Haunted360 - PSone (SCPH-102) CD-ROM Pinouts / Slot Loading

[Haunted360]

Seen it. I have also communicated with him, and he did not do it right. I mean, he just put the drive into a slot loading system. He did not 'hack' the wires etc...

Thanks anyway!

[80T]

U'r welcome

I'm also dieing to make an optical drive mod for my PSX. Doesn't matters which kind as long as it's a PC optical drive or something "bulletproof"
I totally HATE how stupid SONY had used PLASTIC in the PSX optical drive ! Plastic ? ! ? WTF ! ! ! No metal rods ? ? ? ? ? What were they thinking about ? ! ?

@About your experiments with the slot-loading drive... The sled motor being too fast -> there's no biggie - it's just a different "gear ratio" if I can name it like that.
The problem it was that the feedback on tracking it's sent through the laser > RF amp > etc... So if you use the laser from the slot-loading drive the laser will send feedback to the proc. accordingly on where the laser is in that drive... You were trying to position a tracking system different in ratio from the one that was gave the feedback synchronization signal. The only problem here were if the new optical drive's tracking system is too sensitive for the PSX's feeding source.
Sorry if I don't sound very fluent but after a sleepless night combined with my "good" english this is the result.

[Haunted360]

Thanks! haha. Glad to hear someone understands.

As for the drive, the plan is to reverse engineer it to take a PC IDE interface. Impossible for me, but again its an idea...

[80T]

Thanks! haha. Glad to hear someone understands.

As for the drive, the plan is to reverse engineer it to take a PC IDE interface. Impossible for me, but again its an idea...

If you're trying to say that you want to use an entire IDE optical drive then make some kind of IDE -> PSX optical drive emulator... don't even think abou that... ever. N'either the most advanced modders won't even think about such an approach.
Best way in my opinion would be to simply search for the closest possible match PC CD-ROM drive that can be adapted to use the exact analog signals that PSX's drive uses. That means the closest tracking/focus coils impedance, the same number of pins on the laser diode (3), the same number of pins on the laser receptor (10), and hopefully the closest mechanical parameters of the lenses assembly itself...
With some ribbon cable adapter (pcb, ribbon connectors, and whatnot) you could actually manage to adapt the new mechanics to the PSX's mobo connectors...

I would recommend you to take a look on a PSX service manual and study the block diagrams for a start.

[Haunted360]

Sounds interesting...

Were working on something else awesome for the PS at the moment, but this will probably come after we finish it. Again, don't expect anything for a long time...

[80T]

Sounds interesting...

Were working on something else awesome for the PS at the moment, but this will probably come after we finish it. Again, don't expect anything for a long time...

Any hints on the awesome stuff you're working on... ?

EDIT: I think I've got it... You want to interface an HDD to the PS1... ?

[Haunted360]

Haha you got it.

It will be very tricky, but were on it...

[80T]

Don't want to say that you won't be able to do it as I thought about such thing not once and came to the conclusion that is near impossible with normal means but if you are sure you want to go that way I might suggest you to try and emulate the optical drive and not try to hook yourself to any kind of data bus or anything else related that would require modifying the BIOS or even games themselves...
If you want full compatibility (games and consoles) you might just try that. A pretty related project would be the WODE (Wii Optical Drive Emulator) While I don't know anything about programming and stuff I'm not pretty sure that WODE it's indeed what you are aiming for when try to emulate the PSX's optical drive.
Anyways this kind of drive emu should replace the RF amp and the spindle/sled/focus/tracking driver... Kinda complicated stuff I might say...
Don't forget to document about all that is related about CD's formats, optical drives, and lasers. I will try myself to think about some kind of block diagram, though my knowledge abut stuff like this is very limited...
One more thing not to forget: You also want to use a 2.5" laptop HDD as it's has less power consumption and lower voltage. You only get 8 volts and 3.5 volts out of a PSX PSU.

Best of Luck! I really hope to see the PSX revived.

[Haunted360]

Haha, thanks. Yea we got it under control for now - but it will get a lot more harder once we really get into it.

Were going to try anyway, and who cares if we fail. At least we were the first to try.


Updates will be on my site linked eventually to its own site once it is going well...

[Haunted360]

Sorry for the bump. This is not dead (yet)...

OK I was doing some more testing today and I am getting closer

I will presumably bypass the;

- RF Amp
- Focus / Tracking IC
- Coil Drive
- Motor Drive

These are all located on board a CD-ROM by default...


Dont expect anything to happen for a while but im getting there very slowly.

I left my printer going for 22 hours long to print 302 pages of the PSY-Q manual as well as some of my PlayStation documentation I have written (secret document for me )


Thanks and I will post when I get somewhere...

[humakabula1]

just remembered I got that imac a while ago, if you still need it it I have a spare slot loading drive

[Haunted360]

How much for it?


NOTE: http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll ... K:MEWAX:IT was going to sell me 3 for $20

[humakabula1]

I can give you the whole thing for a 4.3" screen or a couple of batteries

[Haunted360]

Hmm, I do have some spare batteries.

I do have 2 kits of Lithium Ions with a protection / charging circuit from a laptop I can give to you.

I have at least 4 battery kits I can give you. The other 2 being Ni-Cd...


You can have them all for the SLD if you want......

[humakabula1]

PM me the details and we will sort it out from there.