[christoph]

In case it helps, there is actually a very low tech solution to booting copied games on Saturn hardware that works with the vast majority of games released (especially expensive/rare/hard to find games like the Treasure releases).

Tape/wedge the drive lid sensor down, power up with a real game in (you don't need to close the lid as the sensor believes the lid is always shut) and allow it do the initial copy protection check on your real disc.

At this point it stops the disc for just less than second - just enough time to pull the real disc out and swap in a CD-R. It takes a little practice and potentially can damage the drive motor if your timing is frequently poor.

Games this won't work with are those spanning multiple discs where you need to swap discs in game to progress.

[serge2k]

I practiced this trick with my original playstation years ago.

Then I killed it trying to mod it. Got a PS1 instead, couldn't figure out the trick anymore.

It was funny that they kept on changing the points where the disc would read info, you had to swap multiple times at different points. They wouldn't stop either, just slow down.

[elwell]

> Then I killed it trying to mod it.

Ugh, don't remind me. My brother fried our n64 and our ps2 trying to mod them into handheld's (with built-in screen).

[pavel_lishin]

I remember owning a "slim" ps2, but I'm still kind of boggled at the idea of compacting everything inside it into a "handheld" size.

[jandrese]

Modding the PS2 is still one of the hardest soldering jobs I've ever done. The worst part is that the modchips were apparently pretty crude in how they worked and ended up burning out the laser diode after about 6 months even if you only used it for imported games and not burned games.

[nathancahill]

Hah, yeah, I used to do that too with the PS1 until I modded it with a chip. It was flaky though, worked 50% of the time.

[MichaelApproved]

Why not just cut the wobble edge of a real CD off and attach it to a burned CD?

Maybe you can shave the back of the shimmed wobble edge down, so that it won't stick out as much on the burned CD. This shimmed wobble can be your key for all the burned CDs you have.

Maybe double sided tape can keep the wobble shim attached to your burned CD while still allowing it to be removable for other CDs.

I've never had a Saturn, so I don't know what this wobble edge looks like in person. Am I missing something?

[justabystander]

You're not getting very technical responses to this, so I'll bite.

> Why not just cut the wobble edge of a real CD off and attach it to a burned CD?

This would have a very low success rate, as the precision required to accurately cut off the wobbled edge on an original disc (and the target area on a CD-R) would a lot of upfront engineering as well as cost-prohibitive tools. Optical discs require more precise measurements than most people who favor the scrapbooking "cut-n-glue" solution can provide.

This is just as long as we're pretending it's possible. Opitcal discs lose a lot of structural integrity the moment you start breaking/cutting them. The reflective portion where the data resides is on a thin film substrate at the back of the CD. Cutting that without outright destroying the disc or (at least reducing the operating life) would take significant effort, as would precisely healing the new gap from combining two separate materials without destroying the alignment of all those microscopic ones and zeroes.

Not to mention that any adhesives you might apply to combine the two pieces would make that level of accuracy impossible, if not highly improbable. And then you have to hope the whole thing holds up while spinning. Even assuming you could get the two pieces to combine seamlessly, there's always the chance that you've done something that destroys the balance of the disc, which could have a number of unfortunate effects in spinning media. I don't think the Saturn drive spins fast enough for it to sling off and demolish your hardware, but it could cause data inaccuracies at the very least.

I mean a company could attempt to do it for you, but it'd be cheaper and more reliable to engineer Saturn-compatible CD-Rs (or offer a disc-pressing service) at that rate. Considering the only use is to defeat old copy protection, it's not going to have a market large enough to sustain it. So you're going to have high prices, and low enough product sales that it would probably not be worth inviting the legal trouble. Even after all that, CD-Rs can have all sorts of QA issues that can affect their shelf life. And then you still have the problem mentioned in the video where the drive hardware fails.

Replacing it with flash data is just a better long-term solution.

[sitharus]

it's not a physical wobble, it's a data track written in a wave-like path. You can't write it as all CD-Rs already have the spiral track so it's very hard to fake.

It's similar to the Gamecube using the burst-cutting area to implement DRM - it's impossible to duplicate without a production setup.

[djsumdog]

I don't think you can't cut a CD like that. The moment you try to cut it with anything, it will probably crack (both for real silicon and CD-Rs).

[JoshTriplett]

> I've never had a Saturn, so I don't know what this wobble edge looks like in person. Am I missing something?

The video shows it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOyfZex7B3E#t=2m13s

[abrasive]

The video's graphic is a bit of an approximation. In practice it appears that every second disc sector is displaced, IIRC. And they've got particular bit patterns written into them to produce a visual logo; these patterns (but not the actual logos) are checked too.

The protection ring is visible to the naked eye for this reason. I can't find a picture, sorry!

[0xcde4c3db]

I tried to figure out how to reproduce the logo at one point (10+ years ago, when people were less worried about dying drives). IIRC, it's that the EFM patterns used to make the pixels don't make valid Red/Yellow Book sector contents, which causes some weird behavior if you try to read them as such.