Okay, as I mentionned to a few people already, I ordered a copy of Wipeout 3 Special Edition from ebay (WOO HOO!) and am in the process of finding the means to play it on my NTSC console, either through chipping or with a boot disk.
I was looking on the net, and found something interesting:
Now, this technique described how to play import disks on a PAL playstation, but since the technology is the same and only region codes vary, I decided to look into it.Originally Posted by online NTSC and PAL FAQ
I quickly located the switch that tells the console that the lid is either open or closed. It's about as intricate and complex as the mechanism that turns off the fridge light - in the top right inside area, there's a peg inside the lid that presses down a small trigger. When that trigger is pressed, console thinks it's closed. Simple.
I put in a disk and left the cover opened, went to cd player and saw that unless the lid was closed, it would not load the music track. With a pen tip, I "closed" the lid and saw the music tracks load. If I let go, the music tracks unload, so the trick here would be to change disk AND close the lid without letting go of the trigger.
Tricky.
So I had an idea - does it really matter if the lid is actually closed? Of course not, only that the console thinks it is. So I devised a leading edge technological system that would allow me to fool this sophisticated mechanism, something of equal sophistication, fighting fire with fire!
Detailed schematics here
Now, of course, something so utterly complex would be worthless without equally complicated instructions to operate it. So take a few minutes to recover from the last schematics, prepare yourself, and have your mind blown by this even more horrendous set of instructions...
here
*pants heavily to catch his breath, popping aspirin like Pez to counter migraine*
Wow, sorry to drop all this heavy hypertech on you guys, but I felt this had to be shared. The basic idea here is that by loading music tracks on your playstation, you're effectively loading the region code associated with it, and as long as the console thinks you didn't open the lid, you're still using the correct region coded game and will load up properly the cd you placed in it.
Now the hitch here is I don't have any import games to try this out with. I'm goin gto have to wait a week or two for my WO3 SE to arrive, so in the meantime, does anyone here have a non-chipped NTSC console and WO3 SE or WO 2097 to try this out, or maybe a PAL console and a copy of WO XL?
The community needs to know if there's effectively a FREE method to allow playing import games easily. After all, don't we all have mountains of ballpen caps lying around, just itching to help us play imported Wipeout games? :mrgreen: