PS Hard Disk Drive

FPGA are simple yet powerful tools; you can learn to design with them without a solid digital background, and many people do, but you and your designs will suffer in the long term. Without question you'll develop incorrect notions about things (then argue with assertive people on forums) and then have to unlearn them later.

Start with the basic building blocks (Boolean algebra, gates, decoders, multiplexers, encoders, latches, flip flops, D registers, shift registers, counters, adders), play with 7400 chips and LEDs on a bread board, move on to computer architecture (which someone cannot really understand w/o a background in digital design), study computer schematics, buy a FPGA kit, start designing with schematic capture, then move on to a HDL. You'll then be ready to start hacking at a project like this (which BTW is not super suited to teamwork).

I've studied EECS stuff for the last 8 years on my own and through school and work, every single day. I still have a long way to go before the sky is my limit. eBooks/self-study initially will only give you superficial exposure,and only in areas you're interested in--keeping you short-sighted, I know this from experience. It wasn't until I was forced to do hard work outside my comfort zone in the classroom that I realized the importance of each discipline I had 0 interest in before. School will give you a huge head start at becoming a competent engineer (continued self study is a given), and high degrees I'm finding out, especially in math and physics, are even better if you want to do advanced things.

In the meantime it all starts here: http://www.play-hookey.com/digital/

 

Haha it sounds so complicated now.

I have soldered PCB's, made my own 555 timers and the like so I have SOME skill already. The advanced stuff I will learn as we develop it slowly.


OK so what would YOU do to start off...

Buy an FPGA and solder the PIO port to it and then use that as an Action Replay? So it will require uploading the ROM to it and then using it as a ROM for the PS. Thats what I was going to do as a test to get going...

 

This. Frankly, to me this sounds like the umpteenth "we don't really have experience but we're going to do <insert some grossly overambitious endeavour here>" project this forum subsection has seen. Calpis knows his stuff like nodoby else, arguing with him like this isn't going to make your project any more feasible.

My 2 cents? Have a look at a SCPH-1000/1/2 mainboard. They're the ones with the least integration of the CD subsystem, which - if I remember right from a similar misguided project I undertook three years ago - is spread over three or four chips with more or less documented pinouts and an 8-bit parallel bus. This way, you *might* be able to get around the requirement of interfacing on the RF level, by taking out one of the chips and replacing it with your board. Of course, this is going to require modifications to the PS hardware, but it sounds more stable than the PIO route. Good luck

 

Yea he does sound legit to me but uh, I think the PIO port is the best way for now. Later on like I mentioned, we will then find a way to go through the CD-ROM pinouts and or bus. For now, we are learning this stuff 1 step at a time. It is not like Calpis is going to teach us part-by-part about advanced electronics / hardware engineering now is he :thumbsup:

We just started on this, and yes we do not have any great skill in hardware. Like how a BUS works, or how a CD-ROM can be emulated from a Hard Drive.


For now, Blaze is working on the FreeWing so we can see how the .exe's are compiled, and sent to the PS.


After that, it is all going to be a nightmare...

 

Looking to an early Playstation motherboard I see:

CD Analog controller chip (controls the laser pickup analog shit like focus/tracking, getting data out of the photo diodes, laser diode power, etc)

CD DSP (analog to digital encoding of the data stream, cd data error correction, additional control of the analog parts through the CD Analog controller chip)

Mechanics controller (controls the overall operation of the drive including but not limited to disc security)

CD-ROM decoder/interface chip (this is the buffer/BUS interface chip which the PlayStation CPU talks to.

And to make your life easier, read this datasheet:


http://www.ddrservice.net/download/Integrated-circuits/C/cxd/1/cxd1199.pdf.html


In my early PS1 we have:

Mechacon (IC304): Some mask rom based Hitachi H8 controller.
Analog CD frontend/controller chip (IC702): CXA1782BR
CD-DSP (IC309): CXA2516Q
CD-ROM interface controller(IC305): CXD1199BQ
SPU (IC 308): CXD2922Q

CPU (IC103): CXD8530AQ
(lol that's the buggy PS1 CPU with ceramic encapsulament)

Toshiba Frame buffer (IC203): CXD8514Q

 

How does a Freewing adapter help you in emulating the CD drive if you dont mind me asking?

The AR protocol is about, on the hitmen site I think. Info on how the freewing interface works is in the freewing docs, which are also on the hitmen site.

Dan

 

Thanks for that .PDF link reference. I have lots of manuals on the PS and PSone but not the separate IC's. I Will download them later I guess...



The FreeWing is just to get the comms working between our PS and out PC. We wanted to see how the programming is done as you compile your .EXE, then send it to the Action Replay (PS) to be tested.

It acts exactly as a Net Yaroze...

 

This week I am going to emulate the PS3 on my NES.

I haven't got much experience but my mum says I can do it so I'm 100% sure I can.

In all seriousness though guys, it's a neat idea and at first I was a little excited by this but are you 100% sure you wanna go through all of this? It could be a huuuuge waste of your time and instead of learning something it might put you off this sort of stuff forever.

Sounds like you need to take a few steps back and start from somewhere near the beginning. A custom, closed and complex architecture such as the PSX is not a good place to start.

I'm not trying to piss all over your dreams and skills and I really do hope you get somewhere with this but second guessing people like Calpis is a sure sign that this will take you years and years and possibly cost a fair bit of money and potentially your sanity too.

 

This week I am going to emulate the NES on my PS3. There. Fixed. :thumbsup:


Yea, its going to be a nightmare but who cares! If we fail, we fail. At least we tried...

 

If you're just beginning to mess with 555s etc then forget this and return to it later. That puts us in the same boat, incidentally (my experience is an A-level in electronics from many years ago), so don't take this as an insult. I am incapable of doing what you're talking about and by the sounds of it so are you. There's no shame in admitting that.

 

What are you on?

I know were incapable of doing this but were going to try anyway.

http://www.freddiew.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/awesome5.jpg


Please stop posting now. It is all irrelevant stuff...

 

i sat through four years of physics, and am doing an EE degree part time atm


i was incapable of soldering 6 years ago,
i can now do smt wiring quickly and efficiently.

i didnt even know an avr was 6 months ago
now i've learnt assembly and am learning C

basically were ready to undertake it,
ready- prepared to learn/gather info/contacts for help/info in the future.
were didnt intend to know everything or even a large amount of what we needed to do from the start,
its a fucking long term project, so it can be done, its not hard to learn stuff if your committed to it.
i cant stress that enough,

didn't the neo myth 64 cart take like... 4 years?

i'm getting kind of sick of hearing peoples opinions on this and how we plan to work.

BACK ON FUCKING TOPIC

im looking for an old scph 1000 board its a jap version and it must have the s-video output, apparently that one has different cd hardware again.

 

That's the kind of board I listed parts from.

 

That was exactly what I was thinking since the first page.

I asked some experienced people in the past about that same project you are running after. All US psx games fit into a 1TB hard drive so this would be awesome but all the replies I got were: "it can't be done".

But I wish you all the best luck in your quest.

 

hmm, why not target on laser emu ? because it a old stuff, no any encrypt .
there is good way no need mod logic board, just plus pcb between laser interface to logic board.
by the way, get one SCPH-5903 to see what they did

 

If your going to shoot for the stars, emulating the laser mech would definately be the definative solution.

Whilst i can picture the basic building blocks of patching something into the parallel port, i will hold my hand up to not knowing a great deal about the ins and outs of low level optical storage.

Can any one shed any more light (laser light ) on this subject. The data which comes out of the optical block we have a number for.. 2x speed cdrom for a max of 300KB/Sec but just how much analogue data from the laser reading the pits and lands is needed to extract this data and would the speed of supplying that data even make it feasible with commonly available high speed logic ?

 

I might be saying nonsense here, but why don't you check out the expansion port?

I have one of those Action Replay carts that connects to the expansion port. When connected, it fully bypasses the original PS1 boot system to it's own. It also lets you play imports without any issues.

I think it would be easier (maybe i'm just guessing wrong) to reverse engineer this Action Replay cartridge and check it's software and maybe a possibility to load isos from a SD Card?

 

long time no update
still in the projects lot amongst a lot of other things.
i have bought quite a lot of hardware to investigate and help shed light on the exp port, including a v-mem.
starting gathering ebooks for C.

 

HORAY! Someone gets it!

Eventually, we will work on emulating the CD-ROM controller to make it run a HDD as you all ask...

Not easy as we know, but again were going to try.

Anyway PS development is awesome and fun! I have spoken to Andy Gavin (Crash Bandicoot designer / developer) about PS dev. and he stated that he does not have any materials or documents left from Sony Computer Entertainment of America.

 

lol, there no any encryption, so you just need emu laser stream, between TOC to jump your stream sector, is easy way.
just find one good FPGA man, help you how to raw dump when disc loading, than you will know how it easy stream it back