Hello all! Saturday I bought Modchipped SCPH-5502 PS1. I had some burned games after I sold my first PS1 back in 2003. The problem is that my recently bought PS1 doesn't load burned games. Optical drive is perfectly fine, reads original and music cd's, not burned discs. I also looked at unknown modchip, which I tried to look on the Internet, but no results. Can someone explain to me, why modchipped PS1 doesn't run burned discs?
There were anti-piracy PlayStation modchips that only served to allow import games to be played, but not copies. That's probably what you have. Your post was caught by the auto moderation, designed to stop spam - probably because it was a first post and had an attachment. Be aware that you might have the same problem again for the next few posts. If one doesn't show up immediately, a moderator will get round to approving it.
Huh, that explains why I can't play burned disks. Although, thanks for the help! Maybe I have to start looking some places in Lithuania, Klaipėda where they modchip PS1 consoles
I've never seen a chip wired quite like that before... and it has an oscillator attached to it as well which I personally haven't seen. Is that rust on the board near the chips? Burned flux maybe? It's possible it's either an anti-piracy chip or something could have gone wrong with the install or chip after all the years. Might want to look into getting a newer, more modern chip.
Also worth mentioning that after 10+ years, depending on how you stored your backups, they might not be viable any more. You can buy a good modern chip (recommend Mayumi V4) from one of several members here, installation is well documented, and fairly simple if you know how to solder.
That's a PAL territory thing - the idea is that you use a 4.43MHz xtal on the mod chip and then feed the oscillator output pin to the subcarrier input on the video modulator. You also lift the NTSC/PAL input on the video chip and ground it, so the chip is always in PAL mode. The result of this is that when you play a NTSC game the console outputs PAL60 - which is something that most European TV sets can handle because it was used by multi-standard VHS machines when playing back NTSC tapes. Note that you need special modchip code for this, since it's effectively overclocking the CPU by about 10% and this throws off the delays. It's also running the 4MHz version of the PIC out of spec, but this doesn't seem to cause any practical problems. The marks on the board just look like 10 year+ old rosin flux to me. I guess whoever installed the chip didn't bother to clean it.
I also want to add a note, that I have some russian PS1 games (these were the business back in 2000s) and some of them are PAL and NTSC. Colin Mcrae Rally 2 is PAL and Taxi 2 is NTSC
It it's booting the Russian discs then your chip is working correctly - so if you have problems with CD-Rs it's because of problems with the optical pickup. It could just be bad, but if the console has been in storage for a long time it may simply need cleaning. There are normally two bits that get dirty - one is the lens, which is easy to get at, and the other is the mirror that sits under the lens and turns the beam through 90 degrees, which is not so easy to get at. Basically, you have to remove the pickup sled from the drive then remove the plastic over over the lens assembly, then very carefully move the lens up so you can get at the mirror - you can clean the lower surface of the lens while you are at it. This isn't 100% (the laser could just be tired), but I have seen consoles that were hugely improved by this.
