Early PS1 and 2 piracy weren’t nearly as easy or widespread as the DC, IIRC both required hardware modchip installations before disc swap soft methods were discovered, where the DC’s only major hardware piracy hurdle was having a CD-R writer capable of burning the DC’s format.
DC piracy flourished because of easier to find ISOs and a faster internet than the PS1 gen of consoles. PS2 had piracy issues at the same time of the DC, but PS2 piracy was much tougher to do due to the larger game disc sizes transferring over the wire and subsequent uncompressed video and code developers didn’t have to optimize for and pirates had to compress or cut to compensate.
When I got a N64 I remember clearly that the N64 major downside was that piracy was much harder, but everyone was buying cheap PS1 pirated disks on street vendors. Like, very very cheap, and no internet connection required.
IIRC you could use pirated games on the PS1 by first booting it off an audio CD with a lot of tracks, then swapping the disk at a certain point in the boot process.
