You start it with the burn disc, then at the PlayStation logo you open it and replace it with another disc, then after the loading starts and the second beep you open it and put the burned disc back in.
I have had a lot of years since I did this…instructions are approximate.
haha yeah some ppl had to do this depending on how you had the system modded, soft/hard/what hard chip you used etc.... There were even softmod discs called SWAP MAGIC (I found one the other day that I think was my old roomates). I waited a little bit after launch until a better chip came out and then got it modded and worked perfect every time with no trickery.
Husband and I just bought a goldfinger instead of the swap trick. Less damage to the Playstation and lens/laser as far as I remember.. been a long while
My first ebay purchase was a special special Panasonic SCSI based CDR drive from Japan that could make perfect copies of PS1 games including the special areas used for security. No need to mod chip.
We had an older brother of a guy who installed them. He was 22 or so and his basement "apartment" at his mom's house smelled of weed, sweat and old pizza.
He also had a massive movie catalog of 700MB XviDs that he'd burn to CD-R for you if you had a compatible player (Philips DVP642 for the win).
lol yes he wishes - HOWEVER I will give him a little bit of leeway bc his dad was a legit photographer and had a slew of old trenchcoats he would keep all his photo accessories in, and I believe that was why he originally started wearing them. However, kevin smith definitely egg'd it on!
my first burner was a scsi 2x.... might have been sony?
it used a cd caddy to burn. it worked flawlessly..... until it didnt.
long paid off for itself with mix cd's or ps1 back ups for $5 + blank cd
Ooh, memory unlocked. When I was bored at night in the computer labs at uni (it was actually possible to finish the internet in the late 90's) I would start cleaning mouse rollers. I bet you the IT department never bothered!
The ball itself was never dirty, it was the rollers 100% of the time. "Cleaning the mouse ball" is useless and I can't believe it's still being repeated 30 years later.
I used to snatch up all the AOL floppies, then crack open the corner, insert electrical tape, and voila, free floppies that you could read/write after formatting
I was so freaked out once when they said they called my house to report my ditching. Until they told me that my grandmother was the one that answered the phone. She never remembered to pass on phone messages. of course the one freaking time!!!
So true. I was more worried about the exact OPPOSITE thing. Gotta make sure you put \*70 in before you ISP's dial up number, so when grandma calls she doesn't kick you offline.
We solved that problem by never getting call waiting. My parents thought it was a useless new technology we didn’t need.
My issue was my sister picking up the phone to make a call.
Yep! We had call waiting bc my mom was a social butterfly and we had a big family. We never got caller id though because "I KNOW WHO'S CALLING". We wound up getting a 2nd line in the late 90's that didn't have call waiting and it only went to the computer room. I felt so cool.
Same here on the second line. We lasted all of six months with AOL before my parents said "fuck it" and got the extra phone line because we were hogging it all evening.
My parents didn't want to pay for call waiting or long distance... so instead, they paid for a second line that went straight to my room.
They made sure to get "non user sensitive service" on my modem line so that you didn't have to pay by the minute. It turns out that not having to get charged per minute on your land line was like an extra dollar per month instead of them always fretting about long phone calls. Oh the 90's and frugal parents lol
On a related note, I had a phone connected to that second line via Y-splitter jack. That phone just happened to have a setting to turn off the ringer and made the buttons flash when a call came in. Late night calls in stealth mode!
I had the flu for a couple weeks and all I did the entire time was play StarCraft on Battle.net. I used to join those comp stomp games where someone would *always* backstab by turning off allied victory. It was great drama.
My daughter just got a Nintendo switch last fall, and when we first opened everything up I had to show my wife the little game cartridges that fit it… and of course had to ceremoniously blow on it before putting it in.
I didn't have an optical drive for a while. Had a family member go into hospice around 2012 and they really wanted to watch bonanza and I couldn't find any locally or come up with an easy solution. I went to Walmart and got an/ cheap DVD player and external LG DVD burner for 50 bucks. ALLEGEDLY grabbed bonanza off tpb. They were watching it within an hour and the drive still works when I need to bust it out every now and then!
I'll go ahead and debunk blowing in the game cartridges.
Want to know the science behind it?
You're not blowing dust off the connectors.
You're adding condensation, which increases conductivity.
So, instead of blowing on the cartridge, release a hot breath into it, like you would on a window or mirror before you draw a smiley face with your finger. Works like a charm.
This is wrong also. The problem was that the NES used a Zero Insertion Force connection method because it was supposedly believed it would look less like a video game and more like a VHS player (the story is they they were paranoid following the Atari gaming crash a few years prior.). The problem is that that the ZIF device wasn’t designed all that well and the connectors would quickly wear out causing the ZIF connector to fail to make contact.
I used to fix it by jamming another cartridge on top of the first inserted one (which I started to do because the ZIF part completely broke and wouldn’t keep the cartridge down at all), which worked way better.
This is partially inaccurate. The American NES was indeed plagued by that horrible Zero Insertion design flaw of the first NES as well as the Nintendo of America’s early attempts at copyright protection, but connectivity problems existed even in the better-designed top-loader models, and this was either due to dust or corrosion. This was why Nintendo released cleaning kits.
I used to hang out with Japanese Xennials when I lived in Japan, and we all reminisced about how we had to blown on cartridges to get our games to work. And the Japanese NES was a top-loader design.
Not necessarily debunked. Bad connectivity between the cartridge and slot could’ve been from corrosion, dust, the ZIF design, or any combination of those factors.
Blowing the cartridge would not just remove any dust on them, but also increase the connectivity because of the introduced condensation, as you mentioned. The drawback of doing that was that moisture caused corrosion on the contacts.
The cell phone generation has no clue about the complex power dynamics in a one phone household. It was like a mini surveillance state. Dodging calls, having people relay messages, listening in or being listened in on via another line in the house, using other voices to mask identity, prank calls, key codes, getting an operator to do an emergency break through on a busy line, stretching the wire to the max in order to talk in privacy in another room. When caller ID first came out it felt like a weird cheat and people still answered as if they didn't know who was on the other end of the call. Hello?
Wow, it's amazing how much life has changed since the 90's lol. So much of this stuff you just never think about again, but it's still there to be remembered. Multiple neural circuits that haven't been used in decades are lighting up right now.
The floppy disk trick is somewhat inaccurate, for 3 1/2 disks at least. Most of them had a little black plastic tab that you could move to open/close the hole, to make it read only or writable. Now, I cannot vouch for the specific AOL disk, but if they're like the one in the picture, you can clearly see the closed hole on the right with the black tab. That's the one I'm taking about.
The tape trick was for the big floppy disks, the 5 1/4 ones. You'd put a tape on the hole to make it writable.
Now, for a *real* Xennial money-saving trick: 3 1/2 diskettes came single sided and double sided. Single sided diskettes were obviously cheaper, since they held less data. But the simple trick was to *make* a hole on the upper left corner, opposite to the read/write tab. Bam, double sided disk for the price of a single sided. Bet you would have wanted to know this 35 years ago huh. You're welcome.
The real move was to insert the format command into the autoexec.bat file. The computer would work normally until the next time it booted... at which point it would no longer work.
Don't blow into your cartridges though, it can damage them over time. It actually warns not to do this in the manual for the NES.
If your contacts are dirty, use a swap with isopropyl alcohol or spray with some contact cleaner (hazardous though).
On the front end of xennials, we were a little too old to get into pogs, which IIRC peaked like '94, '95-ish? Some of us were high schoolers and some of us were in junior high or the later years of elementary school, so I'm sure there's a difference in experience there. Though most of us had NES's and PC's with ball mice and CD burners at some point, I'm sure.
I had the saw blade slammer, used sideways it could flip the whole stack with zero effort. Lesser mortals quaked at my collection (which I found a while back and my kids thought I was a freak)
lmao that's amazing - the place we got pogs was a comic book/card shop too so I think I wound up trading all my pogs in for 94/95 fleer xmen cards or similar
I played for keeps in 3rd grade and I lost all my pogs playing for keeps. And mom was wrong it definitely hurt me more than it hurt her when she spanked me for throwing money away like that
We used to take the CDs out on the woods and hang them.
We would then take our BB guns and use them for target practice.
Also, old keyboards made it fun. We would hang those and play spelling bee. Call out a word and marksman the letters on the keyboard.
Another one I used quite a bit: When my brother got his drivers license, my parents told me to stay off AOL because we only had one phone line and they wanted him to be able to call them if his car broke down or he got in an accident. I figured out if you turn the computer speakers up all the way while online, you would normally hear white noise, but if someone was calling, you would a hear a faint noise similar to the sound the modem would make when you would dial up and connect. When I heard that noise, I would quickly yank the computer phone jack out of the wall and then the phone would ring.
I wonder if it's the same mechanism for trigger the call waiting beep! I never used an analog cell phone long enough to experience someone else trying to call while on it because the minutes were so expensive and my mom would like stare at her watch and cut the call at 59 seconds lol
It works a bit differently. Landlines always had a resting \~-48vdc voltage on them, one reason was to power the devices so they didn't need electricity. When someone calls the number, it sends much higher peak voltage out on the line which would trigger the phone to ring. I imagine what you were experiencing was peak voltage backfeeding from the telco line, through your PC, and out your speakers!
Source: me, 20yr telecom engineer
Cool! Since your a telecom engineer, did you ever make a "red box" where you could manipulate a pay phone into thinking you put a quarter in by mimicking the same frequency or a "blue box" which I think was basically the whistle that came with captain crunch and it was the same frequency the phones would use for long distance minutes?
LOL memoriiiiiiies - I was never a phreaker, BUT had friends that did that for sure. I remember this was when MK2 was still new in arcades, I legit remember my friend calling his mom from a payphone to come pick him up. He thought he was so cool, I was like BRO YOUR MOM IS COMING TO GET YOU
Haha I definitely enjoyed showing off my red box at the mall. That Hackers movie ended up inspiring me to get into computers and I became a software engineer largely because of that initial interest.
You can make short free calls from a payphone by making a "collect" call and then leaving your message as your name.
"you have a collect call from PICK ME UP AT THE MALL"
Fun fact.
Blowing on the cartridge to remove dust did nothing. It was reseating the contacts that actually corrected the issue.
However, the blowing on a cartridge trick is a great way to get someone to check their cabling to be sure things are plugged in. When I was in helpdesk, I instructed hundreds of people to find both ends of a cable, unplug it and blow on each end to clear dust away, then plug it back in.
I was never really concerned about dust. What I was getting them to do was locate both ends of the cable, then unplug it and reseat the contacts when plugging it back in. Often it was revealed that one end of the cable wasn't plugged in, or it was so barely plugged in that it looked like there was a connection, but the contacts inside of the plugs were not meeting.
Anyway, that shared cultural fallacy came in real handy quite a bit, because usually if you ask someone if something is plugged in, they get all kinds of defensive and think you just accused them of being stupid. We've all forgotten to plug something in or accidentally unplugged something and not realized it, and this got them to actually check the cable instead of just insisting that it was plugged in.
Matsushita 7502 was a solid investment, burn at 4x, never worried about a buffer. I actually tried to get it to fail once, ended up with like 6 things open and then started encoding a mp3 before it finally gave in. That thing was a beast.
“Blowing on the game to fix it” was just an urban legend; we all did it but the problem wasn’t dust on the contacts it was that the zero-friction device that Nintendo used on the NES to make it look more like a VHS player was poorly designed and would not always correctly seat the contacts.
Still got my Starcraft CD Key memorized bc me all my friends used it to install the free Spawned versions in computer labs so we could LAN party easily
I remember my friends and I being very secretive with our self-learned tricks! We always played for keeps. Which of course led the school to completely ban them, even on the busses (yes kids played it on busses, using text books lol).
We didn't have call waiting. My parents refused to get it. I did have one of those see through light up phones though so I'd just turn off the ringer and wait for it to light up (they turned off the rest of the ringers in the whole house when they went to bed). I'd get my ass chewed out the next day for people calling the house "in the middle of the night" (like, 10pm) but whatever.
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