What emulators should I write?

[Cyberman]

There are some obviously missing parts.
One of which is how the playstation recognizes it and stores data too it. Not exactly documented I noticed .. well about anything. They had to have some sort of SDK for the silly thing too. It's kind of crazy. At least they used the CR2032 the most common battery next to a AA alkaline.

Now the question is should I split this into another sticky list for people to try as an emulator?

Cyb

 

[aprentice]

There are some obviously missing parts.
One of which is how the playstation recognizes it and stores data too it. Not exactly documented I noticed .. well about anything. They had to have some sort of SDK for the silly thing too. It's kind of crazy. At least they used the CR2032 the most common battery next to a AA alkaline.

Now the question is should I split this into another sticky list for people to try as an emulator?

Cyb

don't sticky it unless theres is interest showed

 

[Normmatt]

I have a few documents i managed to salvage from some old sites, too bad they are in japanese

Not too mention the old sdk demo is lost for ever, i wish i was around too back it up when it came out

 

[kucalc]

If you're wandering about the specs of the CASIO fx-9860 graphing calculator:

* Renesas SuperH-3 RISC Big Endian clocked at 40MHz processor (Max CPU speed is about 133MHz. If anyone knows how to program a SuperH processor or knows anything about it please tell me.)
* 1.5MB of built-in flash memory, can be expanded to 1GB with an SD card
* 128x64 high contrast LCD

Again, if anyone has experience with SuperH processors please tell me. If I remember correctly, a SuperH was used in the Sega Dreamcast.

 

[Cyberman]

If you're wandering about the specs of the CASIO fx-9860 graphing calculator:

* Renesas SuperH-3 RISC Big Endian clocked at 40MHz processor (Max CPU speed is about 133MHz. If anyone knows how to program a SuperH processor or knows anything about it please tell me.)
* 1.5MB of built-in flash memory, can be expanded to 1GB with an SD card
* 128x64 high contrast LCD

Again, if anyone has experience with SuperH processors please tell me. If I remember correctly, a SuperH was used in the Sega Dreamcast.

Well the SH3 was NOT used in the Sega Dreamcast that was an SH4. To be blunt it was a Very BAD idea to do that. Sega would have saved themselves a lot of trouble by using an ARM9 instead.
However to answer your question. The SH3 was originally made by Hitachi semiconductor, which is now Renesas Technology. The SuperH family of microcontrollers goes up and up in performance. There is quite a volume of documentation they have on the various processors available. You should look carefully to see which one matchs most of the specs on the one that is your calculator then grab all the information you can find on it.

Cyb

 

[Exophase]

There are some obviously missing parts.
One of which is how the playstation recognizes it and stores data too it. Not exactly documented I noticed .. well about anything. They had to have some sort of SDK for the silly thing too. It's kind of crazy. At least they used the CR2032 the most common battery next to a AA alkaline.

Now the question is should I split this into another sticky list for people to try as an emulator?

Cyb

Of course Playstations can write to it like a normal mem card, how it detects it/what other communication is possible is another question. Can probably be understood without too much reverse engineering of the PS1 code..

There's an SWI for it, right? Disassembling the BIOS should be a good place for understanding the protocol for communicating with PS1, as well as how the RTC works.

 

[Cyberman]

Of course Playstations can write to it like a normal mem card, how it detects it/what other communication is possible is another question. Can probably be understood without too much reverse engineering of the PS1 code..

There's an SWI for it, right? Disassembling the BIOS should be a good place for understanding the protocol for communicating with PS1, as well as how the RTC works.

The playstation sends packets of data using 128 byte packets. The memcards are what is termed small sectored flash. 128 byte sectors and 8k pages. It is essentially an SPI EEPROM (seriously).

Knowing this you should be able to acertain, you don't need to even touch the bios routines. The bios routines are pretty low level for the memcard. Thus it is likely that you will want to examine a games behavior when it's saving data instead. This is possible using a PS1 emulator with debugging capabilities (pSX).

Cyb

 

[Exophase]

The playstation sends packets of data using 128 byte packets. The memcards are what is termed small sectored flash. 128 byte sectors and 8k pages. It is essentially an SPI EEPROM (seriously).

Knowing this you should be able to acertain, you don't need to even touch the bios routines. The bios routines are pretty low level for the memcard. Thus it is likely that you will want to examine a games behavior when it's saving data instead. This is possible using a PS1 emulator with debugging capabilities (pSX).

Cyb

What I meant was that as far as the PS1 is concerned, the Pocketstation is identical to any other standard 128KB memory card. It's also entirely possible that it is identified as a Pocketstation by the unique identifiers in the header. I'm not sure how much actual interactive communication back and forth is done between the two devices in games (since I haven't ever used a Pocketstation with a real PS1 running a PS1 game which interfaces with it).

The SWIs in particular I meant were the ones on the Pocketstation's side, not the PS1 side; these would also expose any additional communication protocol between the two (and would be easier to get at than ones on PS1 games).

 

[Cyberman]

What I meant was that as far as the PS1 is concerned, the Pocketstation is identical to any other standard 128KB memory card. It's also entirely possible that it is identified as a Pocketstation by the unique identifiers in the header. I'm not sure how much actual interactive communication back and forth is done between the two devices in games (since I haven't ever used a Pocketstation with a real PS1 running a PS1 game which interfaces with it).

Hmmm apart from making a PS1 card emulator device for the PC this might be hard. This is kind of a Job for a Parallel port toy or USB device. This gets complicated fast however. I have documentation on the hardware level interface, as well as the PS1 memory card communication protocol etc. Perhaps inserting a Ghost system (one that copies data as it passes to and from the playstation) and dumps it via the USB serial protocol to the PC. That is the only way I can think of to analyze it.

The SWIs in particular I meant were the ones on the Pocketstation's side, not the PS1 side; these would also expose any additional communication protocol between the two (and would be easier to get at than ones on PS1 games).

Hmmm... I think that might be more difficult than you believe. If you could hack up a pocketstation PS1 emulator that can allow it to dump the bios via the playstation one interface you might be in business. With a memory map you might be able to for example stuff a bootloader program into RAM and have it dump data to the port it scaned from internal ROM. In either case this requires some hardware creation.
If you wish me to go over the details... hmm this is really a very technical proceedure just warning you ahead of time. It involves the use of CPLD's USB and some firmware writting. Nothing impossible just requires some serious hardware hacking in which the programming forum is not the appropriate place to discuse.

Cyb