Hi, I'm probably going to start getting rid of most of my PSX debugs little by little this year and I thought it'd be nice to try to get the CD drives working as well as possible before trying to sell them anywhere. Now, I know that the 2 leftmost trimmers on the boards these consoles are supposed to be for adjusting focus bias / gain and that the trimmer on the CD drive's flex cable is supposed to be for adjusting the laser's intensity (though when I tried blind adjusting it -- I know I shouldn't do that and I won't do it again, I promise! -- a bit on one of my consoles it seemed to affect the motor, with some settings the drive started spinning the discs way too fast or backwards...). Does anyone know what the fourth trimmer a bit to the right on the motherboard adjusts then? It seems to be related to the disc drive too because adjusting it can make the console stop reading discs. No luck finding a service manual for the PU-7 / PU-8 boards yet. ;__; I may have one for SCPH-7502 somewhere (definitely used to have at least) but it probably isn't going to help much with the older boards... I have access to an oscilloscope but most likely no chance of getting an official test CD-ROM unfortunately. However apparently it is possible to get the drive working "good enough" with just a multimeter? On a related note, I'd also like to try repair a DTL-H1000 console (this one I'm going to keep myself definitely, the separate s-video output port is nice for connecting to a cheap video capture card when using the multi A/V port for RGB output to a video monitor at the same time). We had an accident here, one evening me and a buddy were having too much fun playing old games while getting slightly drunk and I forgot that this console didn't have an euro PSU swapped in yet... so I connected it to 230V mains directly. It actually worked for a little while (got into the black PS screen at least) before we noticed a strange noise coming from the console, he asked me about it and then it hit me that I probably should have put that stepdown transformer in between the console and the power strip... He was closer to the strip so he started pulling out all the power cords real fast. However, unfortunately he started from the wrong end and didn't quite get where I was trying to point him at...so it took many, many seconds until the PS was finally disconnected. By that time there the console had already stopped working and there was a small cloud of very foul smelling smoke in the room so after opening the console's case and seeing if any liquid had to be cleaned (fortunately not, IIRC at least the motherboard definitely didn't have anything on it) we went out to have a smoke & some food while I left the apartment windows open. When we came I back, I swapped another PSU into the console and to my relief it seemed to work fine. However, turns out I got happy too early: later that same evening the console crashed while playing a game. The game just stopped running while the console was still outputting the picture and looping (I think) the last ADPCM sample from the game's streamed music. I tried restarting the console but it didn't boot anymore. It starts outputting video ("NTSC" led on my video monitor lights up when the console is powered and I can see the interlacing if I turn up brightness on the monitor) but nothing more than that, just a black screen. So any hope it could still be repaired? I think I could check and swap caps, fuses and such but swapping complex SMD ICs definitely not. If it's not possible to fix it I'll probably reuse the case for a modded retail console (it is definitely in very nice condition and has that distinctive blue color ^_^), preferably one I can swap the output connector panel into from this console so I still get the separate s-video port for video captures. IIRC at least SCPH-1002 which doesn't have the s-video connector anymore still has the connections for it on the motherboard... or if not, I guess I could steal the signals from multi A/V. Oh well, maybe it'd be better to stick to retail hardware or even emulators only when not sober in the future...
