Sony PSX Game Enhancer: has the device been dumped yet?

I recently remembered I had one of the PI/O devices for the Sony Playstation after seeing some information online, and a thought occurred on whether the device has been dumped yet. I’ve yet to find anyone else who owns one, and searching online yielded nothing but abandoned 1990's websites.

The one i own is not the "Plus" edition which had a secondary com? port for an external connection (to download updates for codes I presume). The label on the unit states that it's a Game Enhancer "Plus", but it does not contain the Second Port, so I guess I have one of the earlier versions. I'm willing to have it sent to someone to dump it if there is an interest in doing so. I do nothave pictures currently because the device is up in Canada currently and I’m in the states for another 8 days.

Several people have declared it a rehash of the PAR device for the Playstation but the Game Enhancer was significantly different. The bios is a "World" bios, but it required hot-swapping to load any imported games on CD-R (it needed to check for the base Region block on a retail Black Disk). It does support multi-disk, such as Final Fantasy 7 and The Legend of Dragoon. There was an option to view copied VRAM (VRAM was copied every time the Reset button was pushed), and you could view Entire disk contents and load specific files (For Ex. running the mappy executable directly from Namco Meseum Vol 2.). the GE internal bios can be used as an actual system bios, as far as I’m aware of, because of the chip being an actual mod chip, where as I’m not sure if the PAR would be able to do the same. don't quote me on this. A long time ago I heard that Sony had a massive lawsuit against several companies for using internal SDK files to make these devices, so the sale of GE and such devices was outlawed in the united states. I'm not able to verify if that is the case or not. However i do know that certain GE Devices could read DVD-R, and that several PI/O Devices exist for the playstation that allow the system to be used as a dvd player. My GE device could not, as it's an earlier version.

I'm wondering if there is any interest in dumping the device, if possible. I have no skills in de-soddering and decapping chips. Software I can write though. if this does get dumped, an emulator can add an option to the menu to boot into the GE instead of the PSX BIOS ROM, much like the unit's On/Off Dip Switch. just some food for thought.

 

I once had the "Xploder" my old PSX.

It also had an additional parallel port and a friend was using it to "mess" with the PSX and uplaod "custom" programs to the cartridge.

But that was many, many years ago.

Would that be the same, as google images defenitly show its looking like the same cartridges

 

There were a whole bunch of "Game Enhancer" carts - they tended to use V1.x Action Replay hardware (sometimes with an expanded flash chip) but not the Datel firmware - most of them used modified versions of K-Comm's "caetla" ROM. Note that the ones that are using the Action Replay design (even if they have the 25 pin port) need a special interface card and can't be connected directly to a PC parallel port - although the Action Replay / GameShark V3 and the Xplorer / Xploder can.

If the device has a 128kB / 1Mbit flash you should be able to dump it simply by reading memory from 0x1f000000 with the cart plugged in. If the dump is good, the first 128 bytes should contain a string something like "produced by or under license of Sony Computer Entertainment".

 

Exactly, no need for a dump since all these just used slightly modified versions of Caetla with a gigantic accent on using the file browser to do a swap trick.

I wish I hung on to my PC-Comms link, I ended up getting rid of it once I flashed all my friends' carts to the newest version of Caetla. Once Datel and Interact started the "Pro" line of PAR/GS with the built-in trainer I didn't have any use for that cumbersome setup.