Little Joey 0.5.0 first public alpha

v0.5.0-alpha

Release title:

v0.5.0-alpha "Little Joey"

This is the very first usable public release, it's an alpha.

It barely works so don't expect to be hacking the 1996 NSA mainframe from
your bedroom whilst running away from other spies trying to get the disc
of secrets from you.

What it actually does

Boots a stock 2 MB PlayStation from a CD-R to a shell on your television,
with a keyboard plugged into the controller port. No PC attached.

• Root filesystem lives on the disc, found by walking ISO9660 at boot
• Shell with ls, cat, cp, mv, edit, df, ps, top, lshw, hexdump, fetch
• Memory cards can be formatted (mkfs) and mounted by the kernel
• Complete source is on the disc itself, as SOURCE.TGZ

What you need

• A PlayStation that can boot a CD-R (modchip, tonyhax, or FreePSXBoot)
• A television
• Optional: a Bluetooth keyboard through a BlueRetro adapter, or a
  3.3 V FTDI cable on the serial port

Burning it

Download blackroo-kloader.bin and blackroo-kloader.toc, then:

  cdrdao write --device /dev/sr0 --driver generic-mmc-raw -n --eject \
      blackroo-kloader.toc

Do not use xorriso or a normal ISO burner - the licence area is Mode 2
Form 2 and a 2048-byte burn flattens it, and the console hangs at the
SCE screen with no error.

On the menu: Settings -> Root: /dev/psxcd (this disc), then
Boot from CD-ROM -> LINUX.EXE - root on this disc

Known issues

• Mounting memory cards from the shell hangs. The kernel can mount them;
  userspace can't. Root stays on the CD.
• The keyboard and the memory cards share one bus, so typing lags during
  card access. we cant have it both ways but thats ok.. im thinking of a parallel port 2040bt/w pi
• Card writes are slow, about 31 KB/s.
• 8 MB and 16 MB builds exist but have never run on real modded hardware and the 8mb version has only been tested on duck station.

other than that dont blame me if your playstation only wants linux after trying it.

md5: 6e1f235a51aaf773c60bcf3e528f0282