Since the laser in my old PSX finally died (after pot tweaking it a few times) I’ve been on the market for a new one. I found one, unfortunately a ‘slim’ one, however it was cheap and ‘non-working’, how could I let that occasion slip? As it turns out it’s seen so little use that it even had an original warranty seal, and of course, it worked. The only thing I needed was to make it a bit less picky – disable region lock.
A common concern on these PM-41 boards are the 220µF capacitors, but these seem okay, so for now I left them alone, but as soon as I need anthing capacitor related I’ll buy replacement for these as well.
For the modchip I decided to use PsNee with an Arduino Nano.
For the Nano to turn on quickly enough to glitch the PSX it’s necessary for it to doesn’t have bootloader programmed, so I had to use a Uno as a hardware programmer instead of just programming it via ArduinoIDE.
Test install – everything worked fine.
Finall install.
And a problem.
HUGE PROBLEM.
There is no reaction to power.
Quick panic and a glance at the schematic later I saw that there is no 3.5V present.
600mV is just not going to cut it. Let’s take a lesson out of my book and check the fuses first.
If Your fuse turns into a 100kΩ resistor thats…
uhm….
Not good.
Kids, remember, do as I say, not as I do.
Anyway, as You can see, the green LED is back, as well as 3.5V. At this point a couple of SMD fuses were already added to my shopping cart.
But does it work?
Yes, yes it does. The region lock is also a thing of the past, as well as, ekhm… ehkm…, some protections. Considering that the capacitors are good I imagined that the CD drive is also in an amazing condition and it seems like it’s the case. It reads both original and copy disks perfectly.
Thanks for reading!