Recently, some PS2 Mechacons from the SCPH-7xxxx series have been dumped. Here's what I see, with PS1 implications included. SCPH-50000 and later have what is likely an entirely rewritten Mechacon, code-named Dragon, compared to earlier PS2s. 50000+ use ARM7TDMI, while earlier ones are supposedly SP...

For whatever reason, American PS1s never checked the license area. Even American PS2s don't--for both the PS1 and PS2 license/logo areas. (On DECKARD PS2s, it appears that the DECKARD has functionality to hack the region byte of the PS1 ROM, and the disk loader obeys this...? DECKARD PS2s have the s...

The mod chip detector code I saw determined the system region by reading 0xBFC7FF52, the J/A/E byte in the ROM footer. If the region was E/Europe, the mod chip detector detected itself. I used to use that as the path of least resistance for cracking mod chip detector code: make the conditional branc...

What did Japanese Yaroze consoles do in order to be able to boot non-Japanese games?

My SCPH-7000W, which is very much like a Yaroze, simply has an American BIOS (including the region letter in the footer that mod chip detector code reads).

I still want to get my SCPH-7000W dumped. Who could I send it to? Alternatively, if you tell me how to solder something to it I could do it. I don't know how to program chips to do dumping, though; I'm a software reverse engineer, not hardware unfortunately >.< Are the Yarozes still undumped? The fi...

I have a dump of the SCPH-7000W ROM if you want it, and could take pictures of the board if you want. The ROM is different than the standard SCPH-7001, having a date of about a month earlier. (SCPH-7000W has an American-region ROM, because English is better for a worldwide system's menus, and becaus...

Cool, would be interesting. Japanese (and PAL) Yaroze's aren't dumped yet. So the American Yaroze (DTL-H3001) has been dumped? I'm curious what's different in the Yaroze firmware. My guess is that the SCPH-7000W is functionally a Yaroze, but I don't have a legitimate Yaroze boot disk in order to te...

I have an SCPH-7000W (Midnight Blue region-free) and an SCPH-5903 (video CD). Do you think that I could send you these to have you dump them?

I also have a DTL-H3000 (Japanese Yaroze), but I figure that you would've gotten to those already.

I'm going to guess that going from 8 to 2 MB RAM for retail units was a late decision in the design of the PSX. It'd explain the use of a hack, but isn't conclusive. This is kind of like how the SNES probably had 128 KB of VRAM until late in design they dropped it to 64 KB. The SNES VRAM was word-ad...

If it weren't for f*cking PatchGuard, this'd be possible all the way to 8.1 x86-64...

I own a DTL-H1101 and could do this, but I don't know what level of detail you need. I'm not really capable of much more than using a multimeter, iPhone camera and flatbed scanner.

The PS2's cdrom firmware would be very interesting for PSX programming. Theoretically, the PS2 should be backwards compatible with PSX games. But the firmware is probably quite different, supporting both dvd+cdrom, maybe using a different processor, and different chipset. There are probably a lot o...

I like how only programmers have been known to start from zero :ugeek: I didn't really start at zero; note how that would have resulted in 11 games. I put Beatmania Best Hits as zero because it's a favorite game for non-game reasons, rather than a top-10 game in its own right. =^-^= I see Metal Gea...

0. Beatmania Best Hits (thanks for the 5th Mix source code, unknown leaker!) 1. Final Fantasy 7 2. Breath of Fire 3 (from which my Internet name Myria comes) 3. Final Fantasy 9 4. Beatmania 5th Mix 5. Nocturne in the Moonlight / Symphony of the Night 6. Rockman Dash / Mega Man Legends 7. Tower of Ba...

Command 19 50..57 jump to an 8x3 byte jump table (at 3A5Bh..3A72h in the SC430918PB firmware version). Command 19 58..5F should have another 8x3 byte table (at 3A73h and up), but that region does contain ASCII text "Licensed bySonyComputerEntertainment" instead of jump opcodes. Many of th...

I have my SCPH-7000W (Japanese Midnight Blue) BIOS file somewhere. I wouldn't know where to upload it, though. The SCPH-7000W has the same version number tag as other SCPH-7000's, but a different date. I have no idea what the difference actually is. I doubt it's significant - the CD controller "...

Wow, it's been more than a year since it happened, and I didn't hear =). Congrats no$ on finding the Holy Grail of PSX CD-ROM research! I didn't think there would actually be back doors to unlock the drive in it, hehe. I have an SCPH-7000W, the Japanese "Midnight Blue" sweepstakes model, o...