Well I want to start doing some homebrew on my PSX. So the first step is to get my console ready. I bought a Gameshark Catridge for my PSX. I put it in the serial port, and hooked a serial cable from it to my PC's LPC printer port. Now I read that I need a Comms Link ISA card, or I can build an adapter for the LPC port, called Freewing. But I can't find the schematic for it any where. Does someone still have this, or know how to build the adapter? Or maybe someone has the Pro Comms Link card and would be willing to sell it? Is there some other way I can flash and use my Gameshark with my PC to make homebrew?
xplorer carts are so much easier to deal with as they use a standard parallel port. Although in the days of vista 64 and no more parallel ports, this isn't quite so much of an advantage. I've been looking at a solution to that problem though, if I get it sorted then I might do something about the action replay carts too.
A $2 microcontroller with integrated USB could directly replace a Comm link card (10 I/O), that is for buffered I/O (cheat searching and program uploading). For unbuffered I/O (unmodified file serving I think), USB's low packet rate would make it unbearably slow (~1 KiB/s). I believe parallel ports (+ Freewing etc) are still the answer. What I've worked on is to bring something like the Freewing circuit onboard the AR, this way the circuit can be greatly simplified, a lot of the logic is redundant.
If you're going to use a parallel port then buying an xplorer is easier, it plugs straight in. Thats what I was using on my old machine. My new laptop has no parallel port. If it did then vista 64 would not be happy about programs that do bit banging. Thats where I'm starting from. I think the problems you mentioned are solvable. I have some ideas I'm still parts gathering, then I need to find some time to put it together. I'll let you know how I get on. ebay is normally a good bet. a couple of years ago there were loads, now there aren't so many. You don't need an FX, any of the xplorer carts should work.
