PS1/2 Playing PS1 imports using Gameshark cart

[SkeletonBuddy9]

So I've got a SCPH-5501 unit with an official v2.3 gameshark cart that has the Explore option on the main menu. My issue is every time I try to use it to play an import copy of a game it just gets stuck on the "Loading game" portion. I managed to get the import to boot once using the disc swapping trick while the console was booting but using the gameshark just doesn't work.

Is v2.3 not able to boot burned/import discs? I could have swore that anything after 2.0 allowed for booting them.

 

[Apache Thunder]

I believe with any of the cart devices you plug into the back (when using the stock software that came with them anyways) that you have to start the console up with a valid retail disk that matches your region first. Then after the cart boots up you switch out the CD. This like the disk swap trick allows CD-Rs and out of region games to be played. Usually the cheat devices spin down the CDs so this makes it easier to do the swap and has less wear and tear on the drive plus you don't have to worry about the timing of when to do the swap.

I believe the special unlock commands that homebrew apps like Unirom send to the CD drive to allow booting out of region games/CD-Rs without swapping hadn't been documented until nocash found them in 2013 or so. That means that none of the gamesharks/cheat devices from back in the day would have had support for booting out of region games/CD-Rs without disk swapping.


If you want to avoid doing the swap entirely you'll need to flash a new program onto the gameshark cart. Unirom 8 is the best option. Of coarse you'll lose gameshark functionality with this. I recommend you either obtain a second cart or if you are lucky you have a gameshark with a flash chip larger then 128k since the 256k ones can support the version of Unirom that has the homebrew alternative of Gameshark's cheat system combined with it.