Nothing says UART like... video sync signals?

@foone you know what why the fuck not

I'm taking apart a "Mini DVD Player HDMI, DESOBRY 1080P HD Small Compact DVD Player for Smart TV with All Region Free, DVD CD Player with AV Output, USB/TF Card Input, Remote Control, Support PAL/NTSC"

It's a tiny DVD player (discman sized!) with USB/SD card slots, cause it can play the usual media formats

It's powered by a Sunplus SPHE8203R.

Sunplus calls this a "DVD Single Chip MPEG A/V Processor"

https://w3.sunplus.com/products/sphe8203.asp

@foone this image is somehow powerful

truth coming out of her p-well to shame mankind

@foone i could build that

@foone Sync-on-green RS-232.

Naturally for a Single Chip system, it has four chips.
Here's the next one, the SA5888: Silan Microelectronics, 5-channel BTL driver IC.
This drives the motors and actuators of the optical drive.

And an AiP1628: This is an LED driver, which used to drive the front panel 7-segment display.

And here's a Winbond W25Q16JV: a 3v 2-megabytes SPI flash

@snowfox nah, that's the result of adhesive thermal paste

@mgjetson me, apparently

The documentation of this is, of course, lacking. gotta keep your 2008 DVD decoder chip secret.

But one of the interesting docs that have leaks mentions it has game controller support?

@foone
Oh god it's got a NES emulator doesn't it

@foone
Maybe even a famiclone cause who knows, they might have had space on that die and nothing better to do with it!

And the board design schematic lists pins GAME_D0, GAME_D1, GAME_LATCH, and GAME_DATA

And Sunplus never seems to give any more detail on what this chip is powered by, but they do say it's "32-bit RISC".

so... MIPS, maybe?

@foone
If we had better docs, could it run 9front?!

they launched this chip August 30th, 2007:
https://www.design-reuse.com/news/202513841-sunplus-presents-world-s-first-dvd-soc-solution-sphe8203a-with-divx-hd-playability/

I found some source on verysource, and while I can't download the whole thing, I can get enough to confirm it's MIPS

They've got a tetris game in the source and also mentions of NES games?

@foone
Called it

@foone I'm gonna ask something stupid. How do you know all this stuff? Are you graduated in electrical engineering or something like it?

@yuriaugustus I'm mostly self-taught for EE, I went to school for comp-sci

@ozzelot yup!

@foone
To be fair it's a very obvious call

man this thing has a lot of registers. They put a lot in this chip, it's a real SoC. There's a DSP on here, and a "GAME16" core.

Probably they just stuffed one of their famicom-plus-on-a-chip cores on it

@foone
Does the "16" mean 16-bit? Surely not. Surely they don't have a genesis in there...

anyone got some VerySource credits? https://en.verysource.com/item/8203r_rar-561540.html

@foone *looks at pricing* are they charging... ten cents for this?

@gsuberland yep

@foone at that point I wonder why they even bother paywalling it!

d'you have an account with them?

@foone I have the source code for the firmware for this SOC, if you are interested

@Rib ooh, definitely!

okay I've got a copy. Some fun stuff in here:
void generate_registration_code(BYTE code[8+1]);
void drm_rental_count_update();
void drm_save_rental_file(int drm_enable, int nRet);

there's code here to support PS2 mice? ON A DVD PLAYER?

@foone they were anticipating BD-Java before it was even a twinkle in Sony’s eye.

@foone
I was very confoozled as I just purchased my approximately billionth playstation 2

apparently you activate the UART by sending it "uart"

@ada
3 billion discs run Java
@foone

and these programmers were clearly paid by the IFDEF

that's how you know it's embedded as fuck

there's code here to score karaoke results. it mainly works via rand()

or, to be accurate, robert_random()

#ifdef SUPPORT_GAME_TETRIS
TerisPolling(diff);
#endif

TERIS? FUCKING TERIS?

@foone that makes total sense to me

@foone
Apparently it was always meant to be Terith.

@foone a friend who has worked at <huge embedded megacorp which makes silicon which you use> once mentioned that said company's codebase managed to ifdef out _just_ the keyword else. not the whole else block, just `else`

@r wow

there's a hardcoded "super password".

It's 5168. What's it do? No fucking idea

@foone Sorry I thought Tetris was like default. we need some games for this thing, why is it shocking that it has tetris in it?

@Canageek not tetris, teris!

// Developed at SunPro, a Sun Microsystems, Inc. business.

wait what?

this is a SunPlus device, not SunPro. And SunPlus has nothing to do with Sun Microsystems as far as I know

okay, that's because they're using a sun-derived math library.

There's code here to copy a CD to a hard drive. So I guess you could use this in a set top box with an internal HDD

@foone I love its huge (ground?) pins

@amsomniac yeah! some motor drivers do that, because they make a lot of heat. big grounds make it able to better dissipate the heat into the PCB's groundplane

@foone If it's a DVD player it could be to unbrick after changing region code too many times.