About the PS2



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There is a letter from Guido Mersmann, the author of MCControl :)


 
  Nov 29, 2001  

The MCControl2 project has been started a few days ago!

I got my Playstation2 a few weeks ago and I checked the PS2 card. I couldn't find out how it's working. So I decided to build a snoop hardware to find out how to access the cards. The parallel and diskport hardware seems to work with the PS2 card, but reading 8MB would take a long time. Just think about how long it takes to read a whole PS1 card. Of course it's possible to speedup the reading, but this wouldn't be very much. I think 3x PS1 speed would be the maximum. The PS2 cards are 250 times faster than the PS1 version.

I ordered the parts on sunday and they should arive today. Then I'll build a programmer for the AVR (Atmel) and the snoop device.

If possible I'll make drivers for the old hardware, but a speed version will be connected to the parallel or serial port and working on IO Boards, too. The new reader will require an onboard processor (very cheap) for speedup reason and using a serial/parallel bidirectional protocol.

There is one additional problem I have to solve. The new cards have an crypo/authentification unit (MagicGate) on board. I hope this unit is not used for each card access. The DVDPlayer is locked by MagicGate and can't be copied from one card to another. If the crytostuff is working on card only then it possible to grab the player before it arives there, but I don't think sony made it that easy.

If reading and writing is working there will be a MCControl2 as fast as possible, but it will take time to develop the same flexibility like with MCControl1, because I have to find out how the card filesystem is working and reverse enginiering takes a lot of time. Currently there isn't any (!!) cardreader project available. The only thing I know is the "DexPort" from InterAct, which is very simular to the DexDrive for the PS1. It uses the PCs USB-Port so there is no way to connect it to Amiga (without Mediator or other PCI Boards).

The PS2 itself is great! And the PS1 emulation is great, too! There is no difference and it's not possible to say if a real PS1 or a PS2 emulation is playing the game. Currently I am playing the RPG "Dark Cloud"!

 


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