Q: What does ECCRegen do?

A: ECCRegen regenerates EDC and ECC fields of modified sectors in a PSX RAW CD image. ECCRegen works ONLY with Playstation RAW images made by CDRWin, BlindWrite or CloneCD.

Q: Does ECCRegen let me play backup copies on unchipped Playstations?

A: NO.

Q: Do I need it?

A: You need ECCRegen only if you have patched your Playstation game with a generic PAL/NTSC patcher like Pal4U2000 and you burn the CD-ROM with a TEAC CDR-55S (or a CD writer that doesn't support EDC/ECC on the fly regeneration), or if you have applyed other kind of patches, like the name patch for Winning Eleven u-23 jap.

Q: What is a 'sector'?

A: All datas stored on a CD-ROM are packed in sectors. In mode 2 form 1 CD (the one used by Playstation) each sector has a header at the beginning and a tail at the end.
Headers and tails contain additional informations used by CD readers.

Q: What are 'EDC and ECC fields'?

A: EDC stands for Error Detecting Code and is stored in the tail of every mode 2 form 1 sector. This code is used to detect errors in the data field of the sector.
ECC stands for Error Correcting Code and is store after ECC field. This code lets CD hardware correct errors in the data filed (only if they aren't too much).

Q: What is a generic PAL/NTSC patcher?

A: If you buy a PAL game and you want to play it on a NTSC TV you can do several things:
1. Buy a PAL TV :)
2. Buy a RGB scart cable (it works for PAL->NTSC, I don't know if it works also for NTSC->PAL)
3. Download a game specific patch from internet
4. Patch your game with a PAL/NTSC patch generated by a generic patcher like Pal4U2000
A generic patcher is a tool that scan entire CD image looking for known sequences of code and when it find them the patcher convert these sequences from PAL to NTSC or vice versa.
You need ECCRegen ONLY if you choose (or you are forced to choose) the 4th option and your CD writer doesn't support EDC/ECC on the fly regeneration (like TEAC CD-R55S).

Q: What did you use to build ECCRegen?

A: ECCRegen is written in C & SDK and is compiled with a free Win32 C compiler: lcc-win32. I think lcc-win32 is an excellent alternative to the expensive Visual C++ by Microsoft. You can download lcc-win32 here. While installer cames from Inno Setup, a free installer engine (www.innosetup.com) with My Inno Setup Extensions (http://www.wintax.nl/isx)