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Guest

I picked up a cut-rate PSX. The thing is solid as a tank. Extremely well constructed. In fact, for the firesale price paid, it was a bargain based
solely on features and construction.

Unfortunately, it does not boot the MC exploit (shocking). Worse, it does not accept a JPN Linux RTE disc for booting (not surprising in hindsight). It is different than using an out-of-region disc, where it ignores the out-of-region disc completely. The JPN linux RTE disc results in an error message basically saying you can't use this disc. (Thats the gist, I will translate it completely when I have more time). I may try disconnecting the internal HDD to see if that affects bootup.

Chances are I will relegate this specifically to be the "entertainment" system and let the other PS2's be the dev systems, but I was curious about how accessible the additional hardware devices were, thus wanting to try booting homebrew onto it.

Has anyone themselves had, or heard from anyone else about, any successes in dealing with this exotic beast ?

In pictures, I tried comparing many of the chip part numbers to those on the new PStwo. Not surprising, they are very close. The revision of IOP chip appears to be exactly the same, as well as SSBUS. Of course, both of them also use the new EE+GS.

My personal feeling is that the PSX was an experiment to try different things, and Sony wasn't terribly worried if as a product line is didn't perform very well, so long as many specific concepts used in the product itself succeeded, to be used in other products.

pixel · Joined: 30 Jan 2004 Posts: 791

On a side note, this PSX is a failure. I'd even say this was a test board from SONY, in order to test if building a full featured console will catch the crowd. It hasn't, and they sure will learn their errors for PS3: build a cheaper box, with less multimedia features, focusing on gaming.

Anyway: have you try swapping discs or something ? In order to boot homebrew I mean. And, just for your interest, I managed to boot ps2link using the Action Replay Max Evo's usb stick (had to pack the binary though, since the loading address won't do otherwise... maybe a highload could do too.)
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pixel: A mischievous magical spirit associated with screen displays. The computer industry has frequently borrowed from mythology. Witness the sprites in computer graphics, the demons in artificial intelligence and the trolls in the marketing department.

Guest · Posted: Wed Sep 29, 2004 5:40 pm Post subject:

pixel · Joined: 30 Jan 2004 Posts: 791

I mean, swapping as in putting a demo disc, then, when it boots, pulls the tray out using a knife or something similar, then put your homebrew ps2link, and close the tray :P
_________________
pixel: A mischievous magical spirit associated with screen displays. The computer industry has frequently borrowed from mythology. Witness the sprites in computer graphics, the demons in artificial intelligence and the trolls in the marketing department.

Guest · Posted: Wed Sep 29, 2004 7:01 pm Post subject:

Guichi · Joined: 20 Jan 2004 Posts: 10

karat does not have distributors license for the action replay line anymore. their last update was AR 2.27b or something like that. There is no jap AR Max Evo with supah sjeep Pgen.

The PSX may be a sales failure but to developers this thing is a dev goldmine. The PSX has 64m RAM on the EE(compared to 32 in normal PS2) and 8m RAM on IOP!

Actually getting code running on it is another story. :)

Guest · Posted: Thu Sep 30, 2004 1:42 am Post subject:

zaphod · Joined: 21 Jul 2004 Posts: 53

It seems the Max Media Player Boot is the most proising method here. ONly problem is making a decent elf launcher that's compatible with it's braindead .ELF loader.

pixel · Joined: 30 Jan 2004 Posts: 791

Read what I said above about their loader.
_________________
pixel: A mischievous magical spirit associated with screen displays. The computer industry has frequently borrowed from mythology. Witness the sprites in computer graphics, the demons in artificial intelligence and the trolls in the marketing department.

Guichi · Joined: 20 Jan 2004 Posts: 10

Guest · Posted: Thu Sep 30, 2004 11:26 pm Post subject:

Hey Guichi, thanks for the advice!

Unfortunately, I kinda do care about looks, since it does look fairly cool.

On the other hand, I find it kinda amazing how many separate RISC media
processors and microcontrollers are in this thing beyond the normal PS2
chipsets. I would love to get a closer look from the software side.

I am going to try a couple of different things such as disconnecting the
HDD. I suspect it tries to boot from that first. Maybe...just maybe, it
would then boot from CDROM. Otherwise.... well.... just have to think
some more. :)

Gorim

Guest · Posted: Fri Oct 01, 2004 12:49 am Post subject:

Well, Sony really put thought into this thing. If the HDD ide cable is
disconnected, when the system powers on, it just shuts itself back off.
Dang! :)

zaphod · Joined: 21 Jul 2004 Posts: 53

Well for those who ahve one, i might suggest buying swap magic japan version, or maybe pro loader. they seem to have elf loaders in them, and i think at last one of them can boot a USB elf.

gorim · Joined: 21 Sep 2005 Posts: 18