Reverse-engineering Playstation 1

I don't speak Russian, but I know good RE work when I see it.

The big parts have been black-boxed already - my own console had an Xplorer cartridge running Caetla at the time the PS1 was big! - but it'd be nice to see what actually really goes on inside, say, the SPU, or the GPU's actual handling of a few corner cases. PS1 emulators are already very good (indeed, they can even run the specially copy-protected images without any patches now, as I tried a couple of months ago with a couple of rare games), but those last few percent are the hardest.

I saw MAME mentioned, and that makes sense, given the attention to detail.

It gets even better in the Wiki

http://translate.google.com/translate?depth=1&hl=en&sl=ru&u=...

and results land in SVN repo as Logisim modules (logic level simulator)

http://code.google.com/p/psxdev/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk

This is a bit off topic, but I'm amazed how understable the text is given that it has been translated by a machine, in a matter of seconds, for free.

>The street became colder, short Russian summer moves for the winter. Brains cooled down a bit and began to think.

I've always anticipated winter with a similar sentiment--I like the way this was said.

When I saw "translate.google.com" in the URL, for some reason I had a feeling it was going to be in Russian... I don't know if it's a cultural thing for Russians to be reverse-engineers, but there certainly seem to be a lot of them.

This reminds me of http://breaknes.com/info , which judging from the style of the diagrams might be done by the same person. There's been a ton of transistor-level RE on the NES, but I hadn't seen it done for the PS1 until now. The level of attention to detail is amazing. It's also interesting that they're using Logisim, which is often regarded as a "toy"-level/educational logic simulator (it has some pretty limiting features that make it rather unsuitable for real diagrammatic logic design.)