Proprietary arcade systems from the early to late 1990s, in spite of the admittedly ridiculous prices they sell for nowadays, are actually nice platforms for ho

Proprietary arcade systems from the early to late 1990s, in spite of the admittedly ridiculous prices they sell for nowadays, are actually nice platforms for homebrew development. More often than not there is no protection at all against running homebrew software, as typically anti-piracy checks are implemented in the games themselves rather than in the hardware. Of course there is no documentation most of the time; even though MAME usually provides enough information to get custom code running, anything more complex than a simple demo will require further reverse engineering of the system. But figuring it all out is arguably part of what makes it fun. The current platform I am obsessed with is Konami's System 573, a PlayStation 1-based board introduced in the late 90s and used most notably in Dance Dance Revolution. I have been reverse engineering it and writing documentation as part of a joint effort for about a year [1], uncovering previously unknown details such as scrapped support for booting from a CF card. There is still plenty of work to be done; Konami released several expansion boards providing all sorts of functionality from MP3 playback to online connectivity, and those have been a hurdle to reverse engineer due to their heavy use of FPGAs. Nevertheless, we already have pretty much everything required to develop 573 homebrew games using existing PS1 SDK projects. [1] https://psx-spx.consoledev.net/konamisystem573 https://psx-spx.consoledev.net/konamisystem573