Blog Posts in 2020

January

PSNee on a SCPH-9002
2020-01-05

To ease homebrew development and play out-of-region games, let's add a modchip to a SCPH-9002. Of course, a MM3-based one would be cheaper and more efficient, but it's more of an educational project, with Arduinos and stuff.

March

PSX Serial to USB Adapter
2020-03-05

Porting homebrew games means testing games on real hardware. For consoles like the PSX where the medium of choice is CD-ROM, it makes sense to upload code with a serial adapter during development to increase iteration speed and avoid coasters.

Pi Zero in a PSX Case: TV-Out
2020-03-05

What better way to spend an afternoon than to solder some pins on a fruit-based single-board computer and hook it up to even older hardware of the last century? Exactly.

May

Running Red Hat 8 from 2002 on Linux 5.7.0-rc3 from 2020
2020-05-04

Where we try to run old userland with new kernel land and see which assumptions still hold, and where the userland vs. kernel land API breaks (hint: it's fixed-sized buffers). But hey, even audio and X11 still work.

December

The WAD file format of WipEout Pure and Pulse (PSP)
2020-12-19

Figuring out the structure of data files in old handheld games, which will in turn allow things like DLC conversion, analysis, extraction and other fun things like a skin editor (eventually!).

Filename hashing in WipEout Pure/Pulse WAD files
2020-12-24

In which we finally figure out how 32-bit integer "names" and filenames are related to each other, so that we may (in some form) figure out the original file names contained within game data files.