A few years ago, I found someone had thrown out a mod-chipped fat PS2. It had a little note sticky taped to the top explaining how to turn the mod chip off and on again. It played every NTSC and NTSC-J game I threw at it, but lagged considerably in loading PAL. For the longest time I've had my unmodified console setup for PAL games and my mod-chipped console setup for imports. This morning, the console just stopped reading the disks. I was testing the loading lag on PAL games. I popped in Driver 2, but instead of going to the cutscene before the first level it went straight to a black screen and did nothing. The game booted up fine on both my PS1 and PS2, so there was nothing wrong with my disk. Now the mod-chipped console won't play any disks now at all. It doesn't even give me the Desk Read Error message. The "reading disk" font just disappears. I've tried cleaning the laser and adjusting the white gear, but nothing works. Attached are pictures of the mod-chip and also the console in question. Both my PS2 consoles are SCPH-30002 models, but the chipped one has very different internals. The unmodified system has rows of silver plates sticking up vertically, despite having the same model number. I'm not sure if this particular mod-chip was incompatible with this model or if the laser was just dying. Though I can't imagine why a dying laser would struggle with PAL games while flawlessly read NTSC games. Is there anyone in Australia whose good at fixing PS2s? I've seen the lasers sell for cheap on ebay. At this point I'm debating replacing the laser on this PS2, or just investing in chip for my unmodified console or just take the Free McBoot WinHiip approach.
PS2 lasers are fragile and sometimes dont like certain disks, or are finicky to the point it seems that way. Looks like you just have a dead laser, friend.
