TangentDelta
Member
Not sure if this is the correct place to get help on this, but if it isn't, could you please move it?
Long Story:
Short Story:
Any ideas?
Long Story:
Right, so yesterday I stopped by a flea market looking for any vintage computers (I'm a vintage computer collector), and happened to find a huge stack of PS1s, each for $5. Since it wasn't a console I had already, I figured that It'd be a good idea to buy one of them. I picked out the one that looked the cleanest, and bought it, along with a D-Pad controller for my C64.
When I got home, I decided to open it up to see what sorts of goodies laid within. After taking out the billion screws, I managed to take off the RF shielding/heat sink. In the process of doing that, the 4-pin surface-mount header that connects the disk drive motors to the motherboard popped off. A bit dismayed, I set it aside, to see if I could repair it later.
I then took a closer look at the board, revision-A SCPH-1001. There was a bit of spilled cola around the RAM chips, but I cleaned that off. I flipped the board over, and "HOLY COW WHAT'S THIS", a strange mass of wires connected a 12C508 PIC microcontroller to various pins on the CD controller. Upon doing a little research, I discovered that this was a modification that allowed pirated games to be played on the system without using the "swap trick".
I then flipped over the board, put a piece of sticky tack on the bottom of the broken-off header, and soldered it back on, good-as-new.
Now, not having a controller or a memory card for the system yet (gonna try and buy one of each on ebay, though I'd much rather buy them from a collector), I decided to try and play a game that didn't require a memory card. I burned it on my modern high-speed R/W DVD drive, and put it into the PS1. When it got past the orange logo screen thing, it immediately started trying to boot the CD. It then began making noises that sounded like a coffee grinder, and the game's intro movie started.
The intro movie kept freezing, and the laser on the PS1 kept moving around, trying to find a place to pick up again, until eventually the system crashed. I then tried again. This time the movie got a bit further, but the system crashed before it could end. A bit dismayed, I opened up the system and checked my connections and made sure that the gears for the laser were greased. Finding that everything was okay, I tried again, but got the same results.
Online, I did a bit of research, and found that the drive in the PS1 is extremely picky about the speed at which the CD was written. Writing the CD at anything above 2x leaves weird gaps in the media that the PS1 cannot read.
When I got home, I decided to open it up to see what sorts of goodies laid within. After taking out the billion screws, I managed to take off the RF shielding/heat sink. In the process of doing that, the 4-pin surface-mount header that connects the disk drive motors to the motherboard popped off. A bit dismayed, I set it aside, to see if I could repair it later.
I then took a closer look at the board, revision-A SCPH-1001. There was a bit of spilled cola around the RAM chips, but I cleaned that off. I flipped the board over, and "HOLY COW WHAT'S THIS", a strange mass of wires connected a 12C508 PIC microcontroller to various pins on the CD controller. Upon doing a little research, I discovered that this was a modification that allowed pirated games to be played on the system without using the "swap trick".
I then flipped over the board, put a piece of sticky tack on the bottom of the broken-off header, and soldered it back on, good-as-new.
Now, not having a controller or a memory card for the system yet (gonna try and buy one of each on ebay, though I'd much rather buy them from a collector), I decided to try and play a game that didn't require a memory card. I burned it on my modern high-speed R/W DVD drive, and put it into the PS1. When it got past the orange logo screen thing, it immediately started trying to boot the CD. It then began making noises that sounded like a coffee grinder, and the game's intro movie started.
The intro movie kept freezing, and the laser on the PS1 kept moving around, trying to find a place to pick up again, until eventually the system crashed. I then tried again. This time the movie got a bit further, but the system crashed before it could end. A bit dismayed, I opened up the system and checked my connections and made sure that the gears for the laser were greased. Finding that everything was okay, I tried again, but got the same results.
Online, I did a bit of research, and found that the drive in the PS1 is extremely picky about the speed at which the CD was written. Writing the CD at anything above 2x leaves weird gaps in the media that the PS1 cannot read.
Short Story:
I picked up a "chipped" PS1 at a flea market yesterday and I can't seem to get it to read my backup CDs correctly.
Any ideas?