Dex @Dex@scalie.club

another micro city thought that has been in my head most of the day - "oh my god, they have airpods in, they can't hear us", from a tiny city in the airpods case

part of me wonders why if this additional copy protection applied to the EU versions was why sony had to upload the US versions of some games (the original spyro trilogy, tomba/tombi 1+2) to the playstation store

the PAL version of these games worked just fine when putting the disc in a PS3, but that can read the subchannel info

saying that I'm pretty sure those games worked with decrypted PBPs as well, so maybe not

the city is lifted from its foundations

an incomprehensibly huge eye fills the sky

and then, in a voice much louder than thunder, that makes every building in the city shake with the vibrations

“HEY, DO U RP”

‪brain : hey, what about shrunken cities in domes as part of dragon hoards, mixed in with all the gold and gems ‬
‪me: ...‬
‪brain : or friends as living 2D textures, moving around your body ‬
‪me : brain, it's 3:30am, were these thoughts worth waking me up for ‬

ok, for anyone playing along at home, here's what I eventually had to do

1. convert encrypted PBP to bin/cue using psxtract
2. convert bin/cue to decrypted PBP using psx2psp
3. put the .sbi file with the subchannel information in the same folder as the decrypted PBP

(retroarch should work with the .sbi file in the same folder as a .bin/.cue, but that wasn't working for me for some reason)

ok I've just found out the answer: it's the copy protection that was applied specifically to the PAL version of CTR

either psxtract doesn't copy the subchannel information, or the Sony developed PSP emulator has some sort of workaround for it being missing

the problem is that ctr apparently isn't the only game like this where the subchannel info was used for additional copy protection on the PAL version only

(NTSC would have got the standard CD-R protection - see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUwSOfQ1D3c )

new character adopted from @Technojara@birdsite ! their name is light house, they're a big alien bug, and I suspect probably named after the first thing they saw on coming to earth!

I believe their companion Midnight Cryptid is still available! https://twitter.com/Technojara/status/1097362871262924800

thing to try when I get home

1. swap out retroarch ps1 bios files and see if there's any changes
2. attempt to re-rip CTR disc though I'm pretty sure it's too far gone - I'm not sure but it seems like there's a bit of a weird area on the edges of the disc so I'm wondering if it's got hit by disc rot
3. subsequently, go through rest of PS1 discs and rip anything I might ever want to play again (that has not had a modern re-release, sorry FF9)

it got to about 15% and the heavy whirring stopped and it started going much faster

but at the 89% mark it's started giving a lot of errors about unreadable sectors

maybe i'll get lucky and that was just the spyro 2 demo or something