"Godsend" is a bit of an exaggeration, considering how many ways there are to get the same result without even going into emulation and stuff, but alright. It's still a fun bit of history and behind the scenes info.
Gaming
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A lot people like playing on genuine hardware, and this enables skipping a ton of steps to making that possible. For those select people this really is a massive convenience if maybe not a godsend.
It depends on what type of hardware. On the right console you could do this in real time with nothing but a jammed opening mechanism. I've personally swapped disks on a launch PSX just by learning the right timing and made it work 9/10 times. By 2000 I also knew of multiple places to just get hard mods, but honestly, Bleem came out in 99, so... that would have been my go-to. And now... well, now you can get a MiSTer to run those games if what you want is OG I/O.
I'm gonna say if you're a "OG hardware" kinda person, and I'm one, so I should know, you're also a OG software kind of person. I'll play a real PSX game on a real PSX for shits and giggles, but if I'm gonna burn a CD I have better ways to get that game to run if I am using bootlegs on any part of that chain. Also, if you're a OG hardware kinda person, you may be in the same boat I am and have such restricted shelf space that your default PSX vessel is a PS2 because if you can consolidate two consoles into one that's way more useful than a way to run copied CDs, although that may be a me thing.
Would it kill the author of the article to actually include the cheat code?
I presume they didn't because that would be likely to get gamesradar sued for piracy. They can report on it, but they can't aid it.
What the article didn't mention, and it says in the video, Alien: Resurrection was possibly going to be a multi cd game at one point and the dev was experimenting with the code to get that working.
Argonaut Games' cult classic survival horror FPS Alien Resurrection has been hiding a secret for 23 years: it contains a cheat code that lets you play backup disks on PS1 without having to mod the hardware at all.
Clickbait