Robert Neumann is exactly the guy that I'd expect to do this, he's very capable, has a strong work ethic and is mostly for the hobby instead of wishing Ukranians to die on twitter and trying to get clout and money over it. Rama made the XStation which blows the PSIO out of the damn water pretty much out of the box, and he also did all the work of reverse engineering some obscure piece of crap arcade VGA upscaler to transform it onto one of the most interesting solutions for RGBHV/Component gaming you can get for free. This is worth looking out for.
The reason why this is significant is that instead of taking shortcuts like every other ODE, this emulates the actual laser head picking up reflections off a disc. Remember those early CD players with an signal out port? It's basically the raw unfiltered signal from the disc which the laser is picking up on. An ODE like this is basically converting digital to analog (reading probably an ISO off a SD card and converting it to the FM signal) to digital again (the data the hardware on the cd drive extracts from the analog signal). This is no trivial matter and AFAIK has not been done for vidya or otherwise. In fact, if you read his tweets, he got to the point where the drive can simulate the reading head pulling data off the disc and seeking data, but there's still emulation of motor speed signals, the focus coil on the laser head, among other stuff. It's going to be tough to work with that.
BTW a curiosity about CD-ROMs and the FM signal that encodes the 0s and 1s on the disc: A CD-ROM has very strong error correction and modulation so that 99.9999999999% of the time if there's a read error is because your dumb ass scratched the disc or pulled your PS1 by the controller cord off the shelf. The CD basically has an EFM modulation to improve signal readability when seeking, and eliminate errors -- it's a mapping of 8 bits to 14 bits with a carefully built translation table that eliminates consecutive ones and zeroes- - and there's 2 layers of strong Reed-Solomon correction code slapped on top of it, and even more stuff to help correct read errors in each data frame of the disc. I don't remember where I've read this but I seem to remember that if you take into account all this shit that goes around the actual data you want to store on a CD, the real capacity of a CD-ROM actually amounts to something like 5+ GB. According to wikipedia, it can completely correct error bursts up to
4000 bits, or about 2.5 mm on the disc surface. It's a pretty solid format for something made in the 80's.
Sorry for the autism
It's a drive emulator unlike anything that came before! (Sorry for the video orientation, I'll do some more later) (1/2)
