New PS1 Fakes from China?

[xelement5x | 65]

I've gotten a number of China/Aliexpress repros where they blur out the copyrighted name on the listing, then the actual product has the correct text on it anyway.  Pretty sure it's just to avoid getting dinged by the platform.  

I'd personally say while new discs are one thing that would be interesting to have created, perfect replica paper would be the grail for bootleggers.  The sheer number of loose disc items that could be sold with an undistinguishable set of materials is probably quite high, thankfully no one has gotten that good yet.

[GPX | 1,369]

It really irks the crap out of me when I see a repro game listed as “brand new”. 
My general tip is to seriously question authenticity if the game/box is mint but missing the manual. And if it comes in CIB form, then look at the manual because that’s what I feel is the hardest to do a reproduction on.

[Hammerfestus | 3,846]

6 hours ago, xelement5x said:

I've gotten a number of China/Aliexpress repros where they blur out the copyrighted name on the listing, then the actual product has the correct text on it anyway.  Pretty sure it's just to avoid getting dinged by the platform.  

I'd personally say while new discs are one thing that would be interesting to have created, perfect replica paper would be the grail for bootleggers.  The sheer number of loose disc items that could be sold with an undistinguishable set of materials is probably quite high, thankfully no one has gotten that good yet.

I was thinking that pic looks like they used the blackout tool on the pic to cover up the “lay”

[Hammerfestus | 3,846]

4 hours ago, GPX said:

It really irks the crap out of me when I see a repro game listed as “brand new”. 
My general tip is to seriously question authenticity if the game/box is mint but missing the manual. And if it comes in CIB form, then look at the manual because that’s what I feel is the hardest to do a reproduction on.

What generation of platforms are you referring to?  My experience is mostly NES related and for me the box flaps are always the dead giveaway.  Are repro discs themselves convincing?

[GPX | 1,369]

12 hours ago, Hammerfestus said:

What generation of platforms are you referring to?  My experience is mostly NES related and for me the box flaps are always the dead giveaway.  Are repro discs themselves convincing?

I’m talking generally from all The CIBs I’ve collected from carts to discs. Particularly when looking at just the pics from the seller listing.

[avatar! | 1,811]

On 3/15/2024 at 11:16 PM, Hammerfestus said:

Are repro discs themselves convincing?

When I looked at the auction, the disc looked minty and authentic. I don't know if there's a clear way to tell if it's not an authentic PS1 disc without actually holding it in your hands, and even then I suppose it would depend on the quality of the repro.

[Hammerfestus | 3,846]

9 hours ago, avatar! said:

When I looked at the auction, the disc looked minty and authentic. I don't know if there's a clear way to tell if it's not an authentic PS1 disc without actually holding it in your hands, and even then I suppose it would depend on the quality of the repro.

I’m just thinking that Ive never encountered anything that basically wasn’t just a burned cd.  It was always my understanding that one of the barriers to producing fake copies was the black bottoms.  So I was just curious if there had been advancements of which I was unaware.

[RH | 4,903]

5 minutes ago, Hammerfestus said:

I’m just thinking that Ive never encountered anything that basically wasn’t just a burned cd.  It was always my understanding that one of the barriers to producing fake copies was the black bottoms.  So I was just curious if there had been advancements of which I was unaware.

That was always a mis-assumption that the black discs were part of the security protection.  That's actually not true. It might have been early on to try to prevent people from making PS1 ROMs (but keep in mind, that was 1996, so SONY knew they had time before people had HD and server space to hold several games due to their size) but I've never had a CD-ROM drive that wouldn't allow you to read and browse a PS1 disc, so that definitely didn't prevent any laser for CD-reading from reading the discs.

IMHO, SONY thought it just looked cool.  Even later on, several late-release titles were silver and worked just fine.  I know you could buy a few Square Enix titles, like Final Fantasy IX, off of their web site up to 2015.  Those discs were standard silver discs.

I think the only real copy-protection on the discs is the region data in a sector that standard drives can burn too.  I'd like to read a rather in-depth on the layout of it.  I doubt we'll ever see PS1 discs be remanufactured.  Making the discs would be the easy part but having a proper bootleg burner would be expensive to engineer and produce, probably even by China-standards.

But who knows.  Maybe it will happen one day.  They only way bootlegs might appear is if someone found one of those old SONY professional burners and then found a way to make or acquire discs.  But really, that doesn't sound feasible.  SONY might have kept one of those devices for "who knows?" reasons, but I'd be sure they probably ordered every disc making and burning device to be destroyed when they reached EOL.

[TDIRunner | 2,740]

The "copy protection" is the wobble itself.  Even professionally made CDs are not perfect, and the laser reading the CD is designed to move around or "wobble" (left, right, up & down) while it reads the data on the disc.  Official PS1 discs had their data pressed in a way to specifically make the laser wobble in a pattern that the PS1 would recognize.  In nearly all cases, this only occurred during the startup.  Once you are into the game, this check usually no longer occurs, which is why the "disc swap method" works with most burned games.  

When people burn their own games, their CD burner attempts to make the CD as perfect as possible, and therefore attempts to burn the disc with as little wobble as possible.  Of course, since the CD burner isn't perfect, there will still be wobble, but it won't be the same wobble that the PS1 is looking for, and the PS1 will know it's a fake.  

As mentioned, the black disc had nothing to do with the copy protection, other than the fact that most people didn't have access to that type of disc.  However, there were officially licensed games released without the black disc, meaning you can't always use the black color as a way to identify real games.  

I'm tempted to buy one of the repros, just to hold it in my hands and see just how good or bad they are.

Edited March 18 by TDIRunner

[Hammerfestus | 3,846]

Ahh yeah I actually meant about the black disc from a visual perspective.  I know there’s actual nerd based protections on there against copying but for us dopes out here I think the big takeaway is, “why your Persona no have black bottom? Me love black bottoms” The vast majority of titles are going to have that hurdle.   Could always see a wave of fake Blitz 2001s though.

[RH | 4,903]

4 hours ago, TDIRunner said:

The "copy protection" is the wobble itself.  Even professionally made CDs are not perfect, and the laser reading the CD is designed to move around or "wobble" (left, right, up & down) while it reads the data on the disc.  Official PS1 discs had their data pressed in a way to specifically make the laser wobble in a pattern that the PS1 would recognize.  In nearly all cases, this only occurred during the startup.  Once you are into the game, this check usually no longer occurs, which is why the "disc swap method" works with most burned games.  

When people burn their own games, their CD burner attempts to make the CD as perfect as possible, and therefore attempts to burn the disc with as little wobble as possible.  Of course, since the CD burner isn't perfect, there will still be wobble, but it won't be the same wobble that the PS1 is looking for, and the PS1 will know it's a fake.  

As mentioned, the black disc had nothing to do with the copy protection, other than the fact that most people didn't have access to that type of disc.  However, there were officially licensed games released without the black disc, meaning you can't always use the black color as a way to identify real games.  

I'm tempted to buy one of the repros, just to hold it in my hands and see just how good or bad they are.

I thought the wobble was a Saturn thing, and not a PS1 thing?

[TDIRunner | 2,740]

8 minutes ago, RH said:

I thought the wobble was a Saturn thing, and not a PS1 thing?

I believe they use similar methods, although I'm not as familiar with the Saturn's copy protection.  

[TDIRunner | 2,740]

@RH

This is an excellent channel with a lot of great content and he explains the copy protection much better than I can.  

 

On a side note, if you have any interest in lacerdisc, he has several videos about the subject which are absolutely worth watching.  

 

[RH | 4,903]

23 minutes ago, TDIRunner said:

@RH

This is an excellent channel with a lot of great content and he explains the copy protection much better than I can.  

 

On a side note, if you have any interest in lacerdisc, he has several videos about the subject which are absolutely worth watching.  

 

Oh, I'm actually subbed to his channel and I found it a few years ago.  I never saw this post in his back catalog though.

I've seen all of his LaserDisc videos.  He's pretty thorough on this tech research and, IMHO, his video explaining how a CRT works is one of the best on the internet.

[avatar! | 1,811]

More fakes

If you take a look, it looks like the P-station is absolutely spelled out "Playstation" much in the same ways as the original. The bootleggers clearly just photoshopped a few characters in the first pic. I would imagine that these fakes are probably clearly fakes in the hands of someone who knows what they are looking for, but again this is going to dilute the market and make it hard for everyone

[RegularGuyGamer | 2,013]

I'm tempted to buy some from ali for science. 

[RH | 4,903]

25 minutes ago, RegularGuyGamer said:

I'm tempted to buy some from ali for science. 

If they are cheap, please do.  I’d be interested in knowing if they work.

[spacepup | 2,404]

Fortunately there are some obvious tells esp with the manual, but it's definitely unfortunate.  I hate seeing stuff like this infiltrate the market and inevitably get mixed up with games to where someone gets duped.

[fcgamer | 4,723]

At some point I start to think that aside from collectability, this type of stuff would be the way to go if you just want to game and get a nostalgia kick.