Sony’s original Playstation wasn’t huge, and they did shrink it for re-release later as the PSOne, but even that wasn’t small enough for [Secret Hobbyist]. You may have seen the teaser video a while back where his palm-size Playstation went viral, but now he’s begun a series of videos on how he redesigned the vintage console.
Luckily for [Secret Hobbyist], the late-revision PSOne he started with is only a two-layer PCB, which made reverse engineering the traces a lot easier. Between probing everything under the microscope and cleaning the board off to follow all the traces in copper, [Hobbyist] was able to reproduce the circuit in KiCAD. (Reverse engineering starts at about 1:18 in the vid.)
With a schematic in hand, drafting a smaller PCB than Sony built is made easier by the availability of multi-layer PCBs. In this case [Hobbyist] was able to get away with a four-layer board. He was also able to ditch one of the ICs from the donor mainboard, which he called a “sub-CPU” as its functionality was recreated on the “PSIO” board that’s replacing the original optical drive. The PSIO is a commercial product that has been around for years now, allowing Playstations to run from SD cards– but it’s not meant for the PSOne so just getting it working here is something of a hack. He’s also added on a new DAC for VGA output, but otherwise the silicon is all original SONY.
This is the first of a series about this build, so if you’re into retro consoles you might want to keep an eye on [Secret Hobbyist] on YouTube to learn all the details as they are released.
AI, make me a reverse-engineering platform that combines video recognition of chips and PCB tracks, and cartesian probing robot. Bonus if you can also interpret CT scan files. Output in KiCAD.
Ah, while you´re at it: combine the probing robot with Ghidra and other tools and disassemble all the data you can extract.
Tell me which AI can do this accurately. sofar copilot and chatGPT needed alott of nudging, poking and bending the the replies. It would be ow so cool, but you got to be a prompt engineer to reverse engineer. sofar i havent seen many vibe-reverse engineers who lack any kicad, datasheet searching nor programming skills (as in, none).
Claude and especially via Claude code can do really well with complex tasks.
I’m sorry Dave, I’m mainly optimized for filling up all search engine results with irrelevant information, and tricking old people on Facebook.
Have to say I watched this video and it left me really miffed.
No footage of it doing anything!
Did you miss the shot literally within the first 10 seconds of the video?
Yes… I think I thought that was the PSOne PCB.