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Upgrade the playstation 1 cpu or even recreate entire console motherboard

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What about the namcom arcade versions of the playstation 1 they would have more ram and a higher clocked cpu
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Trying to keep the idea alive again i have the money just need to know who to pay who do i hire? To do the job. Reverse engineer and a programmer still don't it will cost more then 3000$ And then i could sell them as upgrades
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Those reditt post are not me and there talking about a much more updated console
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Anyone take apart the arcade version of the ps1? I still believe there will be a match out there its been almost 30 years
 
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winetime said:
What about the namcom arcade versions of the playstation 1 they would have more ram and a higher clocked cpu
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Trying to keep the idea alive again i have the money just need to know who to pay who do i hire? To do the job. Reverse engineer and a programmer still don't it will cost more then 3000$ And then i could sell them as upgrades
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To hire someone to do it is going to cost way, way more than $3000. Pretty sure no one would buy it as an upgrade, even if you could get it done. You would never, ever recoup your costs. When I said $70000 minimum, I meant it, and even that's probably way too little. People who can do this kind of work get paid very well for their talents and the cost for an independent contractor on a short term project means you'll be paying even more per hour. You'd blow through $3000 in the first week, even neglecting tool costs.
 
I am willing spend 3000 $ on the project
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Same reason i wanted to find a match first i still think there will be one
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You have not personally looked at every R3000 variant device
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70000$ yeah right in 2024 for a risc mips r3000 device your out of your mind
 
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winetime said:
I am willing spend 3000 $ on the project
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Same reason i wanted to find a match first i still think there will be one
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You won't get anything for $3000. If you tried to hire someone to do it for that much, they'll probably just laugh at the offer or take the money and give you nothing of value in return.

As far as matches go, there won't be one. For the arcade version, I'm assuming you are talking about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namco_System_11

If so, it looks like it is the same hardware as the PS1 but with 1 MB extra VRAM, so that won't be of any help either. Even if you could put the extra VRAM inside the PS1, all of the games are already designed and programmed for the regular amount, so you wouldn't get anything out of it.

winetime said:
70000$ yeah right in 2024 for a risc mips r3000 device your out of your mind
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You're not paying for a r3000 device in 2024. You're paying for a reverse engineered version with custom IP ported to a new process with no volume to amortize the research and development costs. It will be very expensive. If you don't believe me, fine, I wish you the best of luck, but don't be surprised when you find absolutely nothing of what you are expecting in your search.
 
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winetime said:
I am willing spend 3000 $ on the project
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Same reason i wanted to find a match first i still think there will be one
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You have not personally looked at every R3000 variant device
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70000$ yeah right in 2024 for a risc mips r3000 device your out of your mind
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Bruv.... please get your thoughts together a bit before posting (or get Cocaine Bear away from your keyboard, LOL!). If you need to add to your post, use the EDIT button. :soda:

winetime said:
am willing spend 3000 $ on the project
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Then you don't have the money. :(

EDIT: 30 y.o processor or not, you need to pay for expertise... what he's been saying the entire thread. ;)
 
]-[itman said:
You won't get anything for $3000. If you tried to hire someone to do it for that much, they'll probably just laugh at the offer or take the money and give you nothing of value in return.

As far as matches go, there won't be one. For the arcade version, I'm assuming you are talking about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namco_System_11

If so, it looks like it is the same hardware as the PS1 but with 1 MB extra VRAM, so that won't be of any help either. Even if you could put the extra VRAM inside the PS1, all of the games are already designed and programmed for the regular amount, so you wouldn't get anything out of it.



You're not paying for a r3000 device in 2024. You're paying for a reverse engineered version with custom IP ported to a new process with no volume to amortize the research and development costs. It will be very expensive. If you don't believe me, fine, but don't be surprised when you find absolutely nothing of what you are expecting in your search.
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You seem to be getting upset maybe you should move on and let someone else respond to my post 70000$ were did you get that for mips risc r3000. It has been 30 years since console release for all you know its already been done
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nothing is impossible in my opinion
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How many R3000 devices are there? There has to be a match 30 years later
 
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winetime said:
What about the namcom arcade versions of the playstation 1 they would have more ram and a higher clocked cpu
Post magically merged:

Trying to keep the idea alive again i have the money just need to know who to pay who do i hire? To do the job. Reverse engineer and a programmer still don't it will cost more then 3000$ And then i could sell them as upgrades
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Wait... Sell what as upgrades of WHAT?

As far as "who to pay" and "who to hire"... the answer is: CHINA.

Shenzu to be exact...

They'll build you whatever you want.

If it's your dream to have a PS1 with an updated CPU, GPU, and RAM (which the PS1 isn't going to use because neither it, nor the games, are designed to use them...) then our dear friend China can make that a reality.

I'd suggest contacting one of the companies that makes weird desktop CPUs out of laptop CPUs. This should be right up their alley.

If you got 3 grand to casually toss at this project... then see if you can get them to throw in an arcade-perfect port of X-Men vs Street Fighter.


...I'll be your first customer! :beer:
 
rainless said:
Wait... Sell what as upgrades of WHAT?

As far as "who to pay" and "who to hire"... the answer is: CHINA.

Shenzu to be exact...

They'll build you whatever you want.

If it's your dream to have a PS1 with an updated CPU, GPU, and RAM (which the PS1 isn't going to use because neither it, nor the games, are designed to use them...) then our dear friend China can make that a reality.

I'd suggest contacting one of the companies that makes weird desktop CPUs out of laptop CPUs. This should be right up their alley.

If you got 3 grand to casually toss at this project... then see if you can get them to throw in an arcade-perfect port of X-Men vs Street Fighter.


...I'll be your first customer! :beer:
Click to expand...


I did not consider going with a Chinese (or Indian) based designer to get this done. There are groups there that run pirated copies of the tools (so no tool costs) and will work for very little comparatively. You're still going to spend more than $3K but it will be much less than trying to hire someone through legit channels.

The people that make weird desktop systems out of laptop CPUs won't help though, that's a very different type of work than what is being considered.

winetime said:
You seem to be getting upset maybe you should move on and let someone else respond to my post 70000$ were did you get that for mips risc r3000. It has been 30 years since console release for all you know its already been done
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nothing is impossible in my opinion
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How many R3000 devices are there? There has to be a match 30 years later
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Not upset at all. Just being very real and upfront with you. The $70K comes from working in the industry and knowing how much design engineers get paid, how much the tools cost, how much it is to manufacture the chip, etc. Like I said, best of luck to you, just trying to set your expectations with reality. If you find a solution and get something that works, feel free to post here and I'll gladly eat crow.
 
]-[itman said:
I did not consider going with a Chinese (or Indian) based designer to get this done. There are groups there that run pirated copies of the tools (so no tool costs) and will work for very little comparatively. You're still going to spend more than $3K but it will be much less than trying to hire someone through legit channels.
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There are no "legit channels" for doing this.

Taking a fully registered, trademarked, patented Sony product and making your own version of it.

It wouldn't matter if the developer was from Seattle or Sri Lanka.

I've got no idea why the guy wants to do this... but I'm the guy who scraped all the paint off of his perfectly good guitar and painted it white... so I'm in no position to judge. :)

I'm absolutely certain he can get this done under $3K. The schematics for the PlayStation are widely available and none of those components are expensive. The biggest expense will be paying someone to program the thing to actually USE the new CPU and ram. (Which won't matter anyway because the games won't use them... Unless of course you reprogram each of the games, too... but if you're doing it just to do it... then sure. Why not?)
 
The quote button isn't working for me but as the above post states. There should be a way in our present time period to get this done for 3 grand witch is what i am willing to pay to do it. More has been done with much less i would believe.

I Want to say this for example not changing subjects, the N64 game console cpu was unsuccessfully upgraded but they came very close from what i read. They harvested a cpu from an old printer. Which is very cool that they did that.

Witch gives me hope that out there, some where, in the 30 or so years since the consoles release, There should be a match hardware wise.
Something i can pull off of something else that will be semi compatible enough to program or tweak to work with ps1.

So i would like to invite anyone who has a R3000 Variant device to post here. Maybe put up some photos of the board. Maybe i could buy it from you if it looks like it would work for the purpose of upgrading the ps1.

But again i would be willing to pay to have one made but i am unsure of the path to get that done. I would have to figure out the way to do it as stated above there is no legit way to do this.

Hopeing and praying to accomblish a childhood dream of mine by doing this. Please post any useful information that may help me out. If you google search upgrade playstation 1 cpu , Google just spits back at you that it is impossible but i don't think so.
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I got to live my life so i have to go but i will check here often to see if i get useful info. I may repost if the subject gets lost along the way. Or the main idea gets pushed too far down the forum to find
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I am basically retired so i have alot of time on my hands witch may help this situation
 
Not trying to rain on your parade, but what you are asking for is difficult.

  • You would have to reverse engineer the existing PS1 hardware design
    • unless you are lucky enough to get a schematic
  • You would have to reverse engineer the boot code
    • it may or may not have BIOS
    • I have done a lot of embedded work over my career, and for low cost you write your own boot code as the traditional BIOS route takes too many CPU cycles)
  • Now that you have reverse engineered both, you would have to figure out how to get the modern processor physically connected into the motherboard
    • BGA (ball grid array) packaged were not popular back then, so it's probably a TQFP package (thin quad flat pack)
      • If it's a BGA, you will need access to a BGA soldering rework station
        • These new go for $100 K...might be able to get one used for about $10 K
        • Or, if you have a buddy who works at a PCB manufacturing house
      • If it's a TQFP, you can unsolder and solder by hand
        • However - the pin spacing if VERY tight...so will not a lot of patience
  • This is all irrelevant, as the odds of a different CPU having the EXACT SAME pinout is very remote
    • So, you will need to do cuts and jumps to fit it in
      • Good luck with this and trying to maintain signal integrity for 10 MHz + digital signals
Now - assuming you get all this solved, you will need to find the general timing algorithm in the source code and modify it to keep the same REAL TIME based on a faster CPU...and the timing has to be exact.

To hire someone to do all this...at least $70 K...with no guarantee that it will be successful.

As stated earlier, you can probably do this with a Raspberry pi and an emulator.

If you want to make a fun project, you can try to do this in an FPGA. For this project, you can get yourself an FPGA evaluation board for under $1000. Then, you would have to create VHDL/Verilog code to recreate the entire PS1 digital subsystem. If I was passionate about a project like this, I would go this route.
 
rainless said:
There are no "legit channels" for doing this.

Taking a fully registered, trademarked, patented Sony product and making your own version of it.

It wouldn't matter if the developer was from Seattle or Sri Lanka.

I've got no idea why the guy wants to do this... but I'm the guy who scraped all the paint off of his perfectly good guitar and painted it white... so I'm in no position to judge. :)

I'm absolutely certain he can get this done under $3K. The schematics for the PlayStation are widely available and none of those components are expensive. The biggest expense will be paying someone to program the thing to actually USE the new CPU and ram. (Which won't matter anyway because the games won't use them... Unless of course you reprogram each of the games, too... but if you're doing it just to do it... then sure. Why not?)
Click to expand...

Like I said, the patents should be expired so legally it should be possible (commercializing the work may get you into trouble but doing it for your own entertainment shouldn't).

The schematics that are available aren't for the chip itself. That's the issue. You can't just put a completely different chip and have it work, even if you rewrite the bios/firmware to get it to boot, it won't have the DMA controller or GTE that the PS1 needs in order to actually run PS1 games. So you have to reverse engineer the chip itself and create a new version that is compatible with the old one. That's what makes it so expensive. If want to just put a different chip in that is powerful enough to run PS1 games without those things, then you'd need to basically reprogram the entire thing to emulate the old chip with the new one, but then you might as well just get a r-pi (as someone else mentioned) and emulate it that way, it would make no difference and save you tons of money.

JrClocker said:
  • Now that you have reverse engineered both, you would have to figure out how to get the modern processor physically connected into the motherboard
    • BGA (ball grid array) packaged were not popular back then, so it's probably a TQFP package (thin quad flat pack)
      • If it's a BGA, you will need access to a BGA soldering rework station
        • These new go for $100 K...might be able to get one used for about $10 K
        • Or, if you have a buddy who works at a PCB manufacturing house
      • If it's a TQFP, you can unsolder and solder by hand
        • However - the pin spacing if VERY tight...so will not a lot of patience
  • This is all irrelevant, as the odds of a different CPU having the EXACT SAME pinout is very remote
    • So, you will need to do cuts and jumps to fit it in
      • Good luck with this and trying to maintain signal integrity for 10 MHz + digital signals
Click to expand...

You can find pictures of the CPU on the motherboard. It is definitely a QFP package. There are assembly and test houses that could package it for you but they'd need to custom design the package to match the original footprint and leads. They can even test it for you (once you've reverse engineered the signals and timing) to match Sony's. It will all cost a decent chunk of money, but would be cheaper than trying to buy all the equipment yourself though.
 
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]-[itman said:
Like I said, the patents should be expired so legally it should be possible (commercializing the work may get you into trouble but doing it for your own entertainment shouldn't).
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WOW! Patents expire after 20 years?!?! That's NUTS!

So what the hell is all this hubbub about RED and the patent for CinemaDNG? (I guess they still have a couple of years left on that given that I think it was invented in 2007 or something...)

Maaaaan I'm gonna make a whole new thread just for YOU! (Where the hell is the "heart" emoji? Ain't no love in these streets I see...)
 
rainless said:
WOW! Patents expire after 20 years?!?! That's NUTS!

So what the hell is all this hubbub about RED and the patent for CinemaDNG? (I guess they still have a couple of years left on that given that I think it was invented in 2007 or something...)

Maaaaan I'm gonna make a whole new thread just for YOU! (Where the hell is the "heart" emoji? Ain't no love in these streets I see...)
Click to expand...

Yes, for patents, it's 20 years. Copyrights, though, are much longer and apply to the software side. Trademarks, I believe, never expire as long as the company doesn't abandon it (don't use it for an extended period of time). That's why I said you probably couldn't commercialize it by selling upgraded PS1s. You could probably get away with selling just the chip though and probably even the service if the customer brought their own system (again, not legal advice, if you have a project like this, consult a lawyer).
 
I have a friend who can do all the solder rework no problem. They have all the equipment needed. They have a local shop near me. TechGenius i believe the company name still is. Its in Montclair CA. They do bga rework, mostly repairing cell phones,ps2,ps3,ps4,xbox,ps5,pcs,gpus etc: you name it, they do it. He is the best that i know of, people from all around send him things that they can't fix and he fixes them.

He once hand reballed the new atari upgradeing the cpu in it for me. I almost got a 8 core Atari... Thats a tale for another time. It didn't work because i chose the wrong chip. I later found out that there is a apu that would work. The new atari is a windows pc so there a bunch of choices for apu. It uses a standard bga cpu socket. I posted on atari forum about that failed project. I didn't want to throw anymore money at the project but it was fun to try to upgrade the Atari. It only cost me about 600$ to give that a shot.
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So i want to say hey if you want a fun project upgrade the atari vcs to an 8 core apu
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I also upgraded the internal bga storage chip on the atari vcs to double the size but once you do that it creates problems. Such as no being able to run the atari os anymore. So the system basically just functions as a computer. Again there is a bga storage chip on the motherboard that the atari os is on, I had that desoldered and soldered in a larger one and it worked so that is definitely possible.
 
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If i had been successful in upgrading the atari vcs i was going to convince my friend to sell that as a service for people. Atari VCS apu upgrade service nice ring to it huh
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I want make sure its said the Atari VCS does not use a custom APU. It used a standard bga socket so you can desolder it and solder in another chip completely possible it cost me 300$ to give it an attempt
 
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@winetime - Last warning. Please stop double/triple/quadruple posting. Use the EDIT button to add to posts, or pull it together BEFORE you post. Once in a while, we get it, but this is just nuts, man...
 
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