It is VERY HARD to time the swap trick to use the backup CD-R’s TOC and not the legit game CD’s TOC. If you can’t time it like a magician the TOC will be wrong, and you’ll experience crashes in game, or no audio. And you can not time it to use the right TOC with the CD player menu swap trick, it will always use the original legit game’s TOC. This is because the CD Player Menu swap trick is the only one which you swap the real PSX game with the burned one while the real PSX game is not moving and stopped in the drive.
I am a collector of specific PlayStation 1s, the earliest ones from 1995. I got an October 1995 PlayStation (fully working, replaced the KMS-440AAM to a PSone reproduction KMS-440BAM). I just recently found a September 1995 PlayStation with the only issue being the CD drive does not reliably read games, so I’ll replace the drive in that as well.
On my October 1995 PlayStation, I do the CD player menu swap trick to swap a TonyHAX boot cd, and then swap a backup when booted in the TonyHAX boot CD. So I got thinking…
Is it possible to modify an existing game, like this:
- Change SYSTEM.CNF to boot into a modified TonyHAX.exe (keep the TOC/CUE the same)
- Have the modified TonyHAX.exe read the real original game’s SYSTEM.CNF (which is on the modified ISO as SYSTEM2.CNF) which then points to the real game .EXE on the ISO.
- Have perfect game audio/TOC after just doing the swap trick.
I tried with Tekken (1995 original release) and sure enough, it works! I can use an original game with 1 track, and swap in a game like Tekken with 27 audio tracks which has working audio!
I’m looking into this more but figured I’d share my current findings…