Building on an idea he’s had since he was a child, security software engineer CTurt has developed a way for people to play unofficial games on a PS2 console by burning them to DVD along with an exploit.
If you don’t have a very technical explanation of how everything works, check out CTurt’s blog post. If you only want the tl version; dr basically created a way to “exploiting the functionality of the console DVD player “by triggering corruption in video playback and then running a game through the resulting hole in system copy protection.
Why does this matter? Because all you need to do is insert a disc, just like you would launch any other PS2 game. You don’t need to get a mod chip, you don’t need a special USB exploit, you just insert the disc and you can play new code without changing anything else on the console.
CTurt’s blog post goes out of its way to emphasize the word “homebrew”, but if you were wondering about more direct applications for this exploit, two of his demo videos show a PS2 with a SNES emulator and a “backup” copy of Shadow of the Colossus.
While this clearly works on a PS2, CTurt theorizes that the same exploit (or at least the same principle) could also work on everything from a PS1 to a PS4.
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