For a late-1990s engineer with good soldering skills, many a free pint of beer could be earned by installing modchips on the game consoles of the day. Modchips were usually a small microcontroller connected with a few wires to selected pins on the chips or pads on the board that masked or overrode the copy protection and region locking. This scene was brought back for us by a recent [Modern vintage gamer] video looking at the history of console hardware mods, and it’s worth a watch (see the video, below).
The story starts in 1996 with the original PlayStation, largely the source of those free pints for a nascent Hackaday scribe back in the day. Along the way, as he expands the story, we find other memories, for example, the LPC bus-based hijacks of the first XBox console, and the huge modding scenes on both that machine and Sony’s PS2. The conclusion is that this community left its mark on today’s consoles even though the easy hardware hacks may be a thing of the past on the latest hardware, and as past Hackaday articles can attest, jailbreaking older consoles still has a way to go.
In the early days, our recollection is that the PlayStation modchips were driven by the region locking rather than piracy, for the simple reason that Sony used 80-minute ISOs which wouldn’t fit on the then-available consumer 74-minute CD-R. We also remember them being used by people who couldn’t afford a blue debuugging PlayStation,. or the rare black developer model.
ModernVintageGamer is a hack and just about everything he says is ill-researched and should be viewed through a skeptical lens.
His retrospective on Bloodlust Software omitted the part where Icer “Sardu” Addis had been doxxed and his family was being harassed by crazed emulator fans. It wasn’t until a thoughtful game developer, with his own foot in the emulation pond, reached a hand out to him to let him get out of the limelight, that things took a turn back towards sanity for him.
Given that this was before the death of bsnes/higan/Ares’s primary author, Near, due to years of concentrated harassment both online and offline, I sometimes wonder whether things might’ve been different if MVG had used his voice at the time to steer the emulation community towards good, rather than tacitly approving of evil.
His retrospective on UltraHLE doesn’t even get the release year correct in the thumbnail, plus it has no interviews with contemporaneous individuals. “Full Speed N64 in 1998”? Not unless you were best buddies with Doc Brown and could take his Flux Capacitor-retrofit DeLorean DMC-12 for a quick spin.
And here, now, he repeats long-debunked conjecture as if it was fact. PS1’s primary means of copy protection wasn’t the capacity of the discs, it has long been proven via disassembly of its CD servo controller that it was down to intentional imperfections in the lead-in groove that was etched onto every licensed disc.
A nominal CD-ROM disc will have an initial lead-in groove so that the laser can obtain and maintain tracking before the disc is up to speed. Sony realized that they could extend this track and intentionally move it laterally to induce variance in the focusing assembly of the laser tray, and that the servo controller could pay attention to these movements, forming a way of encoding ASCII data into what’s now colloquially known as the “wobble track”.
Each major region – US, Europe, Asia – had a particular wobble track that would spell out “SCEA”, “SCEI”, and so forth.
This was also how games got wise to pirated discs, with games like Spyro: Year of the Dragon inducing some pretty gnarly effects on gameplay to mess with people using an early-generation modchip: The servo controller can and should only be reporting that wobble-error data when focused on the lead-in of the disc. If it was streaming in a file, for example, and still reporting that data, you could be assured that the player was using a modded PS1.
The fact that this guy has over a million subscribers on YouTube for what amounts to poorly-researched, long-debunked technical information is downright staggering. About his only real claim to fame is using a pirated copy of the Xbox Developer Kit to cross-compile other peoples’ emulators for the original Xbox. He’s not much of an emulator developer himself, and has about room-temperature porridge levels of value to add to either the retro scene or emulation scene. People need to stop reporting his pabulum as fact.
This guy right here is right. The disc size thing was debunked so long ago that it’s practically criminal that someone is still parroting that in 2026.
Sadly, the over-entitled attitude of MindRape seemed to have spilled over to the community for the most part. The number of harassed, doxxed, SWATted, etc. emulation-adjacent people is, and should be, a major mark of shame on the hobby.
Let’s not even get started on the harassment by the RA “team”..
I used to work for a company promoting the PS2 in the UK. We travelled to events all over the UK with the PS2 “Pods”, the ones you’d find in Game and similar shops.
Our PS2s were supplied direct from Playstation and were already chipped. It was so cool to play demo games on rewritable DVDs with the name of the game hastily scrawled in Permanent marker on them. This article just reminded me of that time, showing off Not Yet Released games.
I miss the retro era
I drank many many cold beverages in exchange for an Xbox mod. Bring me the Xbox and a new hard drive. I was ordering clone chips by the 10 pack.
I miss the days of playing Japanese games on my modded Dreamcast. Found a chip online (NCSX) to bypass the region lock, looked up a computer repairman and booked a soldering appointment. I played MvC2 and Sega GT months early; and mecha games like Macross and Gundam.
Are you sure they weren’t DVD-Rs? I specifically remember buying like 100 Ridata DVD-Rs because they worked best with the PS2 laser, particularly for streaming games like GTA.
I’m surprised RW discs worked at all.
Huh, I modded so many PSXes back in the day, that I immediately went “Oh! That’s a PU-18… but something look off with these two wires on the right?!”
Turns out it’s a PsNee, that came far, far later :D
From the delivery notes for blank 12C508s that I found again years later somewhere in my workshop, there must’ve been far over 600 installations…
Ah! So he’s like the LTT for “Vintage Gaming”, got it! XD
FWIW The video only mentions the ‘wobble groove’, it’s Jenny’s Hackaday article that mentions the problem of finding 80min CR-Rs, after specifically saying “In the early days, our recollection is” [emph mine].
Which tallies with my recollection; the main problem I had back in the day was that some CD-R’s seem to work for making PS1 ‘backups’, but others would never load. I had no idea of the finer points of PS1 hacking in those days, so assumed that it was the result of some genius Sony DRM.
I miss playing sega gt so much 😔
“Each major region – US, Europe, Asia – had a particular wobble track that would spell out “SCEA”, “SCEI”, and so forth.” – that’s exactly what’s in this video. Did you even bother to watch it before writing this rant?
“Each major region – US, Europe, Asia – had a particular wobble track that would spell out “SCEA”, “SCEI”, and so forth.” – that’s exactly what’s in this video. Did you even bother to watch it before writing this rant?
Don’t sit on the fence man! Tell us what you really think of him.
I took a different tack to hardware hacking with my PS2. To be fair, I didn’t get into it for region unlocking, my only goal was to backup the firmware (legally), so that I could use it in my PCSX2 emulator install. (That’s also why that SlimLine PS2 is still in my closet!) And it was honestly childs play by the time I did it, thanks to FreeMCBoot. Bought a copy of one of the James Bond games (maybe Agent Under Fire?), ripped it, and created a modified ISO with uLaunchELF burnt as the second level, boot with original disc for DRM, then swap to the burnt disc and beat level one – tada, FreeMCBoot installed to memory card slot 1. Then I dumped the firmware to a USB drive and promptly stored away the PS2. The only hardware hacking I had to do on that console was due to my own mistake: I accidentally popped off the switch that let the PS2 know the lid was open (trying to wedge it so that I could open the disc cover without my PS2 knowing), quick solder to bypass the switch and on my merry way I went.
I made quite a few bucks repairing red ringed Xbox 360s, though…
Read more Hackaday, amirite?
https://hackaday.com/2018/11/05/how-the-sony-playstation-was-hacked/
As someone who routinely modded psx and PS2 consoles in my college dorm and burned hundreds of CDs for people, there was never a size issue. It was always standard 640mb discs.
Do you have any suggestions for better channels in the same topical vein? I’m interested in the topic and find MVG’s videos just interesting enough to occasionally watch, but they do usually feel shallow and there’s always a large number of comments pointing out mistakes or oversights. I’d love to find a channel that still posts semi-frequently but is better informed.
Also, his carbon engine is not the best. It’s layered with issues.