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First Log: Game Plan

A project log for Recreating the Nintendo Play Station

My attempt at making a functionally equivalent replica of the one of a kind Nintendo Play Station.

coltonColton 11/06/2020 at 05:500 Comments

For the time that I've been obsessing over the SNES SuperDisc, I have learned a lot about the console. Thanks to efforts to emulate the console I know the communication protocols used to communicate to the CD-ROM, I know the memory map of the cartridge and the I/O ports used on the expansion bus and a lot of other info. In fact, I know pretty much all there is to know about the console. The only thing I don't know is how the "Mechacon Controller" commands the actual CD-ROM drive to do things. This project is to document my efforts to reverse engineer the communication protocol between the DSP IC and the "Mechacon Controller" and then build out the rest of the console from there. Since all of the other parts are known and in my possession it should almost be as simple as exposing the decoder IC and whatever "Mechacon Controller" I come up with to the right I/O ports on the expansion bus and then creating my own boot cartridge with the BIOS rom that was dumped for the console a while ago. I will post all of the sources that I have pulled information from in the details of this project.

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