After 27 years you can now softmod a Sony PlayStation 1 | MVG

[Music] the original sony playstation has had a lot of attention in recent times thanks to devices like the x station and the psio and not to mention the very excellent ps1 digital which is an hdmi modification that we've looked at on the channel that delivers a crisp hdmi signal tapped directly from the video chip but these modifications are enthusiast level upgrades that require opening up the system and installing complex pieces of electronics most of them aren't for the beginner and would require someone who's experienced with soldering these modifications also don't run cheap even a simple standard mod chip for a playstation 1 as popular as they were back in the day require some experience with soldering and you still need to purchase a mod chip but what if you just wanted to play playstation 1 discs without a mod chip maybe you own a big cd folder of backup games and you wanted to play them on a playstation 1. in the past this would not be possible unless you had a mod chip installed but thanks to a save game exploit recently found with tony hawk pro skater 2 and 3 this is now possible known as tony hacks this makes running backup games a reality and we'll explain more about the exploit shortly but first why is this a big deal modded ps1s are everywhere and playing backups without a mod chip has already been possible for years thanks to swap tricks and even some things like the game shark that plugs into the parallel port that's been flushed with a custom rom there's even the playstation classic that can easily be modded to play the entire ps1 catalog and improve upon the original emulation or simply because some people don't want to use emulation and are not comfortable with opening up their hardware things like swap tricks can obviously cause unnecessary wear and tear on the hardware and they don't always work there's also issues with cd audio and multi-disc game swapping and something like the game shark will work but if you own a playstation 1 slim that doesn't have a parallel port then you're out of luck tony hacks works on all model playstation ones and it works by utilizing a buffer overflow exploit in tony hawk's pro skater 2 and 3 for both pal and ntsc regions to load a custom backup loader unlock a few cd drive commands and ultimately run backups on an unmodded ps1 so rather than me just talking about it let's take a closer look and see how this exploit actually works now i've got a backup copy here of final fantasy tactics for the ps1 and i'm just gonna put it into my playstation one or my ps1 here just to show you that the um the system is not modified in any way whatsoever so if we go ahead and then reset this ps1 it should tell me to insert a playstation one this this is a completely unmodified ps1 that um we're looking at here and after probably just a couple of seconds here it should tell me that this disk is not readable please insert a playstation format disk now on this particular memory card i have saved games for both tony hawk 2 and tony hawk 3. so let's go ahead and insert our tony hawk 3 original disc for the ps1 so now we're resetting our ps1 and it should boot directly into tony hawk 3 and i'm just going to skip over the intros and the menus and all that stuff and just get into it here the exploitable save games are on the memory card attached to the ps1 here and we've got save games for both tony hawk 2 and tony hawk 3. so let's go ahead and jump in so what we want to do here is we basically load the game here and then we want to select create a skater and watch what happens here when i pick create skater now as you can see here after a second or so we're in tony hacks and basically what we do now is get our backup copy of final fantasy tactics that we tried to run previously and we will swap it into our ps1 as you can see it's basically letting us put a disk in here and it's initializing cd and after a short while it will boot into our backup copy of the game and it should only take about 10 or 15 seconds or so but it does depend on the cd that you've you've made a backup of of course some work better than others but as you can see it's boot into our introduction here and we should be into final fantasy tactics running on a completely unmodified original sony ps1 that has not been tampered with has not been opened with in any shape or form and this is how tony hacks works it's a very simple very elegant but a really awesome way to play playstation 1 backup games on your original ps1 it took 27 years but the playstation now has a soft mod exploit utilizing a save game tony hacks was developed by marcos del solvez it's completely open source and all documentation has been provided for the entire process but in summary this is very similar to how splinter cell softmod works on the original xbox or say the twilight hack works on the nintendo wii according to marcos in layman's terms this exploit uses an oversight from the programmers the game does not check that text in the save file hasn't been tampered and fits in the space the program allocated for it if we externally change that text to something longer we can overwrite other vital parts of the system's memory and run our own code simple enough but there is an outstanding question regarding this hack even with a buffer overflow to boot into a piece of homebrew code how does this allow us to run a backup cd on the playstation 1. for those not familiar playstation 1 copy protection has been discussed on the channel before but in summary each original playstation 1 disc is burnt with what's known as a wobble groove where the wobble would be detected in original discs however burnt cds are not capable of replicating the wobble so to work around this mod chips were created that would send fake data to the cd microcontroller and cause the ps1 to believe that a backup disk was legitimate and a swap trick would simply read the wobble data from the original disk and once authenticated would boot into the backup if you are fast enough to swap disks at the right time for tony hacks the exploit leverages secret cd commands found in the playstation that were discovered in 2013 by sending a string of commands to the cd controller it will unlock the drive and effectively disable the wobble groove protection and with the drive unlocked it's possible to effectively boot from a backup cdr what's even easier is that opening and closing the tray won't disable or reset the unlock state that the drive is in which makes it possible as we saw with tony hacks to simply swap in a cdr backup once the drive has been unlocked and closed the tray these unlock commands were documented by martin kawth who you may know from the no cache emulator line and interestingly enough are supported on every single playstation cd-rom bios from almost the very earliest model all the way to the late model ps1s incidentally i also tested tony hacks on a neter rose and it worked just fine there as well now for those concerned that this might drive up the price of tony hawk pro skater 2 and 3 for the playstation 1 there's really nothing to be concerned about not only were there millions of copies of these games made marcos has already implemented tony hacks for more games with many more on the way his website outlines the list of all ps1 titles that can be exploited to use tony hacks you simply just need to get the relevant exploited save game and the tony hacks loader on a ps1 memory card and boot from that game now getting a custom save game on a memory card can be done a few different ways the first method is to utilize the playstation 2 with free mc boot and the save game on a usb stick you can then simply use the file manager to copy the files to your ps1 memory card then there's also the new memory card pro which uses a micro sd card to store large amounts of save data on a single card these are currently available for pre-order but would be the perfect solution to utilize tony hacks without the need for a ps2 of course it's also possible just to buy pre-installed ps1 memory cards with save game exploits and that's what i expect to see on ebay but once you have the appropriate save game on your ps1 memory card you're all set to go i should also mention that save game exploit discoveries are not new for the sony ps1 back in 2018 there were some documented vulnerabilities discovered for original ps1 games but these would never develop further into a working exploit most likely because of no motivation ps1 mod chips are common as are optical drive emulators these days but still tony hacks is a very easily accessible entry point for all playstation consoles to run backups without opening the system and performing a mod chip and it does make you wonder how much of a game changer this would have been back in 1995 and what impact it would have had on the mod chip business back then but either way it's fascinating to witness the original playstation get exploited in this fashion so there you go guys that is tony hacks for the sony playstation 1 a really cool and interesting exploit for the original playstation i will leave links to all the different sources that i had quoted in this video in the description below so check those out if you're interested in performing the soft mod yourself it's very easy to do but we are going to leave it here for this episode guys thank you so much for watching if you liked it don't forget to leave me a thumbs up and i'll catch you guys in the next video bye for now so [Music] you

Channel: Modern Vintage Gamer

Views: 868,692

Keywords: ps1, playstation, psone, exploit, tonyhax, softmod, sony, playstation 1, mvg, modern vintage gamer, tony hawk, thps2, thps3, tony hawk pro skater 2, retro gaming, video games, game console, save game

Id: 8b5UX5xd-lE

Length: 10min 51sec (651 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 22 2021