SONY PSX DESR-5100 queries

any idea if its possible to make this unit record UK signals/input sources?

 

The only way is to test it lol

I'd be surprised if it does, but then again you just never know. I'd also like to hear what Limey has attempted with the unit in the US and whether he has gone as far as testing the recording / DVB side.

 

thats true..

well TONIGHT is PSX night!

I have planned ot have the kids in bed early, th wife kicked out shopping for the evening and some quality time, just me, the PSX's and the TV....

let the fun(or disaster begin!)

 

I only have one thing to say 110volts only!!!!

 

lol.. i didnt mean that kind of disaster!!!!

And yes i have here a nice big fat 110V convertor... got just for this instance! (Sunpower one i do believe)

Parris fear not,m your unit is safe here with me.....




MUWHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

 

Mine tunes to the US analog NTSC cable frequences without problem & records from them to the HDD quite happily too. I haven't used the ability to write to DVD's yet & I've not attempted to feed the unit a PAL signal (either RF, or composite/s-video) - I probably should, but both these functions are readily done by equipment I already have in place/to be honest I never expected PAL to work with it/since the unit is currently in place in my A/V stack (it is the primary JP games unit in the living room (which had meant it has had the GF's DDR pad attached to it a lot of the time!), I've avoided having to mess around with cables at the back too much.

Once I get my hands on a second unit, I'm planning to tinker with it much more extensively, as it'll be located in my den, rather than the living room. :nod:

 

a second unit eh??

where on earth will you find one of them???

Oh ahat excuse the stupidity, but what s a DDR pad?

 

Hehe. They turn up from time to time. ;-)

DDR = Dance Dance Revolution. GF is a huge fan of DDR/Para Para/Guitar Hero bemani (beatmania) style games in general. And one must keep the GF happy! :nod:

My biggest mistake in terms of tinkering, was actually allowing my unit to be used for what it was intended for (living room gaming/DVR), which greatly reduces my ability to mess around with it.

 

Well my unit turned up with a damaged frontal to the little flip down cover. Not a huge issue, infact I just pulled it off with a view to fixing it at a later date. It serves little purpose and I suspect this DESR will be sorely abused by the time I have stripped it down and picked clean.

Svideo (as DD) suggested gave a colour output, so if you are in PAL land then that's probably the easier option. Strangely my Japanese PS1 doesn't give colour output on Svideo, so I hadn't tried it prior to DD mentioning it.

I've never seen let alone used the D1 type before. Highly doubtful that any European TV sets or monitors have D1 connection.

I'd like to gather together a strip down manual & user guide (that Japanese XMB is familiar but I got Japanese warning messages which looked serious!)

I loved the cracked egg as the time / date update menu!

One thing I will point out as someone did say 'You have a Japanese PS3, why do you need a Japanese PSX?'. Well, for a start it's not possible to use the original controllers on a PS3. Simply put it allows me to use the variety of strange peripherals that are lurking in the attic.

 

Parris got a DESR ??!! Sweet!!!!

I would love to see some hi-res photos / scans of the PCB, especially the BIOS and DVD-controller

What's the SCPH number?

Cheers!

 

That front panel cover & the wire tidy at the back are the 2 things that seem most likely to break on the PSXs - I see a lot of used machines on Yahoo where these items are simply missing.

I think there's a filter present on the PS1 design, which borks the colour carrier.

I've not seen D type connectors used outside Japan - as I mentioned before, it is possible to get cables to extract component video from the D port - let me know if you need help obtaining one.

Depending on where/when you get the warning message, I might be able to help. Looking forward to finally having an English guide...

You can use some of the original PS1/2 controllers on a PS3 via a USB->PS style adaptor, but you may run into issues with some games. Apparently, guitar hero won't work this way.

The PSX's have their own product ID line - DESR-xxxx. They were marketed by the main Sony Corp, rather than by SCE.

 

Thanks Limey (our man with his finger on the DESR)

When I get the opportunity (not this side of Christmas for sure) I shall take that unit to pieces and try to obtain good quality images. The draw back of going for Green energy, low watt, carbon efficient light bulbs is that the light is rather poor. I try to obtain images with a certain amount of natural light in them so that it's clearer, but up North in winter it's virtually impossible most days by the time I get back from work.

 

limey, I was wondering about the SCPH number of Parris' PS1 , as only the early models and the debuggers, have the band pass filter which filters out the chroma for non-NTSC signals.

On a JPN system, the band pass filter would only affect PAL discs, and not NTSC-games or the BIOS menu which the system was designed for.

 

Ah! I see. :katamari:

I didn't know that the band pass filter was removed on later PS1 models - do you know from which model onwards (or was that what you were trying to establish?)?

 

Yeah, the models with the CXA 1645M video encoder chip has band pass issues. That would be SCPH-100x, SCPH-3x00, SCPH-5xxx, including the SCPH-5903 VCD model, as well as all Yarozes and Debugging Stations.

The models with video encoder based on the H7240A chip don't have band pass problems (i.e. H7240AKV, BH7240AKV, CXA2106R). That would be SCPH-700x, including the 10 million models, SCPH-750x, SCPH-900x, and PS One model.....

 

I've got several I can try actually, but the ones I attempted with Japanese launch editions

 

If it is a retail unit and has a S-Video port it is a SCPH-1000 model.

-hl718

 

That is true, but all models have s-video (y/c) on the Multi-AV port...

 

To narrow this down and to draw the conversation back to the DESR, I was using a SCPH-1000 as has already been established. It didn't output in colour for the reasons stated, which is interesting and good to know - so thanks for that bit of information!

Anyone know why it was decided that Sony Entertainment were not responsible for the overall project? My thoughts on this were that it was down to it being marketed as a mulit-media unit with PS2 side added on, rather than the other way around.

My wife took one look at it and said (and this doesn't happen often) 'That's a nice looking unit'. Shock horror! I concur actually, it's a very simple, elegant piece of design and the devil is in the detail.

Perhaps if enough PS fans were to lobby Sony they'd bring it back and introduce PAL and NTSC U, just as Cadbury's brought back the 'Wispa' lol ;-)

 

My guess is that it was something like that. The unit was certainly attempting to attack markets outside SCE's normal turf. The PS3 has taken the other approach of being a gaming box, with multimedia functionality (though it is being used as a vehicle to promote Blu-ray). I thought it was interesting that the DVR side of things was omitted, despite some early speculation that it would support such things. There was also some speculation that the PS3 would be able to link with the PSX's...

Agreed. It's a nice piece of industrial design.

I still wonder why it didn't do better in the marketplace - cost/marketing/before it's time/or just trying to do too many things?

Perhaps they should do like M$ & Mountain Dew - buy a few thousand Wispas & you get a chocolate coloured PSX?