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Oh what an amazing feeling seeing one of my articles here. Let me share you a bit of history about this one: - A year ago, an old version of this article got s

Oh what an amazing feeling seeing one of my articles here. Let me share you a bit of history about this one: - A year ago, an old version of this article got shared in hn (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22932134 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22932134) and since then, google started positioning my site in their search results, and many forums started noticing the site. Yay! - Fast forward, I graduated from uni, continued working on more articles in my free time, and with all the newly acquired knowledge, I decided to re-write the old PS1 article to make it much more informational and accurate - This is the one you are seeing right now. - The rewrite wasn’t easy, though. Luckily, I found very kind and talented experts that lent me a hand, you can see them credited in the ‘Changelog’ at the end of the article. Curiously enough, we are still debating on Discord about some discrepancies regarding the main diagram shown in the article. LSI’s docs (the CPU manufacturer) and Sony’s docs contradict each other when they explain the layout of the CPU’s ‘main’ bus! But don’t worry about it, it doesn’t affect any statement in the article. It’s more of a need to have everything as accurate as possible. Finally, I’m always open to comments, improvements, suggestions, anything really! I share the writings here (https://github.com/flipacholas/Architecture-of-consoles https://github.com/flipacholas/Architecture-of-consoles) to discuss improvements but you can also find my email in the site. PS: The insight shared by developers in the parent thread is phenomenal.

ranma42 5y ago
> CD-ROM sub-channels traditionally store metadata, mostly to guide the drive. These aren’t user accessible and conventional readers rarely allow to manually write over them. Maybe early CD-ROM drives couldn't read the side-channel data, but all drives (readers and burners) after a certain generation can read raw 2448 byte (2352 byte raw sector data + 96 byte subchannel data) sectors. I think Plextor drives might have been the first to support it? > 5-stage pipeline: Up to five instructions can be executed simultaneously Although technically correct, that's a bit misleading IMO. The instruction execution is overlapping, but you can still execute at most 1 instruction per cycle (each stage of the pipeline can only execute one instruction at a time). You need a super-scalar pipeline design to do more than 1 instruction per cycle.
- flipacholas 5y ago
  > Although technically correct, that's a bit misleading IMO. I Agree. My issue is that the other consoles also have a pipelined CPU and I'm trying not to copy-paste the same long explanation from other articles every time. So I included a link next to the PS1's pipeline description. I will try to reword it though. Thanks!
- anthk 5y ago
  Yes, with cdrdao I could read any rented PSX disc under Linux in order to "backup" it.

ranma42 5y ago

> CD-ROM sub-channels traditionally store metadata, mostly to guide the drive. These aren’t user accessible and conventional readers rarely allow to manually write over them. Maybe early CD-ROM drives couldn't read the side-channel data, but all drives (readers and burners) after a certain generation can read raw 2448 byte (2352 byte raw sector data + 96 byte subchannel data) sectors. I think Plextor drives might have been the first to support it? > 5-stage pipeline: Up to five instructions can be executed simultaneously Although technically correct, that's a bit misleading IMO. The instruction execution is overlapping, but you can still execute at most 1 instruction per cycle (each stage of the pipeline can only execute one instruction at a time). You need a super-scalar pipeline design to do more than 1 instruction per cycle.

flipacholas 5y ago
> Although technically correct, that's a bit misleading IMO. I Agree. My issue is that the other consoles also have a pipelined CPU and I'm trying not to copy-paste the same long explanation from other articles every time. So I included a link next to the PS1's pipeline description. I will try to reword it though. Thanks!
anthk 5y ago
Yes, with cdrdao I could read any rented PSX disc under Linux in order to "backup" it.