Optical drives FPGA replacements

Sometimes I wonder if "we" could save the future of consoles which have optical drives (such as the PC Engine) by designing and producing replacements in FPGA form. For example, in the case of the PC Engine, CD Rom drive addons are getting rarer and more expensive by the day, and of course, due to age and use, it (probably) won't be long before these would be impossible to find. The only way to save this, IMHO is by reproducing these CD units in FPGA.

How hard/impossible is this to do?

 

Nothing in the world of electronic is impossible...

... just very hard.


I asked the same question over and over to members here, so I will save the other members screaming.

Learn logic design, EECS and get yourself a FPGA and mess with it. A lot.
You will find yourself thinking how to design such a system and get some sort of prototype running eventually.

I am trying to make a PS1 SD Card system with my FPGA. I have been on it for nearly a year now, and I have no results yet. I am still learning Verilog, and all the functions of my FPGA.

Be patient. If you REALLY want to do it, then do it. But it will take a long time like I said. Especially for optical drives.


Good luck!

 

Hah, there is no way I could do it myself, I was just asking a 'general' question =)

But thanks for your reply, appreciated. What if such FPGA is based off emulation, rather than reverse engineering from scratch? A bit like the Minimig.

 

Hah, there is no way I could do it myself, I was just asking a 'general' question =)

But thanks for your reply, appreciated. What if such FPGA is based off emulation, rather than reverse engineering from scratch? A bit like the Minimig.

 

A lot of the difficulty depends on what documentation you can get, and what part of the system you can intercept. For example, if there's a convenient place to intercept and inject commands between the CPU and the disk controller, that's (relatively) easier to emulate, rather than if you can only access the motor/laser side of the controller. Additionally, if you have to reverse engineer all the commands for the disk controller, it can be a lot more work than if you have a datasheet.

 

FPGA are strictly digital devices, they can't just be dropped into the place of a CD lens assembly. In just about every situation it's impractical to rework a CD emulator back into a licensed console which is why it's rarely done. This goes doubly for old consoles like PCE where simple interfacing is a headache.

In the future when the consoles are unobtainable/unserviceable you'll have two choices, hardware emulation via FPGA kits or descendents of today's software emulators. By this time disposable computers will probably be highly parallelized and built upon nanotube transistors affording stupidly low level emulation. Because of this hardware emulation will probably return to obscurity, which isn't such a bad thing; <tangent> just because something is implemented in hardware doesn't make it good, often it means the opposite since HW emulators are derived from poor SW emulators and to be honest often not even designed with HW paradigms which makes them utterly pointless. Something people don't seem to realize is that SW is capable of modeling any degree of accuracy, is far less limiting and will always be the most accessible.

 

As I have learned, listen to Calpis. The guy knows what he is talking about