Reverse engineering the CPS2 boards?

[obitus1990]

Has anyone reverse engineered the CPS2 boards? I have been doing restoration of classic computers for a while now, and, several of them have been reverse engineered (Commodore Amiga 4000/1200/2000/500, C64, etc) and new boards have been produced and open sourced (Gerbers produced and released for anyone to have boards made at any board fab house). Using NOS parts and/or salvaged ICs from dead boards (usually killed by batteries or SMD cap leakage), I've built 6 of these computers completely from scratch (using new passive components from Mouser or Digikey). Often times, it is easier to just assemble a new board instead of track down all the damaged traces from cap leakage on these systems I mentioned. Having hand soldered over 1000 SMD components onto an A4000T replica board, the CPS2 doesn't look too difficult to assemble

 

[ekorz]

Someone was working on it but started with the B board. https://gitlab.com/loic.petit/cps2-reverse

you’ll probably have a hard time sourcing some of the customs though

That said there are plenty of good working cps2 sets out there still. CPS1 fail more but it’s the A custom (that the cps2 uses also) that usually fails. if anything gets repro’d id guess that would need it first.

 

[Apocalypse]

@obitus1990 as stated above arcade boards from the early 80's and later use a lot of custom chips. It is more or less known what they do from a software point of view but the logic inside the chip at gate level is often unknown. There are several teams working on decapping those chips but it's a long and slow process.

 

[ekorz]

That progress is here: https://gitlab.com/loic.petit/cps2-reverse/-/blob/master/DLs/README.md

 

[fluxcore]

The reverse engineering effort is being put more towards FPGA recreation than hardware recreation. Keep an eye on https://www.patreon.com/topapate , he did the CPS1 Mister core, and is currently working on Q-Sound as a stepping stone towards CPS1.5 and CPS2.