hardware hacking

Engineer creates first custom motherboard for 1990s PlayStation console

The nsOne project joins a growing community of homebrew PlayStation 1 hardware developments. Other recent projects include Picostation, a Raspberry Pi Pico-based optical disc emulator (ODE) that allows PlayStation 1 consoles to load games from SD cards instead of physical discs. Other ODEs like MODE and PSIO have also become popular solutions for retrogaming collectors who play games on original hardware as optical drives age and fail.

From repair job to reverse-engineering project

To understand the classic console’s physical architecture, Brodesco physically sanded down an original motherboard to expose its internal layers, then cross-referenced the exposed traces with component datasheets and service manuals.

“I realized that detailed documentation on the original motherboard was either incomplete or entirely unavailable,” Brodesco explained in his Kickstarter campaign. This discovery launched what would become a comprehensive documentation effort, including tracing every connection on the board and creating multi-layer graphic representations of the circuitry.

A photo of the nsOne PlayStation motherboard. Credit: Lorentio Brodesco

Using optical scanning and manual net-by-net reverse-engineering, Brodesco recreated the PlayStation 1’s schematic in modern PCB design software. This process involved creating component symbols with accurate pin mappings and identifying—or in some cases creating—the correct footprints for each proprietary component that Sony had never publicly documented.

Brodesco also identified what he calls the “minimum architecture” required to boot the console without BIOS modifications, streamlining the design process while maintaining full compatibility.

The mock-up board shown in photos validates the footprints of chips and connectors, all redrawn from scratch. According to Brodesco, a fully routed version with complete multilayer routing and final layout is already in development.

As Brodesco noted on Kickstarter, his project’s goal is to “create comprehensive documentation, design files, and production-ready blueprints for manufacturing fully functional motherboards.”

Beyond repairs, the documentation and design files Brodesco is creating would preserve the PlayStation 1’s hardware architecture for future generations: “It’s a tribute to the PS1, to retro hardware, and to the belief that one person really can build the impossible.”

Modder re-creates Game Boy Advance games using the audio from crash sounds

Game boy Advance, gaming, gba, hardware hacking, Nintendo, Pokémon, pokemon emerald, Reverse-engineering, ROMs, sound files / Kelly Newman / January 22, 2024

To truly catch them all —

Create a bootable, working Pokémon game by recording it crash multiple times.

Kevin Purdy – Jan 22, 2024 5: 08 pm UTC

Game Boy Advance, modded, on display — Enlarge / Andrew Cunningham’s modded and restored Game Boy Advance could, with enough time, sing out all the data loaded into a cartridge.

Andrew Cunningham

Sometimes, a great song can come from great pain. The Game Boy Advance (GBA), its software having crashed nearly two hours ago, will, for example, play a tune based on the game inside it. And if you listen closely enough—using specialty hardware and code—you can tell exactly what game it was singing about. And then theoretically play that same game.

This was discovered recently by TheZZAZZGlitch, whose job is to “sadistically glitch and hack the crap out of Pokémon games.” It’s “hardly a ready-to-use solution,” the modder notes, as it requires a lot of tuning specific to different source formats. So while there are certainly easier ways to get GBA data from a cartridge, none make you feel quite so much like an audio datamancer.

TheZZAZZGlitch’s demonstration of re-creating Game Boy Advance ROM data using the sounds from a crashing system.

After crashing a GBA and recording it over four hours, the modder saw some telltale waveforms in a sound file at about the 1-hour, 50-minute mark. Later in the sound-out, you can hear the actual instrument sounds and audio samples the game contains, played in sequence. Otherwise, it’s 8-bit data at 13,100 Hz, and at times, it sounds absolutely deranged.

“2 days of bugfixing later,” the modder had a Python script ready that could read the audio from a clean recording of the GBA’s crash dump. Did it work? Not without more troubleshooting. One issue with audio-casting ROM data is that there are large sections of 0-byte data in the ROM, which are hard to parse as mute sounds. After running another script that realigned sections based on their location in the original ROM, the modder’s ROM was 99.76 percent accurate but “still didn’t boot tho.” TheZZAZZGlitch later disclaimed that, yes, this is technically using known ROM data to surface unknown data, or “cheating,” but there are assumptions and guesses one could make if you were truly doing this blind.

The next fix was to refine the sound recording. By recording three times and merging them with a “majority vote” algorithm, their accuracy notched up to 99.979 percent. That output ROM booted—but with glitched text and a title screen crash. After seven different recordings are meshed and filtered for blank spaces, they achieve 100 percent parity. That’s about the halfway point of the video; you should watch the rest to learn how it works on physical hardware, how it works with a different game (an ARM code mystery in a replica cartridge), and how to get the best recordings, including the use of a “cursed adapter” that mixes down to one channel the ugly way.

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