| That's kind of my point... You are looking at it from the perspective of a western 90s kid who quickly adopted emulators (I am too). Of course it seems obvious to you that Sony should have encrypted the discs or something. Of course it seems obvious that emulation was inevitable. But to understand Sony's development decisions, you really have to think in the mindset of an adult hardware engineer, in Japan, around 1992/1993. And like I said, emulators did not exist. At all. The primary method of piracy was actually the game backup device [0]. We didn't really see them in the west, I'm not surprised you missed them, but they were rampant in Asia. They were floppy drives that plugged into your carriage based console, SNES MegaDrive etc. They could dump any cartridge game to a floppy disk (or two in the case of the largest 2MB games). And then load the dump back into a pool of battery-backed RAM, which the console would see as a cartridge. Owners of such devices could share the floppies, or copy the files off and share them across the internet. These devices are why most cartridge game from the 8bit era, 16bit era and N64 (yes, there were N64 backup devices too) was already floating around the internet long before we had viable emulators. And it's also what Sony Engineers would have been thinking about when they were designing their copy protection system. They didn't really see the need to prevent ripping (besides required cryptography hardware was expensive and actually considered to be controlled military technology, subject to strict export controls until 1996). And Sony didn't see the need to prevent rips; All piracy devices at this point required the game to be played back on an actual offical console (ignoring Chinese NES clones), so all they needed to do was could close the circle by making the PS1 refuse to play any copied disc. No point ripping if they couldn't be played. Of course, in retrospect this was a complete failure. Turns out mod chips for the PS1 were stupidly simple, cd burners rapidly dropped in price, and emulators quickly became viable. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_backup_device |