MemCARDuino

Arduino PlayStation 1 Memory Card reader

Supported platforms:

• Arduino Uno, Duemilanove, Diecimila, Nano, Mini, Fio (ATmega168/P or ATmega328/P)
• Arduino Leonardo, Micro (ATmega32U4)
• Arduino Mega 2560
• Espressif ESP8266, ESP32 (requires additional board URL)
• Raspberry Pi Pico (requires additional board URL)
• Logic Green LGT8F328P (requires additional board URL)

Various other boards can be supported if they have Arduino core available with SPI library with minimal or no editing to the sketch.

Warning

Some Arduino boards use 5V logic and are not recommended. Connecting it straight may shorten lifespan of your MemoryCard or damage it permanently as it is a 3.6V device. Use a lever shifter for data lines and power the memory card with 3.6 power supply.

Connecting a Memory Card to Arduino:

Looking at the Memory Card:
_________________
|_ _|_ _ _|_ _ _|
 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
 

Memory Card	Uno, Nano, etc	Leonardo, Micro	Mega 2560	ESP8266	ESP32	Pi Pico
1: Data	D12	ICSP MISO	D50	GPIO12 (D6)	GPIO19	GP16
2: Command	D11	ICSP MOSI	D51	GPIO13 (D7)	GPIO23	GP19
3: 7.6V	See 7.6V note	See 7.6V note	See 7.6V note	See 7.6V note	See 7.6V note	See 7.6V note
4: Gnd	Gnd	Gnd	Gnd	Gnd	Gnd	Gnd
5: 3.6V	See VCC note	3.3V	3.3V	3.3V	3.3V	3.3V
6: Attention	D10	D10	D53	GPIO15 (D8)	GPIO5	GP17
7: Clock	D13	ICSP SCK	D52	GPIO14 (D5)	GPIO18	GP18
8: Acknowledge	D2	D2	D2	GPIO2 (D4)	GPIO22	GP20

VCC note: Memory Card is a 3.6V device. Connect it to either 3.3V provided by the board or use external 3.6 power supply.
Old Arduino uses 5V logic and it is not recommended. It may shorten lifespan of your MemoryCard or damage it permanently.

7.6V note: This is only required for 3rd party Memory Cards and knockoffs.
Use external 7.6V power supply or if you are lucky you can get by with using 5V provided by the USB.

Reading saves from a PC:

To read saves from the Memory Card to your PC use MemcardRex if you are using Windows.
Make sure to use the latest version because MemCARDuino now runs at 115200bps while older releases used 38400bps.

For other operating systems you can use a provided Python script.

Before using install pyserial:

pip3 install pyserial

Usage:

python3 memcarduino.py -p,--port <serial port> , -r,--read <output file> OR -w,--write <input file> OR -f,--format , [-c,--capacity <capacity>] , [-b,--bitrate <bitrate:bps>]

<serial port> accepts COM port names, or for linux, file references (/dev/tty[...] or others)
<output file> read from memory card and save to file
<input file> read from file and write to memory card (accepts both windows and linux file URI's)
<capacyty> sets memory card capacity [blocks] *1 block = 128 B* (default 1024 blocks)
<bitrate> sets bitrate on serial port (default 115200 bps)

Pocketstation commands:

--psinfo (print info from pocketstation)
--psbios <output file> (dump bios from pocketstation)
--pstime (appy pc time to pocketstation)

This requires a serial port (/dev/ttyACM0 for Arduino uno's, /dev/ttyUSBX for others, COMX for Windows, and various for macOS).

Thanks to:

• Martin Korth of the NO$PSX - documented Memory Card protocol.
• Andrew J McCubbin - documented PS1 SPI interface.