PSone USB/Serial (Mini Yaroze)

I thought I would post up some pics of my little hack/mod. This is a mini-yaroze if you like;-)

Inspired by the posts by alphagamer and defor in the Sony section - I thought I would further investigate adding a serial/link port to the PSone. Anyway here is my USB take on it, works great. I have setup the yaroze sdk in DOSBox and the cable works great with siocons at all speeds.

This is an earlier work in progress


I forgot to photograph the PCB before refitting the shielding, but hey ho Ill open it up again when I can..



Its a pretty simple mod, you basically connect up to the test points on the motherboard. In this instance becuase I am connecting it straight to a FTDI232 I dont need to invert the handshaking as the circuitry to invert the handshaking isnt present.

To recreate the original PSX serial port the handshaking is inverted so you need to invert the signals

The problem I had was that when I powered the PSone down there was lots of garbage sent to the PC. So I added a 74HC244 to buffer the serial lines and isolate them when the console is powered down.

Finished picture..




Another problem I have experienced is MS Virtual PC. Its serial port emulating seems to suck, or at least the handshaking part of it so I switched to DOSbox 5.0 MB which seems to work very well.

Ive drafted a schematic for the old PSX style port and the USB variety above and will post the details up in the original thread here http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=19777

Comments, improvements, ideas greatly welcomed

Dan

 

Very neat job

Will this work on the PS1 Original?

 

Thankyou.

No not directly but I have a schematic that does work its just on a scrap of paper, Ill get the details for the others up when I get them onto the computer and in a format where you might be able to understand it (ie, not im my crap handwriting:lol

 

hah i suppose you don't need my cables then?

nice job- I've been working on finishing my design, but pretty much for specifically a ps1 style port so that it can be used for link, etc. then if you want, for computer if you use one of the serial to linkport options...
got a little sidetracked with other projects in the meantime of course...

good to know the testpoints checked out- I assume you removed the resistors faking the system into thinking the port was dead

 

Yeah will still have some cables please if the shipping isnt too extortionate :nod: .

Your testpoints were spot on, but you dont need to remove the resistors you mentioned. I checked the resistance (1kohm iirc) and looking at the schematic for the old PSX they are actually part of the design so I left them in place. Think they act as pullups or something.

Ill get a few link games and test it and post up the schematic once I know its all working. Ive got a bit ahead of myself and even got some PCB designs done for both DIL and SMD 74 series for both the usb and traditional psx ports.

Funny thing with the PSone, there is quite a bit of room down the left hand side for stuff like this.

Thanks again

Dan

PS. Ive added some extra pics to the first post

 

yeah- at one point i HAD a source for linkports from sony.. seems they ran out.. you find a suitable option, or just plan to salvage them from older systems?

 

Good job!

 

very nice :thumbsup:

 

Here is the schematic for the above, very simple.

 

Now everything it needs is a yaroze-like paint job ;-)

 

This is great work. Also double thumbs up for the Chuckie Egg love!

 

Hello Dan first of all, thank for this great work and a have same question for you about how configure doxbox to work with a "emulated serial port", the programs on the host like siocoms or hitserial, use channel and irq to work with serial port, but the "usb to serial ftdi" is diferent and I don't know how to configure it. I hope that you understand what I mean because my english is very bad :banghead:.

Same pics of my mod.


The ftdi without usb connector


Leds for tx and rx


And here is the final look of the spch-5502



Works fine with hyperterminal but i am no able to send exes becouse i don't knok how configure dosbox.
Hey, now it works very fine, I make a mistake with the dosbox.conf typing serial1=directserial realport=com1 instead of serial1=directserial realport:com1 it is my fault sorry.

 

Awesome! Looks really really nice, I can't wait to do this to my PSOne and possible a sexy paint job ;D

 

I found a really nice match there as well, but I can't seem to track it down in dark grey, just black, which the yaroze is not.

 

Hmmm with all those great mods, now the only thing we need is a PS1 homebrew community . Cause it would be fun looking at some upcoming PS1 homebrew projects. With games, (graphical) demos, and so forth. Cause I know some of you can program sorry if this post is totally off topic.

 

What I'd love to see would be a revival of the yaroze community on a public basis, and I know a few members here are in possession of the archives, but I'm unsure of the legal aspects- Assembler- if you're around, could we use a thirdlevel to possibly mirror the old site up to here and/or extend it for "new" developers?

Perhaps fodder for an outside discussion.

 

If you need hosting bro then let me know.. Dedicated 100mbit hosting ;D

 

wow! MAD respect! ;-)

Too bad the PS1 coding scene is kind of dead... such a great machine to prog on! :-(

 

Ok so i have a stupid question im keen to get this to work with my old ps one. But im not really electronics minded, i have a yaroze currently and sicons etc.. id like the same set up, using USB. Im not sure about the inverted signals that were mentioned above? are you suggesting that its not required as the psone doesnt invert the data at the test points but on the original machine ( psx ) it did? Id be keen for a few more instructions on this :0

Also struggling to find the parts locally. anyone have a source that ships overseas? im located in New Zealand.