This wasn’t much of a success.

At the time I suspected that differences between the PIC12C508 and PIC12C508A might be responsible.

That suspicion was not completely invented.

Microchip’s own documentation shows differences between the two devices, including the oscillator-calibration implementation.

But I never established that those differences caused this particular failure.

I later discovered a much more immediate problem:

my GQ-4X programmer was becoming unreliable and would fail randomly.

So this video should not be read as evidence that a PIC12C508A fundamentally cannot be used for PlayStation modchip code.

I eventually moved to reflashable PIC12F629 devices, which were much more forgiving when I made mistakes, and successfully returned to the PlayStation modchip project.

Calibration IDs, oscillator settings, all that razzamatazz…

but the dying programmer was not exactly helping!

Sources