Easiest ps1 game to hack?

[ramengirl]

What is a good ps1 game to hack for a beginner? Preferably something with a girl. I'm fairly fancy with programming and 3d art but ive never reverse engineered a ps1 game but there's quite a few games I'd love to alter or remix so want to learn.

 

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

That's an interesting question for sure.

I believe you can get what you want with Threads Of Fate, a remarkably small game released early into the system's life, 3D and with a female protagonist.

I have never hacked a PS1 game myself, but there have been multiple efforts regarding this one title, so I assume people have an easy time of it.

Oh, and welcome aboard!

 

[Ezri_Muldoon]

I have absolutely no idea, but if you could find game released that was also on PC (assuming its the same engine. So no Quake 2 or Doom as an example) and the PC release used a game engine that has documentation surely that would help.

That's how using Half-Life's beta on the Dreamcast became the basis for porting over popular PC Mods & in the case of Gunman Chronicles an entire retail game.

But game engines were in their infancy during the 90's....

 

[matidreamcast9925]

tomb raider had some hacks recently, for both the psx and sega saturn versions. Some fans hacked the code of the game and ported unfinished bussiness (tb gold) to both platforms. Also, some guys are trying to port tomb raider 2 and openlara (decompilation of TR 1996) to the sega saturn

 

[Shadow501]

What is a good ps1 game to hack for a beginner? Preferably something with a girl. I'm fairly fancy with programming and 3d art but ive never reverse engineered a ps1 game but there's quite a few games I'd love to alter or remix so want to learn.

What about Parasite Eve I or II?
What kind of Hack would you like to do?
What do you want to learn, do you want to increase the difficulty in the game, for example, or what?

​

 

[ramengirl]

What about Parasite Eve I or II?
What kind of Hack would you like to do?
What do you want to learn, do you want to increase the difficulty in the game, for example, or what?

​

Parasite Eve I'll give a shot, that makes a lot of sense actually. I want to do a bunch of things, AI translations, gameplay mods. Mostly just learn about reverse engineering.

Post automatically merged: Jul 29, 2025

That's an interesting question for sure.

I believe you can get what you want with Threads Of Fate, a remarkably small game released early into the system's life, 3D and with a female protagonist.

I have never hacked a PS1 game myself, but there have been multiple efforts regarding this one title, so I assume people have an easy time of it.

Oh, and welcome aboard!

Tried messing with Threads of Fate, but even just getting data from the disk is pretty tricky!

I did get some stuff from Crime Crackers 2 loading in ghidra and could find some strings, so that's promising (but how the hell do you find japanese strings)

 

[sun0wl]

Parasite Eve I'll give a shot, that makes a lot of sense actually. I want to do a bunch of things, AI translations, gameplay mods. Mostly just learn about reverse engineering.

Post automatically merged: Jul 29, 2025

Tried messing with Threads of Fate, but even just getting data from the disk is pretty tricky!

I did get some stuff from Crime Crackers 2 loading in ghidra and could find some strings, so that's promising (but how the hell do you find japanese strings)

Conveniently, I actually just went though a hyperfocus phase where I got into PS1 romhacking lol, so I will share some resources you may or may not already know about:

This Dust Remembers What It Once Was - Software - Beneath the Waves

A videogame reverse-engineering toolkit for Ghidra. Currently focused almost entirely on PlayStation games.

www.beneaththewaves.net

"This Dust Remembers What It Once Was ("TDR") is a reverse-engineering toolkit I wrote for use with the NSA'a amazing tool Ghidra. Ghidra is a completely free, open-source binary reverse-engineering toolkit that includes not only a disassembler, but a decompiler that must have been written using black magic. I can't thank its authors and the NSA enough for releasing it last year. I wanted to use Ghidra to help reverse engineer Soul Reaver, my favourite game of all time, but at least when I started, there were a couple of obstacles in my way: Ghidra doesn't support the proprietary PSX-EXE format used for PlayStation binaries, and it also doesn't support the PsyQ .SYM debug symbol format.... I originally started writing TDR specifically for that one project, but I've tried to generalize it enough to work with any PlayStation title that has PsyQ debug symbols available. The PSX-EXE-to-ELF converter means that any PlayStation binary should be importable into Ghidra, even if it wasn't written using PsyQ at all. It also means that any PlayStation binary can be imported into other tools that support ELF binaries, such as RetDec."

(I saw you mentioned Ghidra, so this may be old news to you, but is helpful for me since I'm new to it)

Exploring Tokimeki Memorial: Reverse-engineering PSX games with Ghidra

"This is a collection of information I’ve found while researching PlayStation (PSX) reverse-engineering."

(from the guy who hacked Tokimeki Memorial)

If you haven't already, start with this one (though it might have a lot you already know if you are into programming/computer engineering), but watch ALL of Hilltop's breakdowns/lectures (no joke) on how he cracked Aconcagua, Racing Lagoon, the Mega Man Legends gaiden thing etc. This man is an international romhacking treasure and is a saint for recording these actual masterclasses.

PlayStation Specifications - psx-spx

psx-spx.consoledev.net

This is a conversion/edition of Martin "nocash" Korth's Playstation specs document originally hosted at https://problemkaputt.de/psx-spx.htm. See https://github.com/psx-spx/psx-spx.github.io#readme for more details.

On finding Japanese strings: do you mean in ghidra? I'm not too familiar with it yet but think I heard that it unfortunately doesn't support playing with SHIFT-JIS encoded text very well.

Anyway, good luck! I'd be interested in seeing what you get into. I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out how to decompress the dialogue from Velldeselba Senki recently so I'm a little burned out lol but in a while I'd be happy to try and help or collaborate with someone. (PS: Love your Koudelka avatar lol)

 

[ramengirl]

Conveniently, I actually just went though a hyperfocus phase where I got into PS1 romhacking lol, so I will share some resources you may or may not already know about:

This Dust Remembers What It Once Was - Software - Beneath the Waves

A videogame reverse-engineering toolkit for Ghidra. Currently focused almost entirely on PlayStation games.

www.beneaththewaves.net

(I saw you mentioned Ghidra, so this may be old news to you, but is helpful for me since I'm new to it)

Exploring Tokimeki Memorial: Reverse-engineering PSX games with Ghidra

(from the guy who hacked Tokimeki Memorial)

If you haven't already, start with this one (though it might have a lot you already know if you are into programming/computer engineering), but watch ALL of Hilltop's breakdowns/lectures (no joke) on how he cracked Aconcagua, Racing Lagoon, the Mega Man Legends gaiden thing etc. This man is an international romhacking treasure and is a saint for recording these actual masterclasses.

PlayStation Specifications - psx-spx

psx-spx.consoledev.net

On finding Japanese strings: do you mean in ghidra? I'm not too familiar with it yet but think I heard that it unfortunately doesn't support playing with SHIFT-JIS encoded text very well.

Anyway, good luck! I'd be interested in seeing what you get into. I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out how to decompress the dialogue from Velldeselba Senki recently so I'm a little burned out lol but in a while I'd be happy to try and help or collaborate with someone. (PS: Love your Koudelka avatar lol)

that looks very awesome I'll watch it

 

[SoThankful]

This video helped me with my first hack.