Showing posts with label modding. Show all posts
Showing posts with label modding. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Replacing a PS2 laser




When my PS2 stopped playing dual-layered games I thought a laser replacement was the answer. It reality it turned out to be an arduous nightmarish adventure involving guns, drugs, naked ladies, and a crazy dude from Czechoslovakia. Actually, apart from the Czech, most of that is an exaggeration, but still, it’s worth reading.

.
.
.
I have an old fat PS2 with Messiah chip, which for a long time was the best way to play import PS1 or PS2 games on a PS2 system. It loaded everything you threw at it, even Betamax tapes (not really). But mine was an old model that had seen much use and I discovered it couldn’t play dual-layered DVD9 games. One guy on a forum actually said that the original Messiah chip prevents the PS2 from booting DVD9 games. I don’t know about this, but when Rogue Galaxy was released (the first DVD9 I had tried in my life) I had to buy a brand new slim to play it, and then I modded the PS2 to use Swap Magic for my Japanese and American imports.

The problem is: Swap Magic can’t boot import DVD9 games. Which was fine, since I didn’t own any (dual-layered PS2 games are fairly uncommon). Until I acquired Sakura Wars, a Japan/US exclusive RPG which was DVD9. The fact the UK never got it I suppose is payback for America not getting Siren 2, which we did and which is in my opinion the best game on the PS2. Seriously, if you can play PAL DVD9 games, please play Siren 2. It’s really special.

Anyway, I asked on forums and was recommended to buy a cheap £5 laser. Which I did. I watched some videos and read some tutorials and it seemed easy enough. The laser arrived, and the first problem was they’d sent it without a protective covering. It was just loose in the envelope, rattling around. No doubt scratched to hell I’d assumed. I was rather annoyed at this, since a laser is a fragile thing.

I stripped the machine, lubed the gears to remove the “farting tray” problem that can crop up, and then I installed the laser. Some tutorials recommend calibrating the laser, but I tried it first without doing so. Nothing. Then I tried calibrating both up and down, on the two tiny screws. Again nothing. Then I tried tweaking the height screw on the one side, to alter the angle and height. Hell, I tried altering everything. I spent an entire Saturday doing this, tweaking the damn laser, and it refused to work. The laser move back and forwards and made some noises, but it couldn’t seem to read anything. Putting my old laser back in it worked just fine, loading standard non-DVD9 games.


INSTALLATION TIP: use a bit of blutac to hold screws to the end of your screwdriver, if it’s not magnetic.

I emailed the store and complained about their shoddy packaging. They apologised and offered a refund, agreeing to pay my return postage. So I sent it back, and got a refund for the item and my postage, which was nice of them. Then I bought another one off the same store, since they assured me they’d send a new one, better packaged. True to their word it arrived well packaged. I then spent another day without success – the damn thing still wouldn’t work! At first I worried that I shouldn’t have bought the cheapest I could find. Some places charge £20 for one. Then I wondered if I had the wrong model of laser, but I triple checked various sources online and it definitely was the right one. So I asked again for a refund, saying I wouldn’t buy from them again.

I also emailed some of the people who’d left positive feedback for the item – I got hold of two of them, and both said their lasers didn’t work either, but they’d left the positive feedback before installing them. Just as I logged in to my email account to mentioned this to the store, it turns out they’d emailed me, saying that they’d been receiving so many fault reports on the lasers they were going to send out a mass refund and I didn’t even have to bother sending it back. Apparently the entire batch was bad! Which was very nice of them to do. Lovely people.

So I looked for another store selling lasers, and found a guy in the Czech Republic offering cheap European postage, so bought one. Arrived in a nice little box, well packaged, but again it didn’t work. This time it didn’t even make any noises – it was utterly dead. Now, I am fully aware some lasers require de-soldering, and I checked the solder points, they were find. This was just a dead unit that the PS2 ribbon cable didn’t even recognise as being there. So I emailed the guy asking for a refund, having decided to quit this malarkey. And here is why I hate eBay. He said he’d only refund me I left him good feedback. I didn’t feel like the drawn out process of reporting him to eBay so stupidly, foolishly and naively agreed. Whereupon he promptly refused to refund me.


The filthy sonnovabitch!

I threatened to report him and he sent back some snarkey message about how they were the last of his batch he was sending out and so he didn’t care if they didn’t work. I couldn’t work out whether he was saying he knew they didn’t work, or he didn’t plan on selling anymore so didn’t care if I complained.


Anyway, I opened an eBay complaint against him, and suddenly his tune changed, since eBay got back saying he would give a refund if I returned the item. Problem is, under eBay policy this is only valid if I return it insured mail, with a tracking code. I checked the price and this would cost more than the item itself cost me to purchase. If I sent it back as is, without a tracking code, I’m sure the bastard would claim he never received it. There was no way to contact eBay and explain the situation, so I had to eat the loss. Bastard.

So, out of pocket, with two broken lasers, a faulty system and still no way to play Sakura Wars, I settled on a foolproof solution:

I bought an American PS2! It was only £40 delivered, truth be told, which is an OK price, and it does mean I can now play all my US imports without disc swapping. Best of all, it runs DVD9 games just fine.


The moral of the story: don’t trust people on eBay.

Posted by Sketcz at 6:40 AM 10 comments
Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Thursday, November 25, 2010

Replacing a Game Boy save data battery

I recently went to a junk store which resulted in the impulse purchase of 9 unboxed monochrome Game Boy games, costing in total $19. Each was $2 a piece, except for the jewel in the bundle Mystic Quest, aka Seiken Densetsu, which cost $3. As luck would have it, the save battery was dead. Join me on my own mystic quest, as I battle magi and dragons to replace the fabled Panasonic CR1616 3V save data battery.
.
.
.


Actually, first I’m going to regale you with reviews of the 9 games I bought. If you just want the battery replacement guide, scroll way down.

I’ve always loved the original GB, since there’s something wonderful about those tiny cartridges and the system’s limitations. I also feel that it’s a comparatively undocumented system, with a tonne of overlooked but awesome games no one talks about. For a bit of fun I sometimes buy random carts without knowing anything about them, and on occasion I strike pay dirt, such as with Mercenary Force which yielded an HG101 article. Maybe there are hundreds of potentially incredible games still waiting to be found?

This lot were tucked away in a series of plastic security boxes at my nearby second-hand junk store. They cost $2 each, except for Mystic Quest which was $3. At those prices, it was kid in a porno store time as I grabbed whatever looked interesting. I left behind about 30 or so cartridges, most of them common (including about 7 Donkey Kong cartridges), and a tonne of Pokemon crap.

Unfortunately when I got home and tried these, I was mostly disappointed.


Volleyfire
This was a Japanese import, and a shooter, so I had to have it. Sadly it’s unbearably dull. Imagine Space Invaders, except instead of invaders there’s one guy moving left and right trying to shoot you. Worse than it sounds.


Rescue of Princess Blobette
Sequel to A Boy and his Blob. This is quite cool, but it feels way too restrictive on the small screen, and I don’t like the setting of a run down castle. I prefer the original. It’s not bad, I guess, but not as good as I’d hopped. If you want portable blobbing, get the original NES emulated on a PSP.


Mystic Quest
I’d already finished this years ago, but wanted the cartridge as a collectible. Two things are wrong with it: it’s in French, which I didn’t expect, since oftentimes RPGs are released in English in France. And secondly, the save battery was dead.

Solomon’s Club
Like Solomon’s Key on the NES. Pretty good all in, not sure how long I’ll play it for though.


Darkwing Duck
Played it briefly, seems just like the NES original. Rather good.


Duck Tales
Pretty much the NES game in monochrome I’d say.


Star Trek – Into the nexus
I had hoped this would be a cool RPG like the NES Star Trek games (pictured), but in fact it’s a collection of extremely awful minigames.


Blaster Master Jnr
This just goes to show how much attention I pay to HG101’s many fine articles. If I had read up on this, I’d have known it was nothing like Blaster Master on the NES. I think it’s terrible.


True Lies
I recall seeing a magazine preview for this, which made it look a bit like Die Hard from the NES, which is one of my all time favourite games. Sadly it’s a poorly designed maze shooter, where you can’t make out who is a hostage and who isn’t, resulting to many game overs.


And that’s about it. The Disney stuff is cool, but better on the NES. And Mystic Quest, my prize of this lot, didn’t even work due to battery death. All in all, I wasted $19 which could have been better served on buying a PSN card.

Once I get a chance I’ll be trading this lot in at a nearby retro store. The real nail in the coffin for all of this was, I recently tried for the first time a GB emulator on my PSP. And OH MY GAWD. Never before had I imagined such clarity. I’d tried GB emulators on the Nintendo DS, but the system just didn’t have the resolution to do them justice. You either ended up with a 1x ratio the size of a postage stamp, or you had to go with 1.5x which filled the screen but filtered everything. GB games at x2 resolution on a PSP are the way GB games were meant to be played. It is BETTER than perfect.



REPLACING THE BATTERY

Before I could trade it in at my retro store, I would have to replace the battery on Mystic Quest. I’d replaced batteries on NES games, my Sega CD RAM cart, and several Sega Saturns, but I’d never even popped open a GB cart before.

First I’d need to remove the annoying GameBit screw Nintendo uses. I find the inclusion of these in most retro items slightly disturbing, since you need to go out of your way and order a GameBit screwdriver (they come in two sizes). Their use signifies that Nintendo had never considered the possibility of battery death, or if they did, never intended for owners to repair the problem. It’s extremely short-sighted. Does Nintendo’s repair service still exist for retro items? Can I post them my GB cartridges for battery replacement? Why can’t I crack open my cartridge?

The bigger picture here is that all retro items are slowly dying. Meaning if you’re a purist who wants original hardware, you need to find or become a collector who knows how to mod systems such as the SNES, and the Mega Drive for 60Hz, or knows how to build RGB SCART cables, and who can recommend the best CRT TV, all of which are now defunct. NFG has been a leading figure in the technical chop-shop workings of consoles, and there are others online, but I always find it worrying that preservation of this subset of human culture falls to people like us: a few scruffy guys with soldering irons. There should be a museum for this kind of stuff.

The GB uses the smaller of the two GameBit sizes. After it’s cracked you slide the cover-art part of the cartridge down and pop it off. Here’s where it gets problematic. Backup batteries in console cartridges were easy to replace, using bigger batteries such as (I think, maybe) the DL2032. The GB uses the considerably smaller CR1616 battery. Even worse, Nintendo appears to have soldered these in place.

For comparison’s sake, here is the circuit board to the crappy Star Trek game. Notice how it’s smaller than Mystic Quest, lacking the entire upper section which deals with battery save data.

The battery is housed between 2 small horizontal plates, each of which is soldered to the circuit board. The battery is attached to the plates either by 2 pin-head drops of melted solder on each, or a machine actually punched two tiny holes into the plates, which resulted in an embedded spike in the battery. It was too small to tell, but based on how flush the set-up was with the circuit, they obviously made the battery-and-plates component at a separate part of the plant, and then later in the production line a person or machine took the pre-made battery component and then just soldered that in place. There is absolutely NO WAY you could solder the lower plate onto the circuit, then somehow puncture holes or apply solder to this plate in order to place the battery on top of it, before attaching the upper plate with additional solder/holes. There’s just not enough room around the circuit board to work.

This was going to cause me a huge problem, since I had two options: desolder the 2 plates, replace the battery and then try to re-attach this mini component, or try to pry out the battery whilst leaving the plates in situ, and then hope could I wedge a new one in. Feeling lazy I opted for the latter, and had to use one of my super-tiny flat-head screwdrivers to wedge between the lower plate and battery. A few minutes of jabbing and poking broke the seal and the battery lifted up (the bastard was stuck in like an Alabama tick). Then I delicately had to do the same with the upper plate, making sure not to break them. The plates were quite thin, and had a flexibility not too far off aluminium foil.

If you check the photos, you should be able to see the tiny spikes on the plates – now, I’m not sure if these are tiny blobs of solder which held the item in place, or if a machine punctured a hole from the other side to fasten it securely. There were two tiny indentations on the plate’s reverse side.

Next I needed a replacement battery. The CR1616 is easily available but not too common where I live. A local general store didn’t have it and couldn’t get it in. A dedicated electrical store nearby had a wide selection of batteries, but not the one I needed. They could order it in though, which would take 2 take days and cost me $3.75. I could have gotten it slightly cheaper online, but I didn’t feel like the hassle so had them order it. Assuming my replacement plans succeeded, my working copy of Mystic Quest would have only cost me $6.75.


The problem now was how to affix it securely? I’d bent the plates slightly and the whole thing was loose, and even bending them back didn’t fix things because unlike NES batteries, there was no springy cup shape to hold it in place – the plates are just 2 horizontal strips. I considered tiny drops of superglue, but this would create a barrier between the battery and plates. Resoldering was out since my soldering iron is too chunky.

Then I remembered a special tape I had for affixing bandage gauze to human skin, called Omnifix. That stuff sticks like poop-on-a-blanket and is extremely difficult to get off. Perfect! It would look a little Heath Robinson, but once the cartridge was closed you wouldn’t notice.

Before replacement I took some pliers and scrunched the little spikes flat (the fact they crumpled into the plating so easily increases the likelihood they were the result of holes as opposed to solid blobs of solder). Next the battery went back in face down, and I applied two strips of bandage tape. The tape and adhesive are non-conducting, so I didn’t mind it touching various circuit lines.

Although it somewhat resembled a child’s scuffed knee, I was please with how the circuit board still fit neatly in the cartridge casing afterwards. In case any future owners wanted to get at the battery in a decade’s time when it died again, I decided to replace the GameBit with a standard Philips screw. I normally keep a big box of spare-parts, but had recently misplaced it, so in a pinch stole one of the good screws from a broken N64 memory card by Logitech. Et voila. It fit perfectly and kept the cartridge housing secure.

I tested the game by starting two new save files, named after HG101 no less, and then tried them out 5 minutes later, and then a few hours later. Even after switching the unit off the memory data remained intact, and will hopefully give its future owner several years of enjoyment.


As for myself, I am selling off my small GB collection. These things are reaching the age where they’ll need proper restorative care to keep functioning. I’ve already binned one GB due to a broken, dust filled screen, my old Game Gear’s AC input mysteriously died, my CDi’s internal battery is dead and cannot be easily replaced, and I don’t even want to switch my 3DO on for fear of what I’ll find. I only hope that there are collectors who take this seriously and will maintain the skills needed to keep various older pieces of hardware in working condition.
Posted by Sketcz at 12:44 PM 17 comments
Labels: , , , , , ,

Thursday, October 7, 2010

Modding my Megadrive

Nothing impresses sexy women more than being able to explain in precise detail how you can physically modify a PAL Megadrive motherboard, via only six wires and a couple of double throw pole switches (and trust me, girls LOVE double throw poles!) to clock that 16-bit beast in at the optimal 60 hertz (which is 17.5% faster than the default 50 hertz) when run through an RGB SCART cable on a compatible television, while also being able to flick between the English and Japanese language options. Because sometimes you just want indulge in the old BARE KNUCKLE technique, am I right?
.
.
.

Oh, wait, I was lying. The nerdy pursuit of altering electronic circuit boards is probably the least attractive thing a guy can do – but who cares when you have such pixel perfect beauty on your CRT TVs. In truth, retro console modding is a dying art, especially since retro consoles look hideous on modern TVs, and this MD represent my last venture.

I’ve been away from both the blog and the Games of the World section on the main website for what seems like weeks if not months, mainly because I’m trying to sell off as much of my collection as possible and get things in order for... a cataclysmic life changing decision next year. Well, I’m moving house at least, and I want my entire life to fit into 3 boxes maximum. HG101 overlord DA recently moved, and anyone with a big collection will confirm, it’s not easy.

The MD came with a Sega CD unit, and to increase sales value I decided to mod it. Although the Sega CD unit can only play PAL games, you can rip NTSC games, patch them, reburn them onto CDR, boot them on a PAL system in 50Hz, then flick a switch to force them to run in 60Hz as they were originally meant to. I did this with my MD2 and SCD2 for a long time. Plus, with an RGB SCART cable, there is absolutely no better way of getting a super crisp image.

Unfortunately the MD unit was in fairly bad condition to begin with. It had a massive crack on the outer shell, and when I opened it I found the RF shielding had been several warped – I’d bought it second hand over a decade ago, along with the SCD unit and games, for about $20, and my belief is that the previous owner fell on it, cracking the case and squishing the shielding.

Unfortunately opening I found that the tabs holding the power switch in place were broken, which is why the switch had a tendency to stick. It promptly fell out, forcing me to create a makeshift replacement out of a wooden clothes peg (I tried gluing the switch back in place, but the superglue leaked out and nearly fused with the electric box itself). Worsening the state of the system was that after I’d cut a hole for a flick switch, I used glue to hold it in place, except it leaked inside fusing it shut. So a useless switch. I had intended to use only one pole switch, but now needed two, and since the unit was so fugly already, I put them in plain view to give the whole thing a kind of Steel Battalion vibe, with switches, nobs and dials all over the place.


The soldering went smoothly enough, but I lacked a SCART cable. So I went to a local French store and traded a copy of Tail Concerto on PS1 for a French SCART cable. Its Sega reference was Model 3085 and it came with a massive black box in the middle, which I found odd. And it didn’t work. I had sound but no picture. So I took it back and got another one. Same problem again. Look at it, I wondered if the Black Box was somehow the problem. So I popped it open, and the 8-pin DIN plug, and checked the cables. I then decided to severe the cables in the box and re-attach them to each manually. This was fun, since the Red, Green and Blue signal carriers on the 8-pin DIN side were coloured Green, Orange and Red, whereas those on the SCART were coloured correctly, so I had to repeatedly tell myself: caps to the legs, legs to the dynamite. Good thing I watch TV, huh?

This worked, miraculously, except the screen was over-exposed, which I then realised was because in most normal MD1 SCART cables, there are resistors to reduce the energy from R, G and B signal wires, which were now missing. Which I feared would blow my TV up. Diagrams for an MD1 SCART cable can be found HERE.


I then did some googling and found this topic on Digital Press.

The Digital press website has of course moved since I found that topic, and using google to search it directly yields nothing, so I hope the above Google cache works, since it documents someone else’s solution to my problem.

This is what Dzerp discovered regarding said 3085 Sega cable.

“So here is what needs to be done if anyone else has the same problem with a Model 3085 Sega RGB cable. Cut the (+) connector one the left side of the board and connect it to the SINC on the other side (also cut). And presto. Have a really nice RGB picture.”

AAAARRRGGGHHH BAAAAALLLLLSSSS!!!!!

I had spent an entire evening rewiring the thing because I was too lazy to walk to my computer and search the net. And what I ended up with was a broken, semi-functioning cable, when a simple, single wire snip and resolder would have fixed the problem.

Well, I didn’t feel like buying another cable. And the machine was so goddamned ugly I didn’t think I could sell it anyway anymore. So I gave it to the guy at my local French store. For free. I also traded in the SCD unit for 30 Euro store credit, which I intend to put towards Vanquish.

And with that, my entire 16-bit and earlier collection is no more! All I have is my Saturn, N64, 3DO, CD-I, and modded Xboxs. Plus my PS3.

For anyone interested in doing this mod themselves, I recommend the Mmmonkey website.

Direct link to the MD mod.
Posted by Sketcz at 12:03 PM 8 comments
Labels: , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)