Alien Resurrection can be turned into a "boot disk" for playing burned PS1 games
  • TedZanzibar@feddit.ukEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    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.

  • Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    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.

    • Telorand@reddthat.comEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      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.

  • Hubi@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    Huh, I have this game and a unmodded PS1 lying around. I be sure to try this after the holidays.

    • 9point6@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      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

      • Hubi@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        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.

        • Norgur@kbin.social
          1·
          11 months ago

          Because scalpers expected this to be in demand after the news broke and set their bots to buy every cheap copy by unknowing private sellers in order to create a oligopoly and heavily gauge pricing

          • JanoRis@kbin.social
            0·
            11 months ago

            But isn’t the whole point to play a burned copy of the game?
            This seems like scalping concert tickets to a concert that allows you to copy tickets in the printer.

            • PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              11 months ago

              No, the legit copy of the game allows you to play pirated copies of other games. It bypasses the piracy check in the console and allows you to swap discs to a pirated copy of whatever other game you want.