forgive me for asking this i know it has to be a horrible question but I have to ask, I've been looking into the PSONE slims for a while and was thinking about how keyboards are made with the conductive flimsy plastic , would it be pussible to unsolder everything on the psone's board and resolder it to a smaller pcb type thing to make a much smaller portable?
Anything is possible but this will be hard as hell to do. the PSOne has several chips that have dozens if not hundreds of pins on them that are around the size of a pinhead each. Then there's the need to map every trace out which will be a royal pain when there are thousands. On top of that there's all the transistors, resistors, capacitors, etc. All of this is surface mount stuff and that is much harder to solder by hand than older stuff that is either through hole or a larger sized surface mount chip. Lastly is getting the board made and with how small the traces will need to be on top of most likely needing several layers to shrink the design down that throws the idea of home etching a board out the window. You'd need a professional service to do that which will cost quite a bit. In other words it's not worth trying to do unless you're a professional hardware developer. Just make the portable a little larger to fit the board. It'll be harder to lose that way versus something the size of a smartphone.
Also make sure that "your" new pcb is smaller than the original one, else it won't become smaller :highly_amused:
It's technically possible - the PSone circuit board (especially the last -71 revision) is not that dense and only has parts on one side, so you could clearly shrink it by going to a layout with parts on both sides of the board. I suspect that this would also force you to use a (thicker and more expensive) multiple layer board, though - both because the connection density would be higher and because you would need additional ground planes to shield the signals on one side of the board from another. Maybe a better answer would be "yes, but you probably wouldn't want to pay for it".
A more affordable route would be to get a decent spec'd ARM board (BeagleBoard comes to mind) and run an emulator on it.
On a similar note, you might just be able to saw the board in half and still use it. Ever seen someone trim a GameCube motherboard? That baby will cut down to a credit card sized board with some minor component relocation. But, AFAIK nobody has documented it or tried it. The PSone that is, the Gamecube has been cut down many, many times.
I must be bored, I just took a couple of PSones apart and had a look I don't think cutting down the board is going to be as easy as the GC - mostly because the GC already has the optical drive and PSU on sub-boards, and it's all on the single main board in the PSone, but here are some observations: The front and back of the board are mostly connectors - you could desolder those and then chop a bit of the board off that way. The general layout of the board (with the controller connectors facing you and the parts up) seems to be power supply components on the left, then the CD control circuits and then finally the CPU and GPU on the right. The problem is that they overlap - if you draw a line across the board that includes all the PSU circuits then you also end up chopping some parts off the CD control circuits (although they look like mostly passives) - the gap between the CD circuits and the CPU/GPU is a bit cleaner, but I still suspect that you would find it hard to cut to board so as to not damage either the mechacon or the h-bridge driver on the CD side and the clock gen and video DAC on the CPU/GPU side. What maybe you could do is get two boards - cut one to extract the CD controller subsystem without worrying about anything else, and then cut the other to get the Power supply and CPU/GPU section and fold them back to back - there would be quite a bit of wiring, though - the power side is fairly simple, but the sub bus that connects the main CPU to the CD controller and the boot ROM has rather a lot of connections in it.
thanks guys thats really helpful info and i don't want to use the beagle board/arm because It feels different playing on original hardware
