Ok for anyone who thinks it is not possible to play backups on an unaltered PSX I have news it is possible and I have become quite good at it so I thought I would make a guide on it as there are so many psx ISO's that do not play at full speed besides playing the games on PSX is a much better experience lets start off with the basics...
What you will need...
1)A PSX Console (unmodded) you wont need this guide if it is unless you are just wondering about how to burn your iso's to play on the console
2)Alcohol 120% (or Damon tools) will explain later
3)CloneCD
4)a paper clip (can substitute for something else) will go into that later as well
5)an actual psx game (any game should do) but must be an original copy in order to make this work
Ok lets start with the console...
If you open up the lid you will see a button towards the back right of the console this is your sensor to let the PSX know the CD Tray is either open or shut so the first step is to trick the PSX into thinking that it is closed... The way I have mine setup is by taking a paper clip and bending it into a shape that you can wedge under the corner of the tray while it is open and hold the button down but if you are creative enough you can come up with your own way such as a wad of paper and tape or whatever you have available I have been told a tiny piece of a cereal box cardboard can be wedged between the button and the walls of the button so what ever it takes to get it to work when you feel you have gotten a solid way to keep the button down test it out with your original to make sure it loads if not your button is not pressed down all the way...
Lets go on to making a backup as you know you must own the original to have a back up but we will just assume that you do for whatever reason your disk is damaged or unusable you can download an ISO so there are two ways to make a back up from here if your original works and you just want to preserve the disk you can use it to make a direct backup or backup from an ISO
1) If you are making a backup from disk you don't need alcohol 120% or daemon tools You can just use clone cd to directly back it up (note when you back up a game you cant just put it in and play so please read this whole post to understand what it is you need to do in order to play these games)
Personally I use Alcohol 120% which creates an ISO drive that you can read the ISO directly from...(for those with less experience an ISO is the entire contents of a CD an exact duplication of it) thus is why you need an ISO drive so to speak once you get Alcohol 120% installed and have a drive running you need to mount the ISO image... If you have EPSXE or whatever psx emulator you chose you can test the iso from the iso drive (virtual drive) if it works then you are ready to burn...
2) Burning your iso (you will need a cdburner obviusly and a blank CDR Go for quality on this so far i have used memorex's 52x and had no problems) once clone cd is installed click on the copy cd icon and select your virtual drive for the read options and select game disk (not protected pc game just game) then make sure you select 1x write speed i found that at 4x disks become unreadable the sony laser is weak hell its old technology right!!! anyway once you have all these options placed click on the button to burn it (sorry doing this from memory so if my visuals are off the info is still right) then it will burn your iso to disk when finished you can also test it on your emulator from your drive it should work but the tricky part comes next... NOTE (do not use any other media besides CDR as the PSX laser cannot handle CDRW or DVD media this is really important)
3) Actually booting this disk is a little tricky for those worried about their laser or their motor on the PSX there is really nothing to worry about you will get the hang of it after a few times doing this successfully see the drive is magneticly driven so dont be alarmed by removing the cd while it is still spinning... ok here is how it works....
a) Put in any original psx disk and turn on the power the PSX white screen will come up your disk will be spinning watch the disk and listen to the motor the disk will start to spin faster now you have to be quick when the disk starts to spin faster you need to remove the original and replace it with a backup if done right the PSX menu will change black with the PSX logo now your sounds should be properly loaded into memory and I believe this is where it loads video data at the black screen the disk will slow down so watch carefully now let it speed up again and finaly it will slow down again when it slows for the second time take the original and put it back in for a brief second if done right the screen will change to all black no logo or anything instantly and i mean real fast you need to put the backup back in and bang your game should load I have however had a few problems with a couple games that would not load so I have a backup of Gameshark I do the same trick with and once gameshark is in and loaded you can select cheats or not but you can use it to boot disks too but you need to keep the button pressed the entire time that you are doing this if the button is released it will search for an original disk again if you feel uncomfortable running your psx with the lid up after the game is running i would suggest that you find a way to keep the button down so that you can close the lid superglue tape or cardboard I was thinking of doing the same myself but have been kinda lazy and dont mind the lid being up but hey if you need any further help or get stuck after all I have said feel free to message me and I will see what i can do to help you get through it... It took me a while to get it right and now I can do it everytime unless of course im distracted but it works 100% and the PSX i use is not modded in anyway Hope this Guide is helpfull I will run support if needed EnJoy!!!!!
i used this method hundreds of times on my big ugly psx and my psone..works great...but ya gotta try to burn as slow as possible...seems when i burn games at 2x they play great but at higher speeds sometimes they have trouble reading...i think its cause of the drive speed of the psx
this is just like the gameshark mod of the old versions of the psx (1996-1997 maybe 98 too not 100% sure. too lazy to look it up lol) they had a port on the back to plugin a gameshark. basically the only difference between the two is that the gameshark trick stops the disc from spinning so you dont ruin anything. but yeh i can also confirm that this works although it will screw ur laser over after a while. mine has to be almost verticle now to be able to read a burned disc. originals are fine though.
Also wizzdome this is a good guide. its nice to see someone around thats willing to help.
O_O wow that is amazing i never heard of doing that ever before but it seems way to risky for me. I tried burning the iso .mdf to a cd but from reading this guide i realized that i used the wrong type of cd and my write speed was 4x! I guess there could be another way of doing this but for now i'm going to play my Crash Bandicoot 2 for ps1 emulator
I"m having trouble with this I get the first switch when it speeds up But then the disk slows down one time, speeds up and doesn't slow down at all after that :\
I'm using a CD-R disk, and I burned the game info on alcohol 120% It was the .cue file I believe for suikoden
I don't recommend anyone doing this it could damaged your PSX by yanking out the disc while its still running.You are way better off having a premodded PSX or using the magic swap disc.
