it pops out now it's time to bust open the ps1 and get this thing sold it in while this is happening I should mention that mod shipping may or may not be legal depending on where you live where I live in Australia it actually is legal since courts in 2005 concluded that while a mod chip could facilitate copy infringement it is not in itself copy infringement not as much as actually making the copy in the first place if you're not ripping for home brew or certain pending region locks there's no issue at all in the eyes of the law but those are the laws here and weren't necessarily applies who those living outside of Australia so if you're interested in doing this better concerned about the legality you should probably check the laws of your area now I didn't go into much detail about the disassembly and that's because it's really pretty straightforward but also because there were several Hardware revisions of the ps1 and chances are this one weren't exactly match yours so if you're not sure you should look up disassembly instructions for your specific SC pH model and this applies to the mod ship solder points as well for example the last ps1 i modded and SCP h7 502 had many of the solder points underneath this metal plate which is soldered on to the board and a pain in the ass 2d solder and remove I'm not gonna lie I was getting a little weary seeing this metal plate again on this model SC pH 555 2 but as it turns out none of these solder points are anywhere near this shield in fact they're all on the back which actually is gonna make this way easier the first thing I need to do is decide where I want the much chip to go it's good to do this first so you know exactly how much wire you'll need since I'll be mounting underneath the board I also need to make sure there's enough space between the board and the plate underneath nowhere near any of these raised bumps where the screws go I reckon here should be a-ok I'll keep it in place with a blue tack for now we'll need to solder seven of the eight pins and I'm gonna solve it directly to the pins on the chip I don't always recommend doing this since a lot can go wrong you can accidentally solder two pins together or risk damaging the chip if it gets too hot also if the right process failed earlier this makes it a lot harder to put it back in the programmer for debugging but since I've done this before and I also verified the code writing I'm pretty confident about this working and not needing to D solder it at some point or anything okay that looks good all that's left is to test it and I'll put some tape over to prevent any of the pins from shorting with the metal shielding for this the smoke tests just making sure I didn't break anything [Music] okay good it's always a relief to know I haven't irreparably damaged anything okay now a genuine game to make sure the CD mechanism still reads correctly once again good everything seems fine now it's time for the big test a backup of the same game on an ordinary CDR oh yes it works this ps1 is officially a modchipped playing games perfectly from a CDR as I mentioned before we can also play games for different regions this is a US region game and note how the startup says Sony Computer Entertainment America that the code underneath still says SCE II this is because the text is actually from the game itself and will thus match whatever region that the game is while the fall that occurred as well established is generated by the mud ship and always has to match the console the boot text and logo can actually be changed to pretty much anything which some hacker groups would do to promote themselves the later ps1 slim models actually check the code and the text making it harder to play imports or any pirated games with custom boot text there's a different pic based much of called v1 chip designed specifically for the slim ps1 to get around that text check as well and finally let's place some harm brewed there's actually a thriving ps1 harbor community on PSX dev net where people in the community continue to make games for the ps1 this game is called Europe has ice star you've probably played a puzzle game like it in the past you're trying to collect all the stars but can only move in one direction and it's high ie you can't stop or change directions until you hit a wall so EB puzzle is trying to navigate the environment to get all the stars without getting stuck anywhere it's actually pretty good and the advanced levels have a surprising amount of depth to them I also like the atmospheric music it kinda reminds me the portal soundtrack and really helps give this game a cool space feel I can even forgive the cheesy voiceovers when you complete a level and we couldn't talk about her imbrue without talking about emulators yes even the ps1 has emulators this one's called it Mart beer Neos and actually comes with a Windows tool to automatically create the iso from a folder of nes roms now will boot into it oh good now not gonna lie the menu interface is a little weird pressing any of the action buttons just seems to jump you all around the menu but the important things you need to know a d-pad to choose the game start to actually start it and you know it's actually pretty damn good I know the NES is simple but it's surreal to be playing these games on a ps1 fun fact as a testament to the simplicity of the NES the ps1 CPU is actually not powerful enough to play an mp3 file in real time but as we can see it is still powerful enough to emulate an NES yep the only downside is doesn't seem to have a way to select pal-60 or ntsc / pal meaning a power console like mine ends up playing games at 50 Hertz instead of 60 even picking a USA on the build tool doesn't seem to make a difference but playing in an NTSC ps1 emulator yes and emulator in an emulator sure is normal speed so I guess it's just kind of a bummer for power systems I think the ps1 is super cool and loved breathing new life into them with a quick mod chip however these systems are getting old up to 25 years old in fact and as they get older their drives will wear out and eventually die so while this is a cheap and fairly easy thing to do at the end of the day continuing to rely on these 25-year old CD mechanisms may not be the best idea of course there are super accurate emulators like zebra and med Kniffin through recreating the ps1 look and feel but I also recommend taking a look at PS I own a cartridge of the plugs into the parallel i/o port on the back of the PlayStation and the to boot disk images from an SD card basically and ever drive for PS ones I'm not affiliated with them in any way and keep in mind the PS IO is significantly more expensive than this mod trip approach but it's a really cool product and again I love to see people breathing more like in its old-timer anyway that's it from me thanks for watching and enjoy your 90s nostalgia [Applause] [Music] [Music]