Seeking service manuals/hardware information

[pink_c]

Hi,

Does anyone have a good quality copy, OCR'd would be great, of the SCPH-5500 service manual? The only one I can find on the net so far is pretty janky in terms of quality and readability.

Alternatively, if anyone has a pin-out and block diagram for the GTE chip in the SCPH-5500 that would also be super useful to me.

Thanks!

[TriMesh]

I've never been able to find one. There is a a cleaned up and more legible version of the manual that was done by nocash:

http://www.psxdev.net/forum/viewtopic.p ... 500#p12998

There is no pinout for the GTE, because it's not a separate chip. It's implemented as part of the main CPU, and it's not even possible to monitor the signals to it because it's on the R3K coprocessor bus which isn't bought out to pins on the package.

[pink_c]

There is no pinout for the GTE, because it's not a separate chip. It's implemented as part of the main CPU, and it's not even possible to monitor the signals to it because it's on the R3K coprocessor bus which isn't bought out to pins on the package.

Thanks very much for the information. I meant the GPU rather than the GTE, I blame someone else for the fact i made an error
Do you think the GPU or the video encoder would be the easier place to tap video information from? I see that there's 8 digital lines per color channel on both. I'm basically wanting to take that data and push it through a FPGA to convert to TMDS/HDMI with linedoubling etc. I know there are already solutions available to do this for me, but it's just not as fun as making my own!

[TriMesh]

There is no pinout for the GTE, because it's not a separate chip. It's implemented as part of the main CPU, and it's not even possible to monitor the signals to it because it's on the R3K coprocessor bus which isn't bought out to pins on the package.

Thanks very much for the information. I meant the GPU rather than the GTE, I blame someone else for the fact i made an error
Do you think the GPU or the video encoder would be the easier place to tap video information from? I see that there's 8 digital lines per color channel on both. I'm basically wanting to take that data and push it through a FPGA to convert to TMDS/HDMI with linedoubling etc. I know there are already solutions available to do this for me, but it's just not as fun as making my own!

I think the pin pitch on the video DAC is slightly larger and it might be a bit easier to solder, but the signals are the same - it's just an 8:8:8 R:G:B parallel bus. Also note that on the earlier boards (PU-7 and some early PU-8), the video DAC is connected to the read port on the VRAM rather than the GPU

If you're restricting yourself to the later boards (Late PU-8, PU-18 and onwards) then the GPU has the advantage that it has all the signals you would need to generate HDMI from in one place. One other thing to watch is that if you want to make this a multi-standard solution then you should be aware that a retail PlayStation generates slightly incorrect line and frame rates in the "wrong" mode (I.E. PAL for an NTSC console and vice versa) - although if you have some spare PLLs on the FPGA you can easily fix this just by giving it the correct clock.

[pink_c]

Thanks again for the help on this!
I'll be using a sacrificial PU-18 for experimentation, so I'll take a look at the GPU and see where I can go from there.

[rama3]

Best if you find yourself an SCPH-7000 or later and the "SCPH_9000_3RD_ED" service manual, then use the video encoder section.
It has great quality and detail and all your signals will be there.

Once you have something, it will be just a matter of mechanically adapting it to the older PU-18 or earlier boards.
PU-20 (SCPH-7000) and later are best to start this kind of project.