Final Fantasy VIII-J anti-piracy warning

[prodigysim]

Game Title: Final Fantasy VIII-J anti-piracy warning
Game ID(s): SLPS 01880~3
pSX Version(s): 1.13

I'm using pSX 1.13 in a linux environment, trying to run a self-made image of the Japanese Final Fantasy VIII. I'm not sure about the Game ID since it's not written in that format on the game case (and I don't feel like opening up the image atm either).

Apparently there's some sort of anti-piracy check on the FF8 game disc. When I boot the game with what I believe to be a clean SCPH1000 bios, I get a mostly black screen with an incorrectly rendered anti-piracy warning.

i.imgur.com/MjVOG.png

I did some searching and found this page with info:

consolecopyworld.com/psx/psx_ff8_protection.shtml

Apparently the Japanese FF8 has some sort of mod-chip check inside of it. I was able to simply patch the bin using their tool (had to download dosbox, heh) and make it work, but I thought others might be interested since I couldn't find any other mention of this in relation to emulators.

I'm also kind of curious as to why pSX is affected by this. Is it accurately emulating a modchipped PSX?

[Gamesoul Master]

Try running the game with a different BIOS (more specifically, NTSC-U and PAL) and see if it bypasses the warning on either of those.

I've had a thread going on this topic with other games, and I'm always looking to add more results when found. Usually, patchable games can be played by using a different BIOS, while the ones we can't get around don't have a patch. I don't think we've tried any NTSC-J games yet though.

[prodigysim]

I tried SCPH-1000, 1001, 1002, 7000, and 101 (PSOne NTSC-U) and some other random ones. Same result with all.

[Truth Unknown]

The emulator only emulates a NTSC-U/C console regardless of BIOS unfortunately. Its a matter of how it's reporting the console to the game I believe. There might be more to it, but I can only gather so much from observation.