PS1’s hardware (Motherboard) overview.
Hardware Components
Emotion Engine
- Used for Game Logic
- 32MB RAM
- MIPS 59k CPU
Graphic Synthesiser
- Used for rendering and vertex transformation
- 4MB RAM
- 2.4 GPixel/sec
- Support for Mip-mapping and alpha blending
- Texture formats: 32/24/16/8/4
I/O Processor (IOP)
- Used for Interaction with peripherals (Memory cards, usb devices, Networking, Audio, DVD etc)
- 2MB RAM (8MB on a devkit)
- Playstation 1 on a chip (used for playing PS1 games)
- 36.9 Mhz
Sound Processor (SPU2)
Image processing Unit (IPU)
Serial Interface (SIF)
- Used to Interface between the Emotion Engine (EE) and the I/O processor (IOP)
- SIFDMA - transfer memory to other processor
- CIFCMD - run a command on the other processor such as setting flags
- SIFRPC - run remote operations on the other processor, includes a return value
Example of SIF in action
An example of using the SIF to communicate between both processors is the controller pad libraries. We want to communicate between libpad.a which runs on the Emotion Engine and padman.irx which runs on the I/O Processor.
So during the VBlank period the IOP Padman.irx uses SIFDMA to send controller information (such as which buttons are pressed) to the Emotion Engine.
The Emotion Engine can then request this information by calling the API scePadRead
Hardware Specs
Display Specs
- Supports 480p progressive
- MPEG-2 Full Motion Video (FMV)
Sound Specs
- Dolby pro logic 2 (5.1 Surround sound)
- DTS
- Streaming Audio
Max Game Specs
Per frame:
- 120,000 and 6,000 tris
- 3Mb of Textures
- Frame rate of 30 or 60fps
