Hi guys, just a quick question.. Has anyone ever managed to make a DIY CD-Rom attachment fro the Pc engine?
No. It uses a fair amount of parts including a few Hudson chips that are custom. You would need to reverse engineer them and build replacement via fpga to control laser position, read the CD, decode them, and pass it to the host console or to RAM banks. Also another chip to handle battery save RAM.
I've never heard of an IFU clone. I don't know much about the audio bits but the drive is a type of SCSI and the BRAM part is fairly well documented.
I've heard that before too about it being related to SCSI. Certainly it's possible you could hookup a different drive if you wanted to devote enough time to it. But it doesn't seem likely that it would be anything simple or else someone would have done it already. I'm sure many people have heard there was supposed to be some way to hookup the CDROM attachment to a computer somehow. An official contraption of some kind.
There was one planned for Duo but never happened because the cost of Duo system plus an adapter would have been more expensive than a stand alone 2x SCSI CD drive. I have seen picture of it, I think it was in a VG&CE magazine. One of the general gaming magazine of the early 90's
There was an identical drive sold for computers that plugged into a docking station that looked pretty much like a half width ICU. You could use the same drive with the PCE or a computer. I've heard about a PC interface that plugged into the PCE through the card slot but never seen it.
There's a couple of scans here courtesy of the Turbo Play Magazine archives... http://archives.tg-16.com/EB/big_intelligent_link.jpg http://archives.tg-16.com/TURBOFORCE/TF-03-04.jpg
It's too bad no one has made an adapter that allows you to hook up a regular USB CD-ROM drive. Since original CD-ROM drives are expensive and harder to find in good condition, a cheap USB CD-ROM interface unit would be pretty welcome.
Even more welcome would be cheap components with enough features to do this. Because then we could make all kinds of things cheap. You need to build an entire SCSI controller and something to process the audio. A cheap part just won't cut it.
That would be true. But the point wouldn't be to make the interface cheap. The point would be to make replacing CD-ROM drives (the mechanical part that usually dies first) super easy to replace.
I take your point but the main part that break is a gear that costs at most a few bucks. The economics doesn't make sense. Fortunately there's been a lot of great work with replacing optical drives on other consoles recently and hopefully one of those guys will apply their skills to this one. I have enough drives and parts to last the rest of my life but if I could use a HDD/SDD instead I'd be interested.
I agree. A drive replacement would be swell too! I personally only have one CD-ROM2 drive, and it was a pain in the ass to find one that was clean, calibrated, and in good working order. If it dies, I'll have to spend a lot more time to track one down. But at least it's modular. With the IFU-30s you can just swap them out. Can't do that with a DUO. Hopefully someone comes up with an IFU-30 compatible module that can replace the CD-ROM mech.
There are lots of parts with the capabilities you need for this - you can get an MCU that has high-speed USB, a fast (4 bit) SD card interface and an I2S interface for driving the audio DAC for about $5 - you would also need something like an FPGA for interfacing - the price of that varies depending on how much capability you want, but an $8-$10 (~ 50k gates) part should be fine for this application. The major cost is going to be the time you have to put into it to get everything working, especially since the PC-Engine is not that well documented.
A modern MPU with a similar spec to the one in the CDROM2 + external RAM would cost about $5. Whether that could do the same job plus the other stuff required is questionable. 50K sounds about right based on what's in there. Even if you need 100 it's a few bucks more. So $20 tops. Now take that logic and do the same for a device that would let you emulate a simple cartridge. Should work out to less. Yet something like a TG/PCE flash cart sells for $80. And that's using information that's been available for decades. Unless you can somehow acquire the knowledge for free and build it yourself for fun the the idea of a "cheap" device is unfortunately just a fantasy.
