Hi, I recently acquired an old GH-007 SCPH-30003 ten screw console (v3 right?) from a friend. This appears to be the first PAL console, since v1 and v2 were never released in Europe from my research. I have a few questions. What's the general consensus on this model? Is it considered a very sturdy model, and are there any specific problems that could affect this model? For example the v9 has the burnt coils syndrome thing... Also, will a 400C laser fit and work fine in here? It currently has a 400B laser in it that works fine but I hear that the 400C is a superior model. Thanks in advance guys. This is my first console ever, so please be gentle with me.
Don't use the 400C on the GH-007 unit unless you don't mind it grinding the tracking slide worm gear every time a game try to read the edge of a disc and having it break the optical pickup flat cable once a month... Because the laser power is controlled through feedback it's also possible that a broken flat cable could cause the motherboard to overpower the laser, frying it. Just don't use the 400C on the GH-007 unit. Try to find a 400-B unit for it. There's no such thing as "better" or "worse" laser. There's "wrong" and "right" one though... :thumbsup: P.S.: By the way: PLEASE NEVER EVER PUT LENSCHANGER ON THAT UNIT You may regret it.
Thanks for the replies. The original 400B still works great, but then I had heard that a 400C would last longer and could read more formats. I wasn't aware about the issue of the laser flat cable breaking, so thanks for that info. By the way Oliveira, could you please enlighten me as to why lenschanger should never be used on such a unit? Thank you. Edit: and what is the image in your avatar exactly? It looks very familiar.
**Wall of text alert** Lenschanger was created to allow people swap a portion of data on the console EEPROM so they could swap from the Sanyo HD7 laser to SONY 400C as such information (laser calibration, type of laser and other minor data) is stored there. The same apply for slims and their SPU(NEC) vs KSS(SONY)/PVR(Mitsumi) lasers. The author of the said software (I happen to exchange emails with him once in a while...) made a great work with it but without any official information and knowledge about how the DVD drive firmware really work, it's a gamble. He added a large database with several eeprom dumps on his tool which allow a certain statistical slack that it may contain a dump which would work on your system. But then: 1- There's no way a HD7 laser would fit on a GH-007 for the same reason a 400C don't fit. They have the same size, even. 2- The drive controller on the GH-007 does not have information on it's firmware how to properly adjust to the heavier lens assembly on a HD7 laser. 3- There's two types of laser diodes and consoles of the GH-007 time would only have the early laserdiode, which again brings the firmware issue up. (Info: Lens with white rim are of the old laser type and lens with yellow rim have the newer laser diode) 4- Some of the eeprom dumps on lenschanger database are just "borked" (have wrong CRC) and only work because the mechacon uses it's ROM defaults if the EEPROM CRC for the laser area is invalid. And last, if it's working, why would you want to ruin it ? It's meant to be used on: SCPH-3000xR (V5,V6) 400C/HD7 SCPH-3900x (V7,V8) 400C/HD7 SCPH-5000x (V9,V10) 400C/HD7 SCPH-700xx (V12,V13) SPU3170/KHS-430 and PVR-802W Don't use it on DTL consoles, don't use it on 3000x older than V5 nor 7500x or newer. You have been warned. Making a backup of the EEPROM is MANDATORY and is the only way to recover from disaster. But then if you try to run the console with the eeprom data damaged it's possible to fry the laser and then when you restore the backup it won't work because the diode was damaged. Better safe than sorry, you know. Now about my avatar, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishi_Bashi I know a few of them were released in english for Europe. :thumbsup:
Ah. I'll heed your advice then. Thank you, you seem to be very knowledgeable with these machines. I've read your posts on various forums and you seem to know your stuff a lot. How long have you been working with the PS2 hardware for? By the way, I actually just double checked the motherboard and it actually says GH-006 on it! I thought that this board was only released in the US? So I assume that this is the earliest PAL v3 unit, and that they then switched to the GH-007 sometime later in Europe? I was surprised to see that this is actually GH-006...
I've seen PAL GH-006 units too but only seen GH-007 units set up for PAL regions. I forgot about seeing PAL GH-006 units, indeed. Since we're talking about this, some curious things I noticed about the GH-007: One of the two GH-007 machines I saw was actually SCPH-30002 (Oceania) the other I don't recall what it was. Basically, the only important (significant) difference from GH-006 to GH-007 is the Graphics Synthesizer chip used. GH-006 has the newer CXD2944GB while the GH-007 has the earlier CXD2934GB (the chip used on the 10k units and the TOOL) I believe they did make that board to roll up stock of the CXD2934GB chip. Later on they did GH-014 and GH-016 which also used the old CXD2934GB GS chip. Maybe they saved the chips to make TOOLs but then gave up ? Both GH-006 and 007 use the updated CXD9615GB Emotion Engine chip as CPU (CPUID 2E20) While the earlier units use the CXD9542GB EE Chip. (CPUID 2E14) The CXD9542GB chip seems to have some sort of design bug which is noted as an special consideration for licensed software developers on the PS2 SDK documentation. I presume this bug and the fact that it does run on 2v while the CXD9615GB runs on 1.8v (less heat) are the reasons the former was retired early on the PS2 platform life cycle Same mumbojumbo applies to the GH-004 (which would be par with GH-006) and GH-005 (which would be par with GH-007). I never saw GH-004 or GH-005 with a region other than North America (NTSC U/C). :thumbsup: P.S.: I've been servicing PS2 consoles since 2000-ish P.S.2: Both EE and GS are manufactured by Toshiba. The IOP CXD9553GB (pairs with CXD9542GB) and CXD9619GB (pairs with CXD9615GB) were developed and manufacturated by LSI Logic at Sony request.
That's interesting...thanks for all of the info. By the way, I have a Chinese clone 128 MB memory card. Apparently all the clone cards have the same MCID (or perhaps even no MCID at all?), so software which is tied to a specific MCID should work on all clone cards. An example of such software is the DVD player update, browser updates and such. I was wondering, if due to this fact, is it possible to copy the DVD player update from card to card without issues? This v3 PS2 has the 1.20E player in its ROM and therefore has no support for the DVD remote (and I have the remote but no update disc. >.>). I'd like to update it to the 3.02 version which apparently is included in an HDD utility disc which was never sold in Europe...could a copy from another person's clone card work? Is my assumption to how this all works correct?
... as long as the file is encrypted for the correct mechacon region. So I'd say it doesn't work in this case. You cannot install an american DVD player (using an american PS2) onto a memory card and expect it to work in a european console, regardless of whether the card is an original or clone. However: if two different memory cards use the same MagicGate keys, you can copy installed files between them, and they will still work on consoles of the same region. So you can install the american DVD player (again, via an american PS2) onto a clone card, then copy all files to another clone card using the same MG keys, and the copy should work as good as the original. To make such a file boot on a console from a different region, you would have to decrypt, then re-encrypt its contents (or maybe calculate necessary keys for the other region; similar to how the keys in the file header are changed when installing a file onto a memory card). To my knowledge, this has not been done yet. Decryption is performed entirely by the mechacon, and there is no information available on which algorithm it uses, not to speak of involved keys. As an alternative, one could try to use a system similar to FMCB: use the encrypted file as a loader, then start a decrypted copy of the DVD player. But I haven't heard of anyone trying that yet.
In fact, it was my bad not notice he intended to try a USA DVD driver on his PAL console. If the region match, the copy should work. I tested back in 2007 or 2008 as I had two pirate memory cards of the same kind which worked with MG stuff.
Interesting. I wondered, would it be possible to extract the DVD player from the ROM of a newer console (like a PAL v10?) and use it on my v3? By the way, I was wondering, isn't the GH-008 board an SCPH-18000 console? It's odd that it's part of the Japanese v0 series, but had the SCPH-3000x GH-004-GH-007 (v1-v3) consoles precede it. Where did the Japanese 30000 consoles start then? GH-010 (v4)? Also, I've heard of a "v4R" model and I'm a bit curious about it. Everyone seems to assume that an SCPH-3000x R console is a v5/v6, but apparently some of the earlier ones were termed "v4R" (GH-013 and GH-014 I think?). What's the difference between this and a normal v4 console? I heard that it's sort of a hybrid between the v4 and v5... and people generally seem to hate the v4Rs. ...and what about that oddball GH-016? Looking at the number you'd assume v5/v6 since v5/v6 is GH-015, and the v7 started at GH-017, but it appears to actually be one of the v4s. Judging from other posts on the internet, it's the only pre-v5 model which can use the heavier HD7 laser and was only released in Japan. I wonder what they were thinking, when they thought this all up. Sorry if it seems that I'm asking a lot, but you guys seem to know a lot about the history of these machines and I'm extremely curious about it.
Would need to: Access the EROM and dump it's contents Decrypt the DVD drive KELF (DVD driver binary itself) Decrypt the UDF FS KELF IRX file (UDF driver) Set up the enviroment and boot the DVD player. I own a US 1.10 HDD utilty disc and it installs DVD driver 3.10u. Sadly it don't work in progressive scan mode so I believe the DVD driver detects which type of machine it's running in and if it's a 3000x it refuses to enable progressive scan, even thought the hardware support. SONY used to be greedy regarding new features but I'm glad they became more generous with the PSP and PS3. For curiosity sake SONY named GH-008 as "AB-Chassis" (lol) A-Chassis = 10k/15k/18k (18k based on GH-003 = A-Chassis+) B-Chassis = GH-004/GH-005 or B-chassis' (B-Chassis dash) So GH-008 is a system with A-Chassis DEV9 hardware (PCMCIA slot) but with B-Chassis IOP/EE/GS chips (which operate at a lower voltage and heats less than 10K-ish ones) There's no V4R that I know of. The "R" on the names imply the consoles use the Sanyo HD7 laser. The GH-014 mechacon does support HD7 laser but I never seen a mention of it on the SONY CS-SVC tools of any using HD7 lasers. Neither I know how to setup the EEPROM to make it run correctly with the HD7. I saw it "auto detect" the laser type after miserably try to read a disc with 400C settings for a few minutes. Did sound likely to be pretty nasty wear for the laser unit though. GH-016 was probably meant to let them use the last bit of the 1st gen GS chips they had, just like the GH-002/007 and I presume an eventual GH-009 (would be AB-Chassis') if exists would be using the old GS too. I'd like to invite you to share any information you know about. Also I'm aways interested on diagnosis tools and other kind of stuff related to official repair service.
My friend also gave me one of his SCPH-10350 Network Adapters (ethernet only model). I have a 750 GB IDE hard disk lying around doing nothing, so with this I should be set to play some backups of the games I received. Right? He also installed me an Free McBoot exploit with one of his v5 PS2s. But when I plug it into my v3, it does not boot! I plugged the 750 GB disk in with the Network Adapter and I just hear it spinning up, but no FMCB. What could the issue be here? Both consoles are PAL BTW...
The V3 looks for osd130.elf file not osdmain.elf. So, open uLE on your friend's PS2, *COPY* the osdmain.elf file to a USB storage device, then rename it to osd130.elf paste it back on BEEXEC-SYSTEM folder on the memory card and you're ready to go. You do that so you still keep the osdmain.elf file as deleting it would make your memory card only work on the V3.
