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by jbreckmckye 6 days ago
The PSX BIOS code sounds like a disaster. Everything I read about the software part of the stack, makes me amazed the console even boots

The faulty malloc. A bunch of random qsort implementations. Reiji Asakura wrote an account of how the BIOS and kernel were developed, and it sounds so amateurish

Then there's the way the JP console checks for faulty ECCs on sectors 0..15, not as a clever anti piracy check, but because the CDU-920 broke CD-XA authoring...
1 comments
boricj 6 days ago
If you want a good horror bedtime story, you can peek at OpenBIOS within the pcsx-redux tree: https://github.com/grumpycoders/pcsx-redux/tree/main/src/mip...

The commentary section starts with "The retail PlayStation BIOS code is a constellation of bugs and bad design." and it gets worse after that. There are hidden gems inside the source code comments of that simili-reconstruction.

link