After 23 years, developer reveals he snuck a cheat code past Sony that turns a cult-classic horror game into a godsend for retro enthusiasts

www.gamesradar.com

Article about a recent revelation by the Youtube Channel Modern Vintage Gaming: The game "Alien Resurrection" by Argonaut contains a code which allows to run burned CD copies of Playstation 1 games.

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To be clear, when a developer submits a finished game for publication, it's supposed to reveal all of its cheat codes, but this particular one was never disclosed for the simple reason that Sony would've undoubtedly kicked it back to development for removal. Apparently, Piper isn't too worried about letting his secret out into the wild more than two decades later.
There's a bunch of debug/dev features hidden in production software that I stay quiet with from companies i worked for. Revealing them would probably make me unemployable. Or worse, slapped with a lawsuit.
So I'm glad this guy was probably retiring or switching careers.
- We have lots of software that "just works" at my job, that do things the "approved" methods can't achieve. Sometimes, you gotta do what you gotta do so you don't wind up wasting a lot of time later.
- Reveal them. I'll give you one Christmas cookie.
- Reveal them anonymously.
Huh, I have this game and a unmodded PS1 lying around. I be sure to try this after the holidays.
- Good luck getting a copy if you don't already have one, scalpers have already raided everywhere.
  Edit: apparently the Christmas drinking has affected my reading comprehension
  Still a warning for anyone else thinking the same
  
  Holy fuck, I had no idea. I just checked the prices online and they are absolutely insane. Why is it so expensive? I got the game and the console for like 20 Euros about 10 years ago. It's not in great condition though.
  Edit: Oh, it's just so expensive because of this video? That's pretty crazy.
  
  Reminds me of cube ninja at the beginning of the 3DS homebrew.
This reminds me of working for a UK developer back in the PS2 days. From what I remember, one of the coders there wrote a tool that enabled the comparatively cheap QA test kits that would only boot from a CD/DVD to appear to dev PCs as full blown dev kits (that cost 4 or 5 times the price) and boot code pushed to them over the network.
They didn't have as much memory or processing grunt so there was still need for a few proper dev kits, but it saved them a fortune in hardware costs. Pretty sure it was an open secret that Sony reluctantly allowed, and most of the UK dev studios were using it at one point.
Not all heroes wear capes.
Kinda fitting to have resurrection in the game title!
How exactly can a code on a game affect the system itself?
- When Playstation reads a disc, it looks for a special sequence on the disc that tells the Playstation "hey, this is a Playstation game. You should load it."
  That sequence is proprietary and isn't on burned copies of games. This is anti-piracy protection, and makes sense from a monetary standpoint.
  When you put Alien: Resurrection in the console, which has that sequence, the Playstation is told that "hey, this is a real Playstation game. You should load it." The game loads, then you can put in the cheat, which tells the game to stop loading from the disc momentarily while another disc is loaded (think "please insert disc 2 from final fantasy"). At this point, you can pop in your burned copy of the game, then press a button to continue loading from disc, at which point the game tells the system "hey, this new guy is with me. Let him through", and the Playstation loads the new game from the disc.
  
  Importantly and how it's different to FF is that it boots the content without calling the disk reset and if you keep the disk button wedged then that reset never triggers, so that copy protection isn't called, where as FF basically triggers a drive reset which is why you couldn't use that.
- The PS disc copy protection is only checked when the system is booted. You can load one legit disc and swap it live for a burned disc, but it's difficult because the disc is spinning the whole time.
  This cheat code on a legit disc just stops the disc from spinning for a short time, allowing you to much more easily swap to the copy.
  
  Can you install a switch in line with the disc motor so it stops spinning or does that trigger an error?
- i don’t really know, but an educated guess is that it has to do with how old the console is, and how micro optimized/hacky things had to be at the time. for example, morrowind would reboot your xbox during loading screens. there was probably quite a lot more control given to developers in the olden days, whereas now things are more sandboxed. but i would be happy to be corrected on anything i’ve said here.
  
  “There’s been great tricks that [Xbox] taught us,” Howard said. “My favorite one in Morrowind is, if you’re running low on memory, you can reboot the original Xbox and the user can’t tell. You can throw, like, a screen up. When Morrowind loads sometimes, you get a very long load. That’s us rebooting the Xbox. That was like a hail Mary.”
  That's interesting but that's still in that one game. This thing sounds like it allows you to play burned roms forever afterwards, which means it really affects the system itself.
  
  https://youtu.be/uRB7iUCX4KQ?si=4tJcrjmnaSSRfdyf
  This video does a great job explaining how it works.
  It has to do with system calls for stopping the disc that multi disc games would use.
  Edit: I'm a dummy and didn't realize this video was posted in the op.

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