Thoughts upon PS1 / "Yaroze" homebrew community

Since I jack and shit about programming, then I will say this.

Since I posted a question in the hacks and mods forum about PS1 homebrew and what not, because some of you are both programmers and modders. And defors post got me thinking. Then what about it ? And also is the memory card that came with the Yaroze just a memory card, or does it have any kind of copy protection in it ? since if it is just a normal memory would it not be possible to copy the Yaroze stuff on to another normal memory card ?

Here are the two posts that got me thinking.

my post

defors post

Then go crazy with thoughts to the rest of you

 

first off, the memory card is NOT a normal memory card. It's a true hardware dongle of sorts. I believe that the card COULD be used as a mem card, as there is a chip missing- possibly for onboard storage, but as it is, it's for auth only.

Here's a picture of the inside of one of my access cards:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/defor/4253047736/in/set-72157623156640926/

The first rule of thumb is that all front devices on a ps are serial devices. based on that- it could be doing do just about anything.

The reality is that the dongle is only checked once, and there are simple methods to bypass it that have been documented on the forums and elsewhere. If your nterest is actually in reviving a NY dev community, I'd suggest leaning more towards the legal side of the process.

If you can get your hands on a media kit box, any unmodified Japanese ps or a modified one from any region will run the boot cd and access card. While you don't end up with the pretty system, it's a big savings off the limited edition black system. In addition, you don't need the DTL-H3050 serial cable either, a SIOcons-compatible cable or Interact Sharklink will substitute just fine.

So, as with everything else PS, the Yaroze is really novelty, a nicely 100% legitimate development option that at one point was supported by Sony...
It's more of a collector's item these days, but it still can serve as a nice small development kit if you're on a budget... Just with some serious limitations imposed by the lack of storage media on the PS

just my thoughts...

 

defor, as I opened the thread with. Then I do not program, but I think it would be great if there came a homebrew community , that began releasing games, (graphical) demos and what not for the old PS1, like there is for other old gaming platforms. And oh yeah, thanks for explaining to me the NY "memory card" thing. Cause I have not been aware of what it really was before, other than it looked like a memory card.

 

I would love to help but I lack all the resources minus a PSOne and coding skills.

 

I would be very interested in this as well. My coding skills were never that but last time I touched this stuff was over ten years ago. When I started playing recently I used bladelib and rather than the Yaroze stuff.

A community or at least a central resource for information, examples and any tutorials would be great. As trawling all the old scene websites for comflicting information makes it very difficult, even more so with the closure of geocites.

And of course, I cant see how, but if I can be of any help..

Dan

 

Geocities used to be a great source of info on psx stuff, I have some backups, but not everything of course.

 

There are still some homebrew being developed on Playstation.

 

to my knowledge, most of the now deceased yaroze site was backed up and archived before it simply got wiped from interwebs.

there's a pile of stuff there, including small stuff coded using yaroze and a shitton of examples/tutorials etc...

also, as for comparison

 

I have an OLD (I mean REALLY OLD) SCPH-1020 memory card that looks exactly like the yarose dongle. Even the same NEC microcontroller (which happens to be pretty much PIC-like, exept that NEC makes them on MASK-ROM for corporate customers) and the flash rom position (IC2) populated. So it's the NEC chip firmware which is different on that card. It's otherwise the same as an standard PS1 memory card.

 

im too lazy to check mine as for now, but i'd imagine all mine look like a memorycard instead of yaroze one as they're all from pal units oldest dating back to europe lauch of ps1

oh well, i wonder if it can be turned into a working card by adding a chip

 

No it won't, because the firmware on the NEC chip is different from what a normal memory card would have.

 

figured that's the case, but is it certain that it's missing what's needed to function as a memorycard ?

 

It's not about missing. The firmware on the NEC chip is programmed to do something completely different than data storage. Remember, the Yarose dongle is NO MEMORY CARD.

 

It seems they have simply used some PCBs they had lying around for regular MCs, rather than designing a completely new one for such a limited edition.

Is there any known method to dump the firmware? I'd expect PICs to have a readback option (for testing the regular/non-PROM version during prototyping), but it might be disabled or completely absent from the final chips. If we could somehow find the programming information for this chip (they were not designed for use by Sony only, were they?), we might be able to replicate it. Wouldn't be of much use, though, but still interesting ;-).

 

yeah, im aware of that, it's just that who knows how they actually made it.
what does the console check from the card ? and why doesn't it work as a memory card to begin with?
were they afraid that it gets corruted in use and b0rks the yaroze ?

maybe it's just the same thing with some crap like some ID added the console queries from the card or something stupidly simple like that, and they just decided to spare 0.000001$ per card by trashing the memory flashrom

even tho i gotta admit that i've hardly looked at the yaroze thing, and as a way to patch the disk to not need an access card exists, it most likely also shows what it seeks from there

guessing games are always fun either way ^.^

 

I would be interested in this...But I wouldn't be using official Yaroze hardware =/

 

Well as with any dongle, it just need to be something you can verify it's presence and it's difficult or impossible to copy. An custom firmware microcontroller on a memory card PCB without any flash memory is just that, don't you agree ?

You can solder a 128KB flash there (preferably the ATMEL model printed on the PCB) but I bet with you nothing will happen.

 

heh, i think i'll pass

don't feel like soldering nything in the card... it's so pretty :3

 

So I suppose the way forward to create a 'clone' dongle would be to either look at the software on the yaroze CD to see what data is sent and expected back, or log the traffic on the serial bus. This could then be recreated on another microcontroller?

Saying that, doing the above is about as legal as using the patched CD thats floating around, although 'psxboot' image thats here and there does need fixing up, it does work 100%.

 

I'd say stick to the patched loader as it's "cheaper" lol.