After many months of difficulties (severe data loss, developer illnesses, life) we're approaching the release of BootManager 2.0. We're sorry for the delay in software updates to our existing customers, hopefully our new backup system will help us avoid such serious problems in the future. We'd also like to mention that the CC2.0 hardware will be available very soon.

Our development team has recently grown and we intend to continue creating new updates for existing Crystal Chips customers throughout the life-cycle of the PS2.  The next Crystal Chips Software Update 2.0 including BootManager 2.0 will be released on July 10, 2006 as "Beta" software. This means that we will expect some bugs to show up since this software is very new and hasn't been tested in all the crazy configurations people have but the software should work correctly for the most part. Once we've collected enough feedback we will release a newer version with fixes for any bugs that might be reported.

We've recently started shipping a new revision of Crystal Chip 1.1 (CC1.1). This new revision replaces the 4kbyte Serial EEPROM with a 128kbyte Serial Flash. Serial Flash is considerably faster to read and write than the Serial EEPROM and the additional 124kbyte of storage can be used to expand the Crystal Chip firmware capabilities. This new version of CC1.1 is compatible with Crystal Chips Software Release 19 and later. 
  
Due to the addition of the Serial Flash, the price of CC1.1 has increased slightly due to increased costs. The difference is not large and CC1.1 continues to be competitively priced. 
  
 At this time, we're working on a new release of BootManager which will be called "2.0". More details coming soon...

We're happy to announce that we've uploaded Software Release 19. This release resolves some issues in BM as well as finalizing v14 compatability for all regions. There have been some small changes to the format of the software package so please read the readme.txt file before making changes to the scripts or source code. 
 
We've also added a small feature to BM.  In the Main Menu you can now access a System Information menu which shows BIOS version and Crystal Chip hardware version. 
 
Appologies for the delay in getting this release out, our lead developer was seriously ill for some time but now things are back on track. 
 
We hope you all have happy and safe holidays. :)  

We received a PS2 GH-040-12 today and uploaded the diagrams. Crystal Chip works fine on this new motherboard revision. The installation manuals section was cleaned up - all v14 installation diagrams should be online now.