Dafuq?!?! Are you saying SCEE is willing to sell/give away one of these upon request? Or did you just ask for information on the cards? Also, is it SCEE S&D? Or R&D? I couldn't find anything with S&D.
Damn. If you do get some assistance from them about a devkit, I want some help with my SCPH-10000 retail console. :highly_amused: The service manual for that console series was never available outside of Sony lol... and I think that my unit has some problems with cracked solder joints.
I asked for some assistance. The guy has not replied yet, and I dont think he ever will if he all of a sudden gets several messages from you guys asking for help. Just be patient. Lets see if he replies to me. If so, then we know he can actually help us.
Well Cyberghost has told me that he made a mistake. The card will NOT work without the PIO board. Which means, my cable is either bad or the PIO board is bad. This is good news in a weird way. Time to do some testing on the PIO board Olivera, you are correct about the bootstrap ROM.
Okay, looking at the PIO board, it seems okay. One thing that I noticed, were the fuses. http://www.voti.nl/shop/catalog.html?ICP-N38 There are two of them, and they look like transistors. I did not find anymore. F700 and F701. Why I noticed them, were because they are fuses. So if nothing is going though, the board is dead. Also because they seem to have a crack in the top of them. It may just be the silicone. I am not sure on it. I already reseated all the DIP chips ages ago on my first troubleshooting run down. I will replace the capacitors first, then resolder some main joins or ones that look suspicious. *EDIT* Nope. Still not working. I give up now
UPDATE I got a jumper cable coming in the mail from a friend to test if it is the cable or not, that links the CPU board to the PIO board. Lets hope the cable is faulty, because thats an easy fix.
UPDATE I received the cable and I still have the same problem. After more researching and thinking, I DO have a video out - however, the PlayStation (DTL-H2000) is being held low (reset) because it is waiting for something. That something, is the CD-ROM (DTL-H2010) drive (mentioned earlier). That is what the blue terminator dongle does (bottom right). You can see I really want to use this board. All you people out there who have it packed in a box safe and sound, really make me mad. Here I am wasting time and money trying to revive mine where you have a perfect functional board not being used because you want to collect it. Well let me tell you that the EPROM will not hold its data forever, so you better learn how to dump ROM's. If you have this board with the dongle, please take detailed photos of it for me so I may replicate the pins being jumped.
I called SN Systems in the UK with the problem. No luck. The guy was really nice and he did attempt and put in effort to help me, but the hardware is old and no one uses it or has anything left of it. Shame really, but anyway, back to square one. No coloured bars on the screen. I will phone SCEI (Sony Computer Entertainment Japan) (yes I can speak Japanese to get around), SCEA (Sony Computer Entertainment America) and SCEE (Sony Computer Entertainment Europe) to try and hopefully get this sorted out.
Thought I would take back my remarks because Cyberghost told me that his 3 DTL-H2000's do not have the blue terminating block. That photo above has in fact has a cut cable for the CD-ROM (DTL-2010) drive. I am super confused, but if Cyberghost's boards do not have the plug and yet they work fine, then why would Sony write such a thing into the manual?! Now I am contradicting myself because of this and take back what I said above. The guy at SCEE also told me that the EPROM (the chip above the larger ALTERA MAX IC) may be bad... I dont know if that would be the case but I would like to know what is on that ROM.
Yeah I dnt have any kind of terminator, I just have the dtl-h2010 cable but since I dont have the drive itself, I've never used that cable. pretty much that connector is empty on all 3 of my boards and they all power up to the colored bars.
Well I am sure then that my boards are dead. I tried again to get a responce from them using the reset function while also trying to upload to them. Still nothing.
I phoned Eurocom and the developer who worked on Hercules told me that my boards are infact dead. All boards will reset back to the coloured bars display no matter what. They do not have a Flash ROM, and they do not save the previous state in which they were in. Oh well. I tried the best I could to get them running. I will have to find another then. I will attempt to repair it knowing it IS broken. My guess is now that it may be the PNP transistor mentioned way back. It gets really hot so that is a start.
Guess who found a blown fuse? It's on the PIO board on the main voltage line (it looks like the 12 volt rail, but I need to test it to be 100% certain on that). All the other fuses are perfectly fine. Time to replace it and see what happens... I'm so excited! *EDIT* Here is the little bastard desoldered and the position on the PCB where it was located. http://i.imgur.com/RPOln.jpg http://i.imgur.com/QaHuq.jpg http://i.imgur.com/iC1dL.jpg Found it on DigiKey: ICP-N38 1.5 Amp fuse, 50 Volts. http://www.digikey.com/product-search/en?x=0&y=0&lang=en&site=us&KeyWords=ICP-N38 Datasheet: http://psdev.psio.com.au/forum/download/file.php?id=110
Don't go replacing fuses without investigating why it blown in 1st place. You might end with magic smoke if you don't. Make sure you check for short circuits.
I will take a good look. Even so, if the new fuse does blow, it should not harm any other components.
Fuses help to protect. It doesnt mean they WILL 100% stop something else getting killed. Generally, following l_oliveira's advice is a good idea and this is no exception.
On a sidenote, the five legged chip near the fuse (the one which has mount for a heatsink) looks VERY familiar... Which happens to be a family of buck converters from National Semiconductor. I bet with you that one is responsible for generating 3.3v for all the PS 3.3 logic (basically 90% of the PS1 machine runs at 3.3/3.5v)
You mean, this? (links below) It isn't on a heat sink, so it may be taking 5 volts down to the 3.3/3.5 volts (minimal heat dissipation) (I pulled it away from the silicon/thermal glue. I will remove the old stuff and re-attach it later on with new stuff and get the part number in the process) By the way, that PCB shown above is a Megadrive/Genesis, yeah? http://i.imgur.com/u1v5j.jpg http://i.imgur.com/9aLOm.jpg http://i.imgur.com/FTFLI.jpg