[gamingcat02261991]

How does one patch a physical PSX disc? Even though I don't own an actual PS1 or any game discs associated with it, I've been wondering for some time. I'm willing to one day get a physical PS1 and a copy of MR2 so I can apply STARWIN's patches to the game, IF the North American version of MR1 makes it to Switch sometime in the future.

[FAST6191]

CD-ROM, Flash-ROM, DVD-ROM... the Read Only Memory part of it kind of says it all there. Which is to say you don't.

Some devices have an optical drive emulator that you can load games on, and some devices might have a cheat device you can patch some things on the fly with (think cheats rather than full translations) but most people, assuming they are not using an emulator, will mod their device to accept burned games and burn a modded version of the ISO (which you may or may not want to rip yourself). I don't know what we are currently suggesting for PS1 mod chips, cheat cart methods, or if there are any optical drive emulators worth paying attention to. If doing anything with the laser I hope it still works -- the PS1 lasers were not known for durability even when they were current and burned discs are harder to read.

The PS1 is additionally a nightmare for some things here. Back when the PS1 was current we did not have any particularly well followed Scene rules like we have for later systems, and additionally every other tech company was seemingly trying to muscle in on the CD writer boom and one of the ways to do that was to support PS1 games (usually heavily unofficially, or with "we support game consoles" in the features list).
In addition to plain iso and bin+cue you got half a dozen other formats like Nero's NRG format, Clonecd's CCD, cdrwin, cd juggler and all the other formats the likes of ultraiso will claim support for. Any given game seemed to be ripped in any number of formats, and they persist to this day. That or people get bored of that and rip it again in plain ISO.
You will also encounter a bunch of different patch formats (PPF, bsdiff, xdelta and a few others) or be told to grab individual files from the game and patch those (this is rarer but far from unheard of). Usually that is a matter of getting the right iso, the right patch, the right patching program and pressing patch.

[Jorpho]

and additionally every other tech company was seemingly trying to muscle in on the CD writer boom and one of the ways to do that was to support PS1 games (usually heavily unofficially, or with "we support game consoles" in the features list).

Just to be clear, none of those writers ever had the capacity to write a disk that would work on an unmodded PS1, did they?

[RexDart]

How does one patch a physical PSX disc? Even though I don't own an actual PS1 or any game discs associated with it, I've been wondering for some time. I'm willing to one day get a physical PS1 and a copy of MR2 so I can apply STARWIN's patches to the game, IF the North American version of MR1 makes it to Switch sometime in the future.

No idea what MR2 is but you patch the ISO and burn it to a CD-R.

[FAST6191]

Just to be clear, none of those writers ever had the capacity to write a disk that would work on an unmodded PS1, did they?

Don't know what went with the earliest Japanese models (or if any of those still function -- they were iffy at the time, never mind all this time on) but in terms of being able to burn play old CDs without any fanciness then I think that is limited to either the older consoles or the dreamcast. By the time I got involved in the PS1 chips were commonplace and doing better than the equally common cheat cartridges method, both of which were nicer than simplistic spring methods which would probably have made up anything else at the time.

When I said support I was thinking more the reading of discs part of things as various burner program companies would also typically make the isos in the first place, and as downloading a PS1 game on dial up happened but not easily people still copied games from friends, abused return policies and toddled on down to the rental shop to make their own. Wind in an anti anti piracy ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iw3G80bplTg ) but unofficially for obvious reasons*, and timeframes rather more than the "beats the street date" stuff we got used to later, along with a healthy dose of fanboyism for and time taken to crack/distribute the CD burning/ripping programs and yeah huge mess.

*update to the accuracy of our rips was probably akin to updates to the stability of our console today.

Amusingly it seems one of the sites we used to use for info is actually still up, though as one of the sister sites or sites in its webring (wonder how long since even people here heard that term) is still full of nice PC game cracks I probably should skip it.