Discussion: Reverse engineering the VideoNow Color

kasamikona / pvdplayer

Web-based player for VideoNow Color personal video discs

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Discussion: Reverse engineering the VideoNow Color #1

Open m4x10187 opened 10 months ago

m4x10187 commented 10 months ago

Hello,

I am really interested in your progress on reverse engineering the VideoNow Color, and would like to know a few things on how I can perform the same steps as you.

What development board or programmer do I need?
Pinouts for debugging on the player's motherboard.
Any way to dump the internal ROM?

Thanks.

kasamikona commented 10 months ago

Hi, I haven't worked on the VideoNow in a while. The image files here were just traced from photographs of the screen, I wasn't able to do much with the hardware.

The connection between the CD player section and the rest of the device appears to be I2S and I had some success in overriding the data and sending in my own to see how it would process it, but I don't currently know where I put my notes on that. These images may help if you want to look into that side of hardware hacking. videonow-pins-crop videonow-trace

kasamikona commented 10 months ago

For injecting signals I cut the traces and attached resistors in series and then connected onto the screen-facing end, but that is very delicate work. The hardware I was using to inject signals was a cheap STM32 Blue Pill development board which is not designed for I2S and I had a lot of problems with it. If I resume that work I'll probably do it with a Pi Pico instead.

videonow-wiring

m4x10187 commented 9 months ago

Neat. Thank you very much. 😄