I remember there was an Easter egg but I can’t recall if it was related to no disc and then loading an audio cd or something else. You’d have a small space ship flying around and towards and away from the screen almost like a screensaver.
It’s been almost 30 years though so I’m a little hazy on the details.
It’s bugging me that I can’t find it online anywhere.
Little of both. This is where you might encounter a boot error, between the white and black screens. But I never saw one that I didn't forcibly make happen when modding. At least not with PlayStation's. Xbox red rings were common as fuck, and they would also occur during the startup logo sequence.
EDIT: I found my favorite PS1 animation helping out below! HERE it is!
I have all of the retro consoles boot animations that people were cool enough to switch up into a Steam Deck boot animations I also have the plugin for deck tools that allows you to get a random one after each reboot. Needless to say, I never get tired of hearing the old OG Gameboy, PS1/2, GameCube, etc. boot animations and sounds. Core memories indeed!
This applies tenfold if you lived in a country where the are only pirated copies of games and all consoles come pre-modchipped (especially if your game was a multi-language copy with a built-in selector/launcher). I assume the modchips had shit timing, so when the chip was having a bad day I would sometimes have to restart my PS2 for 10-15 minutes straight until it loaded. Sometimes I gave up and came back later to repeat the cycle.
Bonus memory:
PS2 is supposed to play PS1 games. So when we got a PS2, on the first day I tried one of my bootleg PS1 games and it loaded fine. After that, it never loaded another PS1 game ever, showing the "please insert PS1 or PS2 disc" error.
Thankfully there was a magazine here that wasn't afraid of talking about chips, which ones were good, which ones enabled ps1 games too, etc. It's why I purposefully asked for a matrix chip for my fat ps2.
This reminds me of the story behind CD Projekt RED getting started in Poland. The only way for them to bring games to their community was basically bootlegging them, so that's where they began.
The heavy bass effect that blew out my dad's surround sound subwoofer amp due to me maxxing out the low frequency gain from the PS1 startup tune lives rent free in my head.
The worst was if it was a multi disc game and the broken disc was the last one. You're invested, excited to see how the story ends, ready to smash Sephiroth's face in, and it all grinds to a halt.
I'm glad we have finally gotten to a technological point where games just go right to the god damn menu the moment you power on the machine (or at least, good ones without an hour of unskippable logos and disclaimers), since that was what I had originally, you know, back before the CD era and everything was solid state. You'd pop in an NES, Master System, SNES or Genesis cart in, power it on and BAM! the game is already going.
Not that I am not nostalgic for the PS1, PS2, Dreamcast and GameCube startup sequences.
Thanks now I have ptsd, worse sound every. I hated that when it happen. Question how come we never see this happen with PS3 snd above? Did they fix something or disk just made better?
Man this takes me back, I used to have a faulty LAPD: Future Cop disk, which happened to be my favourite game, me and a friend used to sit in front of the TV saying "pls pls pls pls" and cheer when it worked.
Oh, man. This brings back memories. I did this every time I loaded any game into the system. My PS1 had issues with the balls on the disc spindle that locked the disc in place. I had no idea and had so many issues with discs not loading until I discovered it. Then it became the disc equivalent of popping the cartridge out of the SNES and re-seating it until it worked. Eventually, I had to replace the balls as they fell out but as a broke college student, I just crumpled small bits of aluminum foil into similar sized balls and stuffed them in there. Worked great after that.
My first ps1 needed to be upside down to play, ahh, the good ol' days. Where you needed the console oriented a certain way, but at least games were a full experience and a flat price.
I can hear this meme so hard. Even the spool down and spool up of the CD drive in this situation is burned in forever. It’s been more than 20 years but it feels like yesterday
This reminds me of my X-BOX for real. Absolutely amazing console. (I still miss those "Duke" controllers).
But the most common disc reader was terrible. Over time games would just stop reading. Halo: Combat Evolved, I kid-you-not, would start to load...and then load BACKWARDS, usually (but not always!) resulting in "Problems reading disc."
Me and my co-op friend would be cheering it on like it was going for a touchdown LOL.
Crimson Skies too, I remember. I took great care of my discs but I guess the drive would just scuff them up over time.
I think that's even more so a problem these days for people getting into retro consoles because many of these discs are more than 30 years old, the disc drives too are getting up there in age. Many of them are starting to fail or become unreliable from dust and wearing out with age since the laser assembly is rather fragile.
It's one of the reasons why ODE and SD loader mods have become popular lately, as well as Homebrew game loaders on the newer consoles which can support them (PS2, PS3, Wii, Wii U).