Utility Disc

Bundled with SCPH-10000 and SCPH-15000 consoles in Japan. These consoles don't have the DVD Player in ROM, so this disc must be used to install it onto a memory card. For that reason, a memory card came bundled with these consoles as well. Besides this, the Disc contains some PS2 usage instructions and a demo video. Starting from SCPH-18000 and later as well as all consoles released outside Japan, the DVD player was preinstalled in ROM, hence rendering this Disc mostly useless.

• Utility Disc 1.00 (PBPX-95201)
  • Bundled with early SCPH-10000 units in Japan, manufactured until March 25th, 2000 (around 1.25 million units). The DVD Player install function only works on SCPH-10000 units that came with Utility Disc 1.00. Units that came with 1.01 will fail the installation, as will all later models of PS2.
  • Installing 1.00 onto a memory card through a console that supports it and trying to use this memory card in another console that does not support 1.00 won't work either as the DVD Player 1.00 has been blacklisted entirely on later units.
  • The DVD Player 1.00 installed by this disc has a method of bypassing the region code check on DVD Video. This way, it is possible play DVDs from any region as long as they contain 60 Hz video.

• Utility Disc 1.01 (PBPX-95202, PBPX-95203)
  • Bundled with later SCPH-10000 units and all SCPH-15000 units. Was also available as a free replacement/update for owners of the 1.00 disc, which had to send in their 1.00 disc or exchange it at 7-Eleven stores to receive the free update.
  • Partially fixes the region check bypass.
  • Can install DVD Player 1.01 on any SCPH-10000 and SCPH-15000 unit.
  • At least 2 slightly different releases exist of this disc: PBPX-95202 and PBPX-95203

Trivia

Sony was very serious about making as many people as possible exchange their 1.00 utility disc for a 1.01 disc, to remove as many 1.00 utility discs from circulation. The whole process was completely free and they even refunded the shipping cost one paid for sending the 1.00 disc to them. Additionally, it was even possible to replace the Disc for free at 7-Eleven stores from April 7th until April 21st 2000. Despite all of these efforts, 1.00 discs are still very common, indicating that a lot of users simply did not seem to care about having their Disc replaced. This might be because the information about the ability of 1.00 to circumvent region code checks already quickly spread throughout the internet back in the day.