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PLAYSTATION

Description

The PlayStation is a video game console of the 32-bit era, first produced by Sony Computer Entertainment in the mid 1990s. The original PlayStation was the first of the PlayStation series of console and hand-held game devices, which has included successor machines including the PSone (a smaller version of the original), PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, and the forthcoming PlayStation 3.

On June 2005 the PlayStation and PSone shipped a total of 100 million units, becoming the first home console to ever reach that mark.

Technical specifications

Main CPU

A PlayStation motherboard

MIPS R3000A-compatible (R3051) 32bit RISC chip running at 33.8688 MHz

The chip is manufactured by LSI Logic Corp. with technology licensed from SGI. The chip also contains the Geometry Transformation Engine and the Data Decompression Engine.

Features:

Operating Performance of 30 MIPS
Bus Bandwidth 132 Mbit/s
Instruction Cache 4 kB
Data Cache 1 kB (non associative, just 1024 bytes of mapped fast SRAM)

Geometry Transformation Engine

This engine is inside the main CPU chip. It gives it additional (vector-)math instructions used for the 3D graphics.

Features:

Operating Performance of 66 MIPS
360,000 Flat-Shaded Polygons per second
180,000 texture mapped and light-sourced polygons per second

Sony originally gave the polygon count as:

1.5 million flat-shaded polygons per second
500,000 texture mapped and light-sourced polygons per second

These figures were given as a ballpark figure for performance under optimal circumstances, and so are unrealistic under normal usage.

Data Decompression Engine

This engine is also inside the main CPU. It is responsible for decompressing images and video. Documented device mode is to read three RLE-encoded 16×16 macroblocks, run IDCT and assemble a single 16×16 RGB macroblock. Output data may be transferred directly to GPU via DMA. It is possible to overwrite IDCT matrix and some additional parameters, however MDEC internal instruction set was never documented.

Features:

Compatible with MPEG-1 and H.261 files
Operating Performance of 80 MIPS
Directly connected to CPU Bus

Graphics Processing Unit

This chip is separate to the CPU and handles all the 2D Graphics processing, which includes the transformed 3D polygons.

Features:

Maximum of 16.7 Million Colours
Resolutions from 256×224 to 640×480
Adjustable frame buffer
Unlimited Colour Lookup Tables
Maximum of 4000 8×8 pixel sprites with individual scaling and rotation
Emulation of simultaneous backgrounds (for parallax scrolling)
Flat or Gouraud shading, and texture mapp

Sound Processing Unit

Features:

Can handle ADPCM sources with up to 24 channels and up to 44.1 kHz sampling rate
Could perform digital effects including:
- Pitch Modulation
- Envelope
- Looping
- Digital Reverb
Could handle up to 512 Mbit of sampled waveforms
Supports MIDI instruments
PC file name format: .PS

Memory

Main RAM: 2 Megabytes (4 Megabytes on "Blue" development console)
Video RAM: 1 Megabyte
Sound RAM: 512 Kilobytes
CD-Rom Buffer: 32 Kilobytes
Operating System ROM: 512 Kilobytes
PlayStation Memory Cards have 128 Kilobytes of space in an EEPR

CD-ROM

Features:

Originally Single Speed, later replaced with a Two Speed drive, with a maximum data throughput of 300 KB/s
XA Compliant

Name	Version	OS	Size	Date
ePSXe	1.6.0	Windows	260 Kb	8/6/2003
PSXeven	0.19	Windows	679 Kb	4/29/2005
AdriPSX	1.0.5	Windows	1.10 MB	7/4/2003
PCSX	1.5	Windows	166 Kb	7/14/2003