PSIO Supposedly Working

nice video,s retrojunkie i,am watching this thread and the psio site every few days for updates i see the progress is building pretty fast good to see! any ideas on the price range of this device when its finished? i mean if its done will it be mass produced? or will the first few batches be hand crafted by some of you and then sold? or will it be sold as a do-it-your-self kit? because all of these options got there own price range. even so as i always say KUTGW!!

 

I hope the videos give an idea of the current state of the project.
No idea regarding price though, I'm sure the PSIO team will work out pricing once the a closer to final prototype is ready Remember mine is old outdated 1.1, not the new racy 2.0
Although, I suspect with the amount of pins on QFP-looking chips they'll be factory made to a point!
After looking at the solder job on the PSIO 1.1 board Shadow sent over, he did a damn good job. Better than I could - just look at my other videos ;D
I'm sure they'll let us know as soon as they are ready, it might not be for a while yet though. But progress is progress

 

Those days haven't ended for me, still somehow I'm managing to flip iDevices successfully thanks to their value retainment.

Anyway back OT. What's next for PSIO do we know what the next steps are to improve compatibility?

 

Personally I have no idea and anything I could offer is speculation and this isn't the thread for speculating on this topic. Clearly those who are the talent in this group are doing a pretty good job as the damn thing actually works. The issues currently being seen are pretty much those anyone developing a PS1 emulator would face as well.

 

Ok time to get back on topic.

 

Should the sceptical topic title now be renamed if the proto device is working.

 

It was requested several times, but I guess moderators do not see these requests.

 

I would think a separate topic tracking the state of the project and it's compatibility/advancements and updates may be more relevant, also to serve as a drama seperation...Not sure if RetroJunkie wants, or has the time to do that at the moment however.

 

That would then lead anyone reading the first 15 pages or so of this topic to be very confused. If anything a new topic should be created.

Personally I wanna see this thing handle something complicated but my knowledge of unusually coded PS1 games is extremely limited.

 

Game coding isn't a problem--presumably anything a game can check can be emulated via the CD controller and SPU's CPU interfaces.

The compatibility problems stem from the PSIO ONLY being able to emulate those interfaces which are available on the parallel I/O connector (by overpowering the real chips--bad), it doesn't and cannot actually emulate those sub-systems in-system because it isn't physically wired to the "internal" buses between them which pass the least of which the missing audio data.

It would appear that if the PSIO is to support CDDA/CD-XA, it must contain its own audio DAC and analog mixer since it does not appear the parallel I/O has provisions for digital audio input. Also short of fully emulating the SPU (which may not be possible from the parallel I/O) it's unlikely there will be full audio compatibility since IIRC the SPU can perform effects/do operations on the CD audio data.

(I do believe this stuff was forewarned ages ago.)

 

this was what cybdyn wrote some time ago. i don't know the details though i assume pcm style serial sound interface means digital, so no need for a DAC. if not, it will be quite an issue.

 

The connector does have I2S, but almost certainly it's an output, not input. Perhaps like the CD controller the data signal can be overpowered if it's unbuffered directly from the SPU. Then you have the (slight) issue of both sampling, and overpowering the same (slow) signal. Lots of unconventionality here.

 

It's an input - although it's configured to connect to a device working in slave transmitter mode, so the PSX is generating BCLK and LRCLK and the only line the external device can drive is the data. You also need to do something about the settings in the DSP, since that external input has it's own volume control and it's normally set to zero. That might require overruling some signals - trap write accesses to the CD volume register and remap them to the external volume.

 

Trimesh - is Quite Right

 

Regarding the question of should this thread be renamed, I agree that it would be better to start a new thread, maybe called "PSIO Compatibility, Suggestions, and Experiences" so that those with a PSIO (Prototype or, when it's released, release version) can post their experiences, and anyone else can posts questions and suggestions.

Personally, I doubt I'll be picking a PSIO until the compatibility is much better (which hopefully is just a matter of time, especially if the software is open source) but I'll be following the PSIO topic(s) with great interest. And kudos to cybdyn for all of his hard work and effort.

 

You want to do that, you do it on our forums. We don't go around to every forum reading everyones opinions

 

ta dah

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