additionnal ram on the parallel port

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Orion_
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additionnal ram on the parallel port

Post by Orion_ » June 9th, 2017, 3:36 am

would a PS1 game could have used the parallel port to get additional ram ?
was the parallel port intended for this use ? (because I doubt sony made the parallel port for action replay purpose ..)
it is strange that, no official hardware approved by sony use this port.
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Post by Shadow » June 9th, 2017, 9:31 am

Yes it would have been originally designed to be a RAM expansion slot. It would have been 'slow RAM', but it would have at least extended the amount of data that the system could store. It's really just a port which allows direct access to almost everything on the bus.

I guess Sony never saw any real potential use for it, though I'm sure they probably used it for in-house development.
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Post by pepe » October 8th, 2017, 9:59 am

is possible to remove some unused data of BIOS RAM Map (64 kb) to get more ram ?

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Post by Shadow » October 8th, 2017, 1:14 pm

No.
Development Console: SCPH-5502 with 8MB RAM, MM3 Modchip, PAL 60 Colour Modification (for NTSC), PSIO Switch Board, DB-9 breakout headers for both RGB and Serial output and an Xplorer with CAETLA 0.34.

PlayStation Development PC: Windows 98 SE, Pentium 3 at 400MHz, 128MB SDRAM, DTL-H2000, DTL-H2010, DTL-H201A, DTL-S2020 (with 4GB SCSI-2 HDD), 21" Sony G420, CD-R burner, 3.25" and 5.25" Floppy Diskette Drives, ZIP 100 Diskette Drive and an IBM Model M keyboard.

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