Toni Westbrook dot Com

Sharing Software Development Knowledge With You

If you've been keeping up with this blog, you'll know that the prototypes had checked out and we were awaiting the final product. I'm happy to say we received a batch of 20 PCBs from the fab house the other day, and I've soldered one up, and it works great. That means that we're good to go, it's just a matter of us soldering them up and shipping them out! As soon as the first batch of 20 have been assembled, preregistration will close and normal sales will open. Those who preregistered will be given first priority to the purchase of a PSX64 and Shredz64. More instructions are to follow soon. After the first batch of 20 ship, more batches will come in 50 at a time. Please note, it will take a while to assemble each batch, but we will try to be timely so you won't have to wait long.

Below is a picture of the finished product as you will receive it. Note - as you can see we changed the design slightly to use rectangular connectors which should add a lot of stress relief/protection to the cables.

When the first 20 are assembled, a final price will be posted as well. Thanks again for your continued patience, we're definitely rolling along!

First off, I want to apologize for not updating this blog for a few weeks, I've started a new job and things have been hectic getting up to speed on things. But life is starting to calm down, and more importantly, I've received the first PSX64 PCB, soldered on the chips, uploaded the firmware, and it works!

There are a few changes to make to the board, mainly due to the pinout of available parts (I have a large stock of voltage regulators that are a different pinout than how the board is configured). I'm also going to use rectangular headers with stress relief connectors for the PSX and DB9 cables so they can take more tugging (as opposed to soldering them directly to the board). However, these changes aren't major and don't require another single-board run. The next run will be a batch of 10-30 boards, which will then be available for purchase! I suspect it will be about 4 weeks or so.

Thanks to everyone who has signed up on the notification list, it won't be too much longer now!

So, for anyone building your own PSX64, you may have noticed if you used firmware 1.0 that it didn't work with guitar controllers. WHOOPS. The schematic wires the pots opposite to the way the firmware handles them, so the strum pot was handling the whammy bar, and vice versa. Firmware 1.0a fixes this and is available here for download. Sorry about that, too many late nights.

Also, it looks like the prototype PCB board should arrive within the next 5-7 business days, so we're looking at 2-3 weeks after that until we can start shipping PSX64s, not too much longer now!

Lastly, I had the honor of presenting Shredz64 for Neues, a tech program on the 3sat network (Germany, Austria, Switzerland). For those with 3sat access, keep a lookout for Shredz64!