Make-A-Monster helps play 1997/1999 PSX or Emulation of Monster Rancher (1&2, NTSC & PAL)

Attempting to Cross-Post from Monster Rancher

Monster Rancher debuted in 1997, it's a fantasy Pet (monster) raising and breeding game which had a unique mechanic that, during gameplay, when prompted you could insert a Music CD, or another Playstation game, and it would generate a monster based on some meta data from the disc that was read.

In 2001 we learned how to extract that meta data from CDs and some games (a text file containing track information, referred to as ToC or Subcode data) and share them without having to share copied CDs or Games. You could create a CD and inject the ToC data during the burn process to make any CD have the same meta data as what the ToC files contained. There were limits to this, as it would be an identical Monster produced ("randomized" stat offsets are determined by this data and so would be identical to the original).

As original hardware becomes hard to acquire, many have turned to emulation, though, even most PCs today no longer even come with optical drives to be able to use this mechanic.

5 years ago, We (superfans/nerds of Monster Rancher) completely reverse engineered the CD Read Process and were able to create a web app that could generate the meta data on demand, including all possible randomized offsets that would normally be produced by CDs and games in the wild.

We named this app "Make-A-Monster", and the data/files can be used with original hardware, or in emulation. We included the ability to create any Monster, On-Demand, but also allow the use of randomized creation, and also blind creation so you just don't know what you'll get at all and be completely surprised.

There is a remaster of Monster Rancher 1&2DX on Steam, Switch, and iOS that came out late 2021 and has quality of Life improvements and such. It also has several old bugs re-introduced, since the game is based on the original Japanese Monster Farm which were fixed in their NTSC and PAL localization, but overall is a very positive experience as well, and introduces new monster variants that never existed in the original.

I hope there's some Ranchers out there that will enjoy this, if you're still playing the original games, and also hope there's folks out there supporting the Remasters as well :)