PS1 Personified Fear crash on real hardware

R3Serial
R3Serial
3,577
9
Published 2021-03-25
The volume of the TV is low because this was recorded at like 3 or 4 in the morning. Anyhoo, I was trying out a new hack for the PS1 that utilizes an exploit in a save file for Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3. The third-party tool, called TonyHax, allows you to play burned or imported game discs. Which is not usually doable since, out of the box, the PS1 is region-locked.


When I put THPS3 in to try it out, and went to another room to grab my only PAL region game to test with (Klonoa Beach Volleyball, British PAL version) I heard this noise from the other room and thought "huh, the startup isn't supposed to be that loud." Then it immediately hit me that my PS1 had encountered the dreaded "Personified Fear" error crash.


In short, a "Personified Fear" crash happens when the PS1 is unable to properly read the PS1 BIOS data stored on the game disc or can read part of the data but it is garbled and corrupted. Resulting in the second half of the PS1's bootup sequence not loading correctly and crashing the system. The loud whoosh sound hear in the beginning is actually the sound of a glass bottle shattering reversed. Usually, you'd only hear a small bit of the sound as the second half of the bootup sequence appears with the PS1 logo and the sound of chimes.


Recorded on Wed, 24 March 2021 at 3:35am.
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