To get $5 off your Magic Spoon variety pack and get a head start on New Year’s Resolutions, click this link: magicspoon.thld.co/sharopolis_0123 and use code SHAROPOLIS at checkout!
i think there was a music player trick with swap, when you exit player it loads game. you put genuine game in player, it spins and stops, then you swap cd and exit player. yeah thats it
To anyone modding with the chip for the first time. Be aware that when they changed the orientation of the optical drive, they basically made the ribbon slot in the rf shield a razor blade. You need to tape the slot or you will move the drive and the ribbon will be severed.
Managed to solder a chip on my psone (which I love with my whole heart) on my first try. The feeling was hard to beat when my japanese SOTN booted up at once!
A much easier swap method (may only work on the earlier revisions with the phono AV jacks): turn on the console with no disk, select the CD player, insert genuine disk, hold the switch down and wait for the disk to spin up then stop, swap disk, slam lid shut, exit CD player. The downside of this method is that it caches the disk TOC meaning some games have audio issues if they use CD audio. (And have you tried turning your Playstation upside down? My drive mechanism went wonky after a few years, but flipping the console on its head gave it another year or two before it quit working entirely!)
When my original PS1 gave up the ghost I decided to replace it was a preinstalled modded PS1 which was great for selling off almost all my PAL games (some kept for sentimentality) and buying much cheaper NTSC copies. Playing them on the old system is so much more enjoyable for me then using emulators on newer systems, it sounds stupid but hearing the disc spin as it loads data when I'm playing just makes playing PS1 games a more fulfilling experience for me. That said, there is one issue with a tiny few ~1999 era games where they added mod detection. One example I have is both the US/C and J-NTSC Final Fantasy VIII which won't boot the game on my modded PS1 (but will on my modded PS2).
As for the mod chip detection, the first Dino Crisis als had it which was a bummer. I could get it to run by using my "Exploder"-cartridge (a Gameshark clone) but at some point they eliminated the parallel port on the PS1 and this effectively killed the market for such cartridges.
Or buy an XStation, it’s worth it. No more lasers, or compatibility problems…and it’s silent without a drive. And the XStation syncs with the Memcard pro as well.
The disc swap trick changed over time depending on console revision, so it is likely that the order of operations you do in the video isn’t correct for your console revision. After the 100x models, Sony got smart and changed the BIOS to check the disc twice, essentially requiring a “double swap” to get the console to boot an out of region or copied disc.
I used to do the swap trick with a glob of blu tak back in the day, though it did misread red book audio in a lot of games, never knew for years that Twister Metal 2's soundtrack played in the wrong order for me :D But today, would it just be easier to use a PS2 and a Free McBoot memory card to play import PS1 games?
@@therealsnowwhite1937 after market replacement optical drives can be purchased, besides which, there were approximately 400 million machines made that can play PS1 games, I think that's enough disc drives to last all us retro enthusiasts till we're all dead tbh
@@therealsnowwhite1937 yes, you can find them on Ebay easy enough, they're cheaper on Ali express, but I always had a hard time finding them on there, even though the guys I've seen use them had no problems themselves.
I had a cheat cartridge back in the day that didn't require an original game to boot. Cant for the life of me remember what it was called but it had loads of options and a file browser and machine code monitor, it was bright red with 2 buttons on the top. It ran cdrs and imports wonderfully. Discovered that the gta `expansion` gta London didnt actually need the original gta disk if you just used the file manager to bypass the loader and run the program directly.
I remember back in the day when my younger brothers somehow acquired a mod chip and accosted me one evening coming back from pub after a "Sky Super Sunday" footy booze up and demanded I install the chip despite being three sheets to the wind. despite my warnings they insisted and luckily I just about managed soldering it in without messing it up. also bonus getting them off my case for few weeks lol
Hadn't seen FreePSXBoot before, I think I'll be giving that a try for some US imports I've been gifted - nice one! Currently doing the cheat card disc swap. Both of my original PlayStations have the same trouble as yours, optical drive hardware getting flakey. I think there are some laser gain pot fixes you can do, but they're fiddly, require specialised equipment, and only prolong the life of the drive for a while. I don't hear great things about the aftermarket parts either. I've also considered an XStation ODE, though I'm not sure how fiddly it is - smoother than the old PSIO anyway. Me ol Megadrive is much older, and still runs "homebrew" from any region without a hitch. The speccies are even older and run like they did the day Sinclair and Sugar cut corners on production costs...
Just use Tonyhax. No chips or mods required. EDIT: Unirom is basically the same thing so cheers to that! It will work if you have a PSOne that you can’t plug a Gold Finger or Game Shark into though. It’s the same exploit using a modded Tony Hawk save and a copy of the game to crash the system, much like the Wind Waker overflow save file for GameCube to boot Swiss.
Great video - wasn't aware of this new "uniboot"! The drive might not like all CD-R media. Almost every system I have is picky about what media they will work with. You generally cannot go wrong with Taiyo Yuden discs.
I use the tonyhax soft mod method that came out a couple of years ago. You have to get a specific save for Tony Hawks 2 on your memory card (available online), then boot up Tony Hawks 2 and load the save in the create a skater option. It then boots into tonyhax and you can play import and/or CD-Rs. The best part is that it works on the PSOne model, which for me has a much more reliable disc drive. It can also be done with other games too. The main difficulty with this method is getting the save game file onto your memory card in the first place. It can be done via a PS2 using free mcboot, or the way I did it was using the PS3 memory card adapter with a USB cable that lets you link your memory card to a PC. I then used the PS Memory Card manager programme to get the save file on there. Has worked a treat since!
Main problem now is not how to boot a burned cd but how to find a drive that still can boot ANY cd:( I have several ps1 and about FIVE drives and none of them can flawlessly play a game. So the drive emulators is the only option now to play AND ENJOY a ps1 game.
Really? I have 11 PS1's and apart from 1 they all play near perfect, it's usually down to scratches on the disc that are the problem for me, but in my experience PS2's really do play my PS1 games flawlessly, you could also try an after market optical drive, but j have no experience with them so can't really recommend them.
@@RetroGamesBoy78 Yes. I have two PS1 phats and two PS1 slims. All their drives was almost dead at the time I got them (occasionally boots to the game but with huge stutter on video cutscenes). So I bougth a pile of drives from aliexpress - with almost the same results. Maybe it's all my bad luck but all ps2's I have (slims and phats) a running games perfect. Except of one who refuses to boot (guess it) - ps1 CD's:)
I remember using the swap Dragon Ball: Final Bout (Japanese edition because it was the only one available in the USA) and it worked about 30% of the time. It's just luck and timing, but those were the times.
Good timing, I just picked up an original PlayStation as I haven't owned one for decades and wondered what to do with modding... just bought a memory card with unirom on it for a tenner delivered off eBay!
My local game store was so cool, they sold me a Japanese PS1 with the region switcher thing, I don't think I ever actually utilized it as a kid, not knowing what I had.
Hey... first commercial for me. I do like cereal... even just plain corn flakes :) cool video. I remember shock when friend brought PSOne first time to my home.
We did this when I was younger. We'd get copied PS1 games from the local computer repair store. Using a spring over the plastic bit that pressed the button down to say the lid was shut. So it can be opened and shut without stopping the disk spinning. You'd put a legit game in like you did in the video. But we'd wait for a noise that is made after it's passed the check (I guess it was the drive making a mechanical noise when slowing disk or something). Like a low 'burrh'. Then swap in the copied game, and you can close the lid. Boom! £3 games. How else were we going to play chase the express in Japanese, or thps2 in gray-scale because it was an American copy, and didn't play well with our old tube TVs 😆
I still have my American FFVII I had to perfect the swap trick for, played that game flat out as soon as it arrived. I got lucky as our big tv was alright with NTSC.
Thanks interesting with the actions replay attachment. When I was a child I was given a ps1 with one and burnt discs but I couldn't get them to work I didn't know it involved using a genuine disc. Anyhow I will be ditching the laser if possible because even when I'm very purposely careful I still end up with scratches on discs when I use them, the discs scratch so easily I would rather just preserve them and run off an SD card
Also it might be okay with newer chips but I found an old ps1 that didn't work, I found it had a mod chip installed and I removed it and it worked. It could be the chip died being an old cheap piece or that it was incorrectly installed but I think sometimes older installations can damage the console over time. It may be in general there not great for console health, I'm not sure so just saying it's worth looking into before jumping in.
I’ve been using Unirom flashed to an Action Replay device and had patchy results. Some games will work fine, some won’t, some load to a point and then stop responding at specific points (Biohazard after the opening movie for instance). Will just soldering in a chip have more reliable results?
Eh? There is still no way to exchange the Lazer disc reader with a SD card reader yet? That thing gonna burn out and it will be harder to find replacement in near future
I have 1 PSIO equipped PS1 and a few without parallel ports. Can I use PSIO to run UNIROM to install on a memory card that I can use for my other PS1 consoles in case my PSIO console were to succumb to old age?
K, i searched through the entire internet gotta ask here, im using retroarch, and i would like to modify a game called pool hustler. I want to get rid of the miscue script, so i can actually bounce the billiard balls over eachother without losing a turn, how do i go about it?
Yes, it outputs 60 Hz - but not "true" NTSC. IIRC it was usually called "PAL60" but I don't believe this was an official PAL-specification. So you didn't get color via a composite video-cable. The solution for many European TVs was simply using an RGB-SCART video cable. This also worked great on my old Commodore 1081 monitor which also featured a SCART input. That way you got very sharp images at the "intended" 60 Hz of an NTSC game.
Since I prefer to use official copies of games, I would probably only ever do this sort of thing to play imports if I ever got my hands on any. I have a PlayStation, one with that weird parallel port, but not the earliest model. Disc drive still works but it seems a bit finicky, sometimes I have to reboot the console 2-4 times before it starts loading a game correctly.
For a cereal that costs more than $10 a box, it would be nice if they didn’t use bioengineered ingredients. They claim it’s healthier yet still use GMO? 🤔
@@RocketboyX Modern GMOs ain’t grandpappy Reddenbacher’s variety. Studies have shown GMO’s with pest resistance cause cancers in lab rats. Maybe there’s a reason bugs won’t eat them?
To get $5 off your Magic Spoon variety pack and get a head start on New Year’s Resolutions, click this link: magicspoon.thld.co/sharopolis_0123 and use code SHAROPOLIS at checkout!
i think there was a music player trick with swap, when you exit player it loads game. you put genuine game in player, it spins and stops, then you swap cd and exit player. yeah thats it
To anyone modding with the chip for the first time. Be aware that when they changed the orientation of the optical drive, they basically made the ribbon slot in the rf shield a razor blade. You need to tape the slot or you will move the drive and the ribbon will be severed.
Yeah, It was an art figuring out when to swap the disk. If memory servers, You waited too long. Once it starts going X2 speed I thin you are too late.
You can listen to the motor change speed, that’s the easiest way to know it’s passed authentication checks.
Managed to solder a chip on my psone (which I love with my whole heart) on my first try. The feeling was hard to beat when my japanese SOTN booted up at once!
A much easier swap method (may only work on the earlier revisions with the phono AV jacks): turn on the console with no disk, select the CD player, insert genuine disk, hold the switch down and wait for the disk to spin up then stop, swap disk, slam lid shut, exit CD player. The downside of this method is that it caches the disk TOC meaning some games have audio issues if they use CD audio. (And have you tried turning your Playstation upside down? My drive mechanism went wonky after a few years, but flipping the console on its head gave it another year or two before it quit working entirely!)
When my original PS1 gave up the ghost I decided to replace it was a preinstalled modded PS1 which was great for selling off almost all my PAL games (some kept for sentimentality) and buying much cheaper NTSC copies. Playing them on the old system is so much more enjoyable for me then using emulators on newer systems, it sounds stupid but hearing the disc spin as it loads data when I'm playing just makes playing PS1 games a more fulfilling experience for me. That said, there is one issue with a tiny few ~1999 era games where they added mod detection. One example I have is both the US/C and J-NTSC Final Fantasy VIII which won't boot the game on my modded PS1 (but will on my modded PS2).
As for the mod chip detection, the first Dino Crisis als had it which was a bummer.
I could get it to run by using my "Exploder"-cartridge (a Gameshark clone) but at some point they eliminated the parallel port on the PS1 and this effectively killed the market for such cartridges.
Or buy an XStation, it’s worth it. No more lasers, or compatibility problems…and it’s silent without a drive. And the XStation syncs with the Memcard pro as well.
The disc swap trick changed over time depending on console revision, so it is likely that the order of operations you do in the video isn’t correct for your console revision. After the 100x models, Sony got smart and changed the BIOS to check the disc twice, essentially requiring a “double swap” to get the console to boot an out of region or copied disc.
I recently bought a PlayStation 1 just because it was covered in 1990s skateboard stickers. Besides looking amazing it also had a mod chip inside 😊
I bought a PS1 a couple of years ago and didn't know it was modded until I tried an NTSC-J game. Also had stickers on it.
I used to do the swap trick with a glob of blu tak back in the day, though it did misread red book audio in a lot of games, never knew for years that Twister Metal 2's soundtrack played in the wrong order for me :D
But today, would it just be easier to use a PS2 and a Free McBoot memory card to play import PS1 games?
And a mass storage device to load ISO backups to as optical drives are fragile anyway.
@@therealsnowwhite1937 after market replacement optical drives can be purchased, besides which, there were approximately 400 million machines made that can play PS1 games, I think that's enough disc drives to last all us retro enthusiasts till we're all dead tbh
@@RetroGamesBoy78 Aftermarket as in made by a different manufacturer?
@@therealsnowwhite1937 yes, you can find them on Ebay easy enough, they're cheaper on Ali express, but I always had a hard time finding them on there, even though the guys I've seen use them had no problems themselves.
Larry Bundy Jr
does Mcboot play the games as they were intended (60hz) or in PAL
I had a cheat cartridge back in the day that didn't require an original game to boot. Cant for the life of me remember what it was called but it had loads of options and a file browser and machine code monitor, it was bright red with 2 buttons on the top. It ran cdrs and imports wonderfully.
Discovered that the gta `expansion` gta London didnt actually need the original gta disk if you just used the file manager to bypass the loader and run the program directly.
You did the swap trick wrong, you need to pull the disc after the first time it speeds up and slows down, and you need to do it fast.
I remember back in the day when my younger brothers somehow acquired a mod chip and accosted me one evening coming back from pub after a "Sky Super Sunday" footy booze up and demanded I install the chip despite being three sheets to the wind. despite my warnings they insisted and luckily I just about managed soldering it in without messing it up. also bonus getting them off my case for few weeks lol
Oh man you come with this video just at the right moment ! I got a ps1 recently and I'm looking at a way to play other stuff than original games.
Hadn't seen FreePSXBoot before, I think I'll be giving that a try for some US imports I've been gifted - nice one! Currently doing the cheat card disc swap.
Both of my original PlayStations have the same trouble as yours, optical drive hardware getting flakey. I think there are some laser gain pot fixes you can do, but they're fiddly, require specialised equipment, and only prolong the life of the drive for a while. I don't hear great things about the aftermarket parts either.
I've also considered an XStation ODE, though I'm not sure how fiddly it is - smoother than the old PSIO anyway.
Me ol Megadrive is much older, and still runs "homebrew" from any region without a hitch. The speccies are even older and run like they did the day Sinclair and Sugar cut corners on production costs...
Just use Tonyhax. No chips or mods required. EDIT: Unirom is basically the same thing so cheers to that! It will work if you have a PSOne that you can’t plug a Gold Finger or Game Shark into though. It’s the same exploit using a modded Tony Hawk save and a copy of the game to crash the system, much like the Wind Waker overflow save file for GameCube to boot Swiss.
I just got an Xstation. It works fantastically, it works magically with my new memcard pro. Its just perfect.
Great video - wasn't aware of this new "uniboot"! The drive might not like all CD-R media. Almost every system I have is picky about what media they will work with. You generally cannot go wrong with Taiyo Yuden discs.
I use the tonyhax soft mod method that came out a couple of years ago. You have to get a specific save for Tony Hawks 2 on your memory card (available online), then boot up Tony Hawks 2 and load the save in the create a skater option. It then boots into tonyhax and you can play import and/or CD-Rs. The best part is that it works on the PSOne model, which for me has a much more reliable disc drive.
It can also be done with other games too.
The main difficulty with this method is getting the save game file onto your memory card in the first place. It can be done via a PS2 using free mcboot, or the way I did it was using the PS3 memory card adapter with a USB cable that lets you link your memory card to a PC. I then used the PS Memory Card manager programme to get the save file on there.
Has worked a treat since!
Main problem now is not how to boot a burned cd but how to find a drive that still can boot ANY cd:( I have several ps1 and about FIVE drives and none of them can flawlessly play a game.
So the drive emulators is the only option now to play AND ENJOY a ps1 game.
Really? I have 11 PS1's and apart from 1 they all play near perfect, it's usually down to scratches on the disc that are the problem for me, but in my experience PS2's really do play my PS1 games flawlessly, you could also try an after market optical drive, but j have no experience with them so can't really recommend them.
@@RetroGamesBoy78 Yes. I have two PS1 phats and two PS1 slims. All their drives was almost dead at the time I got them (occasionally boots to the game but with huge stutter on video cutscenes). So I bougth a pile of drives from aliexpress - with almost the same results.
Maybe it's all my bad luck but all ps2's I have (slims and phats) a running games perfect. Except of one who refuses to boot (guess it) - ps1 CD's:)
I remember using the swap Dragon Ball: Final Bout (Japanese edition because it was the only one available in the USA) and it worked about 30% of the time. It's just luck and timing, but those were the times.
Macho Nacho made showcased some options too.
You switch the disc when it slows down, switch it back when it speeds up then finally switch the import/copied game back again when it slows down
I have'nt plugged in my PSX in the bedroom for about 20 years. LOL. I play my old games on the PS2 in the lounge. :)
I used my modded PS1 a bit longer for some games but now with modern emulation there is almost no point using the real hardware.
@@PainterVierax I totaly agree, but with using the PS2, I can still use my old game saves too.
@@frankowalker4662 there are ways to read and dump your memory cards though. This has been extensively retro-engineered.
Good timing, I just picked up an original PlayStation as I haven't owned one for decades and wondered what to do with modding... just bought a memory card with unirom on it for a tenner delivered off eBay!
And it works great!
6:24 Amazing feature, never come across this before.
My local game store was so cool, they sold me a Japanese PS1 with the region switcher thing, I don't think I ever actually utilized it as a kid, not knowing what I had.
Those bring back memories have a modern PS1 and a game enhancer in my PS ones parallel port
*Action Replay or Game Shark with FREE spring for ya lid* 💡
Hey... first commercial for me. I do like cereal... even just plain corn flakes :) cool video. I remember shock when friend brought PSOne first time to my home.
We did this when I was younger.
We'd get copied PS1 games from the local computer repair store. Using a spring over the plastic bit that pressed the button down to say the lid was shut. So it can be opened and shut without stopping the disk spinning.
You'd put a legit game in like you did in the video. But we'd wait for a noise that is made after it's passed the check (I guess it was the drive making a mechanical noise when slowing disk or something). Like a low 'burrh'. Then swap in the copied game, and you can close the lid. Boom! £3 games.
How else were we going to play chase the express in Japanese, or thps2 in gray-scale because it was an American copy, and didn't play well with our old tube TVs 😆
UniROM allowing the PS1 to run NES games? Great, now you turned it to a PolyStation. 😂
I still have my American FFVII I had to perfect the swap trick for, played that game flat out as soon as it arrived. I got lucky as our big tv was alright with NTSC.
*was it in black & white or color though?*
@@afriend9428 colour
@@dangerotterisrea *Fantastic*
Underrated Channel 👍👍
There is also the "XSTATION" optical drive emulator that eliminates the cd drive all together.
U dang right
Thanks interesting with the actions replay attachment. When I was a child I was given a ps1 with one and burnt discs but I couldn't get them to work I didn't know it involved using a genuine disc. Anyhow I will be ditching the laser if possible because even when I'm very purposely careful I still end up with scratches on discs when I use them, the discs scratch so easily I would rather just preserve them and run off an SD card
Also it might be okay with newer chips but I found an old ps1 that didn't work, I found it had a mod chip installed and I removed it and it worked. It could be the chip died being an old cheap piece or that it was incorrectly installed but I think sometimes older installations can damage the console over time. It may be in general there not great for console health, I'm not sure so just saying it's worth looking into before jumping in.
I’ve been using Unirom flashed to an Action Replay device and had patchy results. Some games will work fine, some won’t, some load to a point and then stop responding at specific points (Biohazard after the opening movie for instance).
Will just soldering in a chip have more reliable results?
I think you should've swapped the disc when the disc slowed down.
Eh? There is still no way to exchange the Lazer disc reader with a SD card reader yet? That thing gonna burn out and it will be harder to find replacement in near future
Do your Japanese games run at 50hz on it or does give you 60hz?
I usually just play PS1 on my Retro Handhelds and other Obscure Handheld Gaming Devices. 😁
with modern emulators using GPGPU capabilities, you'll get a way better emulation on PC than handheld or any ARM powered device.
The original hardware is the best? Idk man, some games really like an upscale.
I have 1 PSIO equipped PS1 and a few without parallel ports. Can I use PSIO to run UNIROM to install on a memory card that I can use for my other PS1 consoles in case my PSIO console were to succumb to old age?
K, i searched through the entire internet gotta ask here, im using retroarch, and i would like to modify a game called pool hustler. I want to get rid of the miscue script, so i can actually bounce the billiard balls over eachother without losing a turn, how do i go about it?
Sry about the PS1 drive
Sorry if I missed it, but if you boot a NTSC game on a PAL machine, does it automatically output 60hz?
Indeed it does!
Yes, it outputs 60 Hz - but not "true" NTSC.
IIRC it was usually called "PAL60" but I don't believe this was an official PAL-specification. So you didn't get color via a composite video-cable.
The solution for many European TVs was simply using an RGB-SCART video cable. This also worked great on my old Commodore 1081 monitor which also featured a SCART input.
That way you got very sharp images at the "intended" 60 Hz of an NTSC game.
You're doing the swap trick weong. You also have tonturn itnon its side.
1996 called and asked for its video back. my mate is selling copied games after PE
Your doing it wrong
Since I prefer to use official copies of games, I would probably only ever do this sort of thing to play imports if I ever got my hands on any. I have a PlayStation, one with that weird parallel port, but not the earliest model. Disc drive still works but it seems a bit finicky, sometimes I have to reboot the console 2-4 times before it starts loading a game correctly.
PSNee 😉
For a cereal that costs more than $10 a box, it would be nice if they didn’t use bioengineered ingredients. They claim it’s healthier yet still use GMO? 🤔
Great point. Let’s hope that they at least paid Sharopolis a fair sum in exchange for their sponsored message.
GMO crops have literally saved lives and has reduced diet induced blindness by millions, but let spread FUD.
@@RocketboyX Modern GMOs ain’t grandpappy Reddenbacher’s variety. Studies have shown GMO’s with pest resistance cause cancers in lab rats. Maybe there’s a reason bugs won’t eat them?
First
It's FreePSXBoot, of course.
Best mod.. Trash bin mod.. Every one can do it easy
First