Official PSIO Development Thread

looks great but will the price be around the 500$ mark?! or I did not understand it correctly?

 

Not sure where the $500 came from. Shadow said the price will be reasonable and I dont think they have said a firm price.
http://www.psxdev.net/forum/viewtop...f10349bbb144875bbe029cb3a01b9&start=480#p5183

 

Me either. Probably around $150.

 

ah, I see
I also saw on the everdrive forum that the PSIO needs a "special modchip" installed as well...
does it also come with a usb port or is this sd-only?

 

It's not a "special modchip". It's a device which is intended to detect when the PSIO cartridge is connected.

It's supposed to redirect the CD hardware I/O to the cartridge port only when PSIO is attached so the PS console can still be used without the cartridge attached.

 

ah, they could have written it in their faq instead of calling it a "special modchip"

 

Technically, they're absolutely right at calling it a "special modchip" as in it's a chip and it's not like a regular modchip ... lol

 

I think this is great for emulating a cd-drive and being a modchip, but if it's over $30.00 I wonder if they'd make a more basic model (say just a standard sd card adapter). Would a ram cart (like the Sega Saturn) be possible via parallel port?

 

I have some PsyQ ram carts that I never figured out how to enable the ram on them, otherwise they are just like blue action replay carts with a parallel port or scsi port hooked up to let you load files from your pc instead of CD drive. I plan on getting back to them one day, but ram should be possible on the parallel port.

 

So it seems they discovered recently that the Playstation will not be able to "see" the PSIO via parallel port without an internal modification. A "detection board" will be included, but the user has to solder that in themselves. To me, this is not a good development.

 

I am more annoyed with the SD-card route they took.... personally I don't care if I have to completely remove the stock drive (that's why you are installing an ODE) or install some modchip for the PSIO to work , but SD cards??? that's a huge letdown.

Give me a solder-version that installs internally with a USB port , that's the ultimate setup - not some rectangular thing sticking awkwardly from the back :\

 

Yeah, I'd rather just have a single board replacement of the CD unit that is internal to the system, than one which requires internal modifications as well as an external dongle.

 

The only problem with replacing the CD unit is there are different pin-outs used throughout the PlayStation life, similar to the Saturn. I would like something that acts as a pass through so you could still use the CD drive. It could boot the UI off a default CD that was mounted when first turned on.

That isn't the PSIO though, which is aiming at two different markets. One the homebrew development, the other the ODE. I think I'll stick to my xplorer fx carts running caetla for the moment.

 

^ speaking of xplorer carts, is there anything special you can do with a gameshark?

 

Which is actually weird, since i have one of those GameShark / ActionReplay carts that connect to the parallel i/o port and it takes full control of the system.

It boots straight to the cheat cart "OS", totally bypassing the SCE / PS1 logo and boot system, as you can see on this example:



So why they need an extra "special chip" to make this possible?

 

ive not read their blog or dev logs for a few month but I believe they can take alott controll from just the PIO (not rly a parallel port)... But Audio CD data and a few other signals arent routed to the PIO, and these where what they needed. Maybe one of the hardware guys can explain. but I used to look at it to make one myself, and too many projects and this way above my head at the time (still ... i tink). anyway, just like the modchips, to run whatever and get all data at the right place an internal board would be needed. I hope to see proof soon or just a "cheap" release (not priced above 40 euros).

 

The parallel I/O connector provides access to the peripheral bus. An external cart is merely meant to decode things to unused parts of the memory space. An external cart can't disable other peripherals on the bus such as the internal CD controller, at best it can OVERRIDE their data (this is a slightly risky practice). It's possible to avoid conflicts through software trickery (snooping CD controller writes off the bus via hardware, but forwarding reads to a new external CD controller ie the PSIO via software patches), but this is rather tedious. Either way you do it, that only more or less enables CD-data compatibility.

The internal CD controller handles more than CD-data though, it has a direct connection to the audio system to stream CDDA and CDXA (it also has connections to the CD mech system that might need to be smoothed over). The parallel I/O connector doesn't have access to any of these signals of course. For true compatibility, you need the same direct access as the internal CD controller has, though it might be possible to kludge in compatibility some other way. That is probably the reason behind the internal mod.

This is stuff I brought up at the very beginning of Haunted's now-deleted original "hard drive" thread.

 

Thx Calpis, sounds like a intresting hack.

 

Well I think they moved in the the peripheral direction (rather than drive replacement) because they wanted it to be more like an Everdrive. You don't have to mod your system, just plug and play. Now withe the requirement to mod the system, makes all that moot.

Also appreciate the technical descriptions Calpis.

 

I think the parallel port was destined to require modifications with something like this (either the PSIO or the system). To me, It makes a lot more sense to work with the parallel port's native functions (is it really limited to about 3 megabytes per second transfer?); I think this better exploits the PSX, and allows more careful judgement about the best practices and choices to make within those boundaries.

As a side note. Is it possible to interface SCSI or PATA to the parallel port? This makes more sense IMO (especially if it's only limited to protocol translation). Not only could you use SCSI and PATA CDRW drives, but there's CF card to IDE adapters. Would probably be much cheaper too, especially with all the time spent developing better firmwares and hardware mods for something that can't do stuff right. People would have a tough time building one, so I don't understand why this shouldn't be attempted, especially a party trying to market something like the PSIO (seems very expensive and not very flexible). And what about USB to parallel port? These options seem a lot better, more homebrew friendly, more flexible, and much less of a pirating device toy (no offense).

Whether someone wants to replace their dead PSX cd drive, or replace it with something solid state (sdcard, ROM, etc), it's still going to require extra hardware and software to emulate things not possible without the original CD-drive (or an external CDRW drive). Much emulation and cost is needed for functions that are only possible with physical media.