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IMPORTANT UPDATE

On the 20th of August 2022, Martin surprisingly released a new version of this documentation. While this fork will try to incorporate the changes, one important footnote that got added is the following:

I am homeless in Hamburg, please help me out!

The authors of this fork thought that this deserves more than a footnote, hence this notice here.

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This is a conversion/edition of Martin "nocash" Korth's Playstation specs document originally hosted at https://problemkaputt.de/psx-spx.htm. See https://github.com/psx-spx/psx-spx.github.io#readme for more details.
You can also download this website as a single-page pdf.

Martin is a difficult individual to reach (see https://problemkaputt.de/email.htm, especially the part about gmail), and so far, any attempt at contacting him about collaborating on this document failed.

Therefore, no copyright or license have been properly acquired to republish and alter this document. However, since this repository will accept and proceed to issue corrections, amendments, and additions to the original work, the fair use and derivative work doctrine is believed to be applicable in this case.

An important detail to know about this current document, as well as the original from Martin, is that it isn't a clean room reverse engineering project, as some people may seem to believe or repeat. A good chunk of the original document has been either directly copy/pasted from the confidential code and documentation from Sony, or summarized and rephrased. As this document isn't clean room, any work derived from it shouldn't be considered clean, and anyone saying otherwise is misguided at best. The reference source material, code, and documentation used to make this document can be found at https://psx.arthus.net/sdk/Psy-Q/

To discuss the contents of this document, or hang out with likely minded people on development, hacking, and reverse engineering of Sony's first console, feel free to join the PSX.Dev Discord Server.

Memory Map
I/O Map
Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)
Geometry Transformation Engine (GTE)
Macroblock Decoder (MDEC)
Sound Processing Unit (SPU)
Interrupts
DMA Channels
Timers
CDROM Drive
CDROM Format
CDROM File Formats
Controllers and Memory Cards
Pocketstation
Serial Interfaces (SIO)
Expansion Port (PIO)
Memory Control
Unpredictable Things
CPU Specifications
Kernel (BIOS)
Arcade Cabinets
Konami System 573
Cheat Devices
PSX Dev-Board Chipsets
Hardware Numbers
Pinouts
About & Credits
CDROM Video CDs (VCD)
CDROM Internal Info on PSX CDROM Controller