So I was poking around trying to work out what was different between Chrono Trigger 1.0 and 1.1. Chrono Trigger 1.1 freezes on the PSIO prototype 1.1 board, coincidence? Haha. There's a ROM.BIN in the root of the game disc so I popped it into a SNES emulator and it loaded up the Japanese version of Chrono Trigger for SNES. Anyway I was curious to learn a little more on how Square did this. From what I've read so far, all the routines, are pulled from the ROM.BIN? Sounds pretty cool in my book! And I've apparently just learnt that the memory card slots on the PlayStation are electrically the same as the controller ports?
As far as I recall, the PSX version of Chrono Trigger is basically a "Chrono Trigger Emulator". It has the original ROM there for the script/sound/graphics assets, but it doesn't go as far as running the low level 65C816 machine code, that's ported to PSOne to run natively. It's clever, a lot of early emulators were written this way. They sold themselves as, for example, SNES emulators, but really they were Super Mario World emulators. It's why only certain games worked properly on Bleemcast.
I've got to say it is impressive, and probably a huge time saver for the developers! Bleemcast! There's a name I haven't heard for a while, need to pull out my MGS disc now that I have mastered the first part on PSIO. But it is sealed... ughhh...
Yeah. It's been known for a while. However it was always in english for me. Are you using japanese version of CT? Hm, I always thought that 1.1 was greatest hits/platinum release with the same data from black label. As, for ports you are also right. PS1 uses a modified SPI protocol (extra ACK line). You can read extra stuff in my MemCARDuino thread.
BC! works with ps1 backups just fine! And there's now a selfboot version of BC! for MGS floating around, if you wanna keep your original intact. Seems like fair use to me!
I discovered the same thing when I first got Final Fantasy Chronciles. There's also some RAW/WAV on the disc as well, I can't remember if they were used for the FMV or something else. As for the controller port thing, that would explain why the original PlayStation multi-tap didn't have a memory card plug on the able.
That was because the emulation wasn't very good. They started out trying to make an emulator that would run all games, but ended up running out of time and just making it work with specific titles. Yes they are wired together, there are different commands for each that the other ignores. Some of the 3rd party memory cards that were larger capacity allowed you to select between the different slots by pushing button combinations on the controller.
There is no emulator behind this, the hardware never could do that at frame rates even remotely decently. The only data pulled from that ROM image is just dialog text, while everything else was taken directly from the ROM and embedded into overlays. The actual code is a mix of a PlayStation framework and SNES assembly statically recompiled to C->binary.
