[slg]

Why is this being downvoted? I think it is perfectly reasonable to ask for a TLDR on a 30 minute video.

Anyway, the basic story is that the Saturn had copy protection in the form of physical marks on the copy protected CDs. This puts a huge barrier to entry on homebrew and the like, so a guy going by Dr Abrasive tried to reverse engineer a way around that. He first looked into a way of disabling the copy protection on the CDs to allow burned CDs to be used but that proved too difficult.

He eventually hit upon the fact that the Saturn had an external module that could be added to allow the system to play video CDs. He then built a component to take advantage of that fact and feed in his own commands through this interface thereby avoiding the copy protection entirely. This allowed content to be run from USB sticks without the need for CDs at all, lowering the barrier to entry even more. It also helps workaround mechanical failure of the CD drive which is becoming a common problem for the 20 year old hardware.

So now if you have this custom built component, you can take an off the shelf system and start running code from a USB stick without any soldering, hacking, or modification at all beyond plugging the device into the back of the console.

[simplemath]

the most impressive part, to me, was how thoroughly he reverse engineered what looks to be a crazy complicated CPU architecture - the Saturn has four of them.

Also, I love that his original motivation was to use the sound processor for mixing chiptune, and basically opening up the entire system at metal level is a happy by product.

ALSO, the fact that he decided that his first working prototype was too hands on and finding a way to piggyback the video playback expansion card to make the mod orders of magnitude less complicated to install / execute.

Super impressive stuff

[Neeek]

Wasn't it only one of those CPU's though? He mentioned there is a CPU dedicated to disk operation and that's the one no one had been able to get a ROM dump of, which in turn enabled all the other stuff? Not trying to downplay his achievement or anything, I'm new to all this but it's easy to see that this is some truly amazing work.

[em3rgent0rdr]

2 CPUs, 2 GPUs, and there is a separate CPU dedicated to disk operation which was (almost) completely isolated. His achievement was getting access to that disk CPU, but that access allows access to the rest of the CPUs.

[jessriedel]

It's reasonable to ask for a TLDR for anything. They are better known as abstracts.