In this episode I speak to developer Danhans42 who was the programmer of the PSIO homebrew custom menu "Litemenu" which was never released after legal action from the PSIO maker.

PSIO is a plug in dongle for the original grey Playstation 1 which allows you to run games from an SD card. While it was one of the first "Optical Drive Emulator" type mods for PS1, it has experienced a difficult history with a slow pace of updates and negative online behaviour from the creator

After feeling frustrated with the lack of updates, Dan used public information and his own debugging of the PSIO to develop his own menu which was faster and had more features.

Dan offered to give this code to the creator without publicly releasing it, however after a deadline had passed, the offer was not taken up and Dan was on the end of legal threats. While Dan and the community in general were quite confident that these legal threats were baseless, Dan decided to fold the project and not release the code.

There is also MUCH MORE to the story. In this episode we learn a little about Dan's background and how he came into PS1 coding as a young person, hacking up his own Net Yaroze style PS1 dev console. We then jump forward to how he obtained a PSIO clone, what led to his frustration with the development and how we went about coding his own menu.

Dan is quite open in this talk about the part he played and steps along the way he could have handled better.

We try and answer the most controversial points about PSIO and Litemenu

* Does Litemenu enable PSIO piracy?

* Does Litemenu include any PSIO code

Follow Dan

Blog http://psx0.wordpress.com

Github http://www.github.com/danhans42

PSX.dev Discord - http://psx.dev/

0:00:00 - Start

0:04:11 - Typing in code from the user manual back in the day

0:11:08 - Using Net Yaroze for PlayStation Programming

0:12:05 - Net Yaroze SDK and PlayStation Boot Disk

0:18:12 - Dan wanted to make a a Chuckie Egg-Inspired PlayStation Game

0:21:49 - Discussion on the PSIO and Clones

0:34:32 - Which chips are inside the PSIO? How did Dan create the menu?

0:39:32 - Could I make any ISO the menu.sys??

0:43:08 - Discovering PlayStation CD Commands via the PSIO debug out

0:56:51 - Does Litemenu infringe on any copyright??

1:04:33 - Technical discussion on PlayStation coding

1:16:28 - Online Drama and PSIO Development

1:25:32 - Litemenu adds Game List Retrieval and faster loading

1:31:44 - Exploring Future PlayStation Hacking Opportunities

----------------------

Along with my friend Steve from RetroTech we maintain a blog about our projects "The Cathode Ray Blog"

https://www.cathoderayblog.com

You can find the audio on the web or your favourite podcast app

https://anchor.fm/zezretro

Catch us on Twitter

https://twitter.com/zez

https://twitter.com/usa_retro

For all your CRT repair needs, check out Steve's channel

https://www.youtube.com/c/RetroTechUSA