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Comment by ryanmercer | Hacker News Reader

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ryanmercer·

The teardown done by Ben Heck:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug-CyGXMabg

The repair done by Ben Heck:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qh91IO9cV48

The finally working video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaIfPuziJ-0

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Working in quote marks. He did an very impressive job, but it’s only half working. The cartridge port works, but he couldn’t get the drive to read. Shame. I hope someday, someone can get that working.

I feel like the “proper” thing to do, if the goal here is to figure out what the prototype is “supposed to work like” in order to develop emulators and so forth, is to watch the CD drive protocol on the line with an oscilloscope and then iterate on an FPGA that speaks that protocol but is just reading from e.g. blocks on an SD card. It’s not like there are any actual SNES-PSX CDs to read on it, so you don’t need the “CD drive” to read actual CDs, just to get the information of theoretical CDs into the console somehow.

I didn't watch the whole thing, but it looks that it can boot homebrew from CD.

Did you watch the final video? He got the drive to read, play audio CDs through the bootstrap SNES cartridge and then run a home-brew game off of a CD-ROM (no original games exist to test with so the CD format and hardware capabilities were reverse-engineered from the ROM).

"he couldn’t get the drive to read" is completely false. It boots a game off a CD-ROM!

I came into the comments to say this. I'm surprised the auction description doesn't mention that it has been worked on.

If it didn't before, it certainly does now.

"Though the CD-ROM drive was not currently working when it was found in 2009, it has since been repaired by Benjamin Heckendorn, a YouTube personality known for his console repair videos."

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