Hi everyone, this is my first post and I hope I'm not asking a dumb question, but here goes.. I have the original USA Turbografx16 with the docking bay and portable CDROM drive. Has anyone tried using a more recent CDROM or DVD ROM drive for a computer and interface it with the Turbografx16? Computer drives seem to be way more rugged and last for a very long time when used with care. I'm thinking if one could make a cable with the pinouts for the original CDROM and necessary electronics and hook it up to a new DVDROM or CDROM drive, or even an older SCSI CDROM drive, and just leave it on the side next to the Turbografx16 CD docking unit. I've googled a whole lot and haven't found any instance of this being done. Is this impossible? Thank you for reading this bill53
This is an idea that has been floating around. Where by, someone creates an adapter that allows you to interface a USB/SCSI CD-ROM to the PC-Engine. Enough data about the PC-Engine and CD-ROM attachment exists for such a device/adapter to be made, but no one has stepped up to the plate to make one. A shame really, since they could really make a lot of money!
I'm sure it's possible, but might be quite complicated. The basic problem is that the drive - although it uses the same basic command format as a SCSI device - was designed before there was any standard command set for CD-ROM devices, so it implements anything that doesn't map in a reasonable manner to the old SCSI CCS (which was designed for discs...) to vendor specific commands. If you get a SCSI CD-ROM it will almost certainly implement the SCSI-2 CD-ROM command set - so most of the commands that the PCE tries to send will end up getting rejected. As a example, the SCSI-2 "Play audio" command is 0x45, but the PCE uses 0xD8 for the equivalent function, and this means nothing at all to a regular SCSI CD-ROM. As a result, a simple cable isn't going to work - you would need an interface circuit that read commands from the console, decoded them and then generated the correct request packet for the connected device. Certainly not impossible, but far from trivial, too. It would also need a lot of testing.
anyway SCSI is better than special/original protocol like ps1 used for example. but if it's rear console i think it's problem where i can get/buy it?))) and if there are lot of users of such console it can be very exclusive project.
For all practical purposes, it is a custom protocol. Electrically, it's basically SCSI, but from memory it only uses 2 standard SCSI commands (READ(6) and REQUEST_SENSE) - everything use is done using vendor commands, and the codes (and generally the format) have nothing in common with the ones that were standardized in SCSI-2. On top of this, the system consists of multiple parts - there is the actual CD-ROM drive, the interface unit (IFU-30) - this has extra audio hardware and 64KB of RAM in it, and a system card that contains the boot code. In order to make something that's going to be useful to someone that just has the base console, you need to implement all that, too. The later system cards contained more RAM, so if you want to support later games you really need to add that too. It's certainly all doable using modern programmable logic, but would require a fair amount of reverse engineering. Back when I was looking at it, I got it to the point where it would boot, but never got the audio side to work.
