Comment by djur

Are you sure that the PlayStations you had weren't modchipped? The PSX had physical copy protection (the "wobble groove") that was relatively easy to circumvent (you could manually switch a genuine game for a pirated game once it had passed the check). Modchips made it even easier by just dummying out the wobble groove check. Later games started using Sony's LibCrypt and various checksumming maneuvers to detect pirated copies, but that was all defeatable.

The PS2 used a lot of the same tricks, it was just better at it. But once consoles started having internet connections, they could start doing checks that way as well, and ban people using modded consoles.

You absolutely can mod modern systems to play pirated games. The tradeoff is that you can never use online services. That's why people don't do it as much anymore.