Replacing blown fuses in Philips CD-i players with Mono III and Mono IV mainboards – sounds too simple to write an article about. That’s why I’m going to dig a bit deeper into the topic. An important fuse sits on the mainboard and protects the -5 V rail. I tripped (over) it by accident and was confronted with these weird symptoms that are hard to diagnose:
No video output (well, there is something, but see below)
Service Shell video output with a rolling/flickering image
The disc tray opens on its own (tray loader motor is constantly spinning)
This guide shows the replacement of the laser sledge in Philips CDM 12.1T CD mechanisms. It assumes that you have already cleaned the lens and done the necessary troubleshooting to rule out other errors (see this article for diagnosis with the Service Shell). If you only get dirty disc messages or experience stuttering audio/video from time to time, you can still follow the guide to clean and grease the mechanism.
For documentation, I replaced the laser sledges of two CDI450 players with unreliable or no disc recognition at all. I took different approaches to find the easiest replacement procedure, so don’t be surprised if you suddenly see pictures where things are in different places.
This is an overview of the lists of capacitors and other components that I had to create in order to repair or modify my devices. Currently, all of them are already featured in my repair articles, but I will add further lists that are not featured yet or are a work in progress.
Recently, I acquired yet another CD-i player for repair and it came with a Philips 22ER9021 CD-i Gamepad. The gamepad showed two common signs of usage: Broken cable insulation and an unresponsive D-Pad.
The coating is broken right behind the cable strain relief. I’ve seen much worse cases of broken insulation and even ripped out conductors, but this still needs to be fixed before it becomes worse.
Philips 22ER9021 PCB – front – with broken cable insulation
In the early to mid-90s, the Texas Instruments Ti-82 Graphics Calculator (or Graphing Calculator) was introduced and became a requirement in some high schools. I never had the official serial link cable to connect mine to a PC, but it came with a calculator-to-calculator link cable. That cable was very popular during math lessons for trading pictures, programs and games. We had several games back then, but I only remember one game, a Breakout clone programmed in TI-BASIC that was painfully slow.
I still have this calculator, but it was sitting in a drawer for more than 20 years. In this article, I will bring it back to life and connect it to a modern Windows 10 PC to install a Breakout clone or something better on it.
I recently acquired a cheap Top Hunter MVS cartridge with graphic glitches for repair. When I plugged it into my Neo Geo MV2FS, it had the mentioned graphic glitches and a mostly green-tinted image.
This Hori Joystick-7 (HJ-7) for the Nintendo Famicom has been sitting on my shelf for many years. When I finally took it out to use it for the first time, I noticed that the stick got stuck when moving it all the way to the left or right. In this article, I will open it up and fix that issue.
The Cuckoo CRP-N0681F rice cooker doesn’t run Doom (yet; see below), but it can talk, sing and chuff like a steam locomotive. It also prepares all kinds of rice. One day, the display went blank. The next time I plugged it back in, it greeted me in Korean and wanted me to set the clock. It seemed that the internal battery had died and the user manual agreed with that:
About Lithium battery – This product contains lithium battery for improving blackout compensation and time. Lithium battery lasts 3 years. – When current time is not displayed on the screen, it means the battery is exhausted. It should be replaced.
Unfortunately, that’s all what the manual had to say about this topic. A quick search on the internet didn’t reveal any clues about the battery replacement, so I opened it up to have a look inside.
This is a follow-up to the modifications I did to a NTSC VA15 Saturn. In this article, I will implement the following Sega Saturn (PAL VA3) modifications: Region-free BIOS, FRAM, and a 50/60 Hz switch (SW4).
After finishing the last article, I took three broken PAL Saturns that I had lying around apart to see what I could repair and modify next: A Model 1 with VA1 mainboard, a Model 1 with VA3 (aka “PAL VA SD”) mainboard and an almost identical Model 2 (VA5, also “PAL VA SD”). I had only one working Type-B power supply, so I had to make a choice. I went with the VA3 Model 1 because the mainboard was in the best condition and only needed a working disc drive and power cable, reset button stick, power suppy and some cleaning. This is how is looked before:
This article is about implementing the following Sega Saturn modifications: Region-free BIOS, FRAM, and switchless 50/60 Hz.
But first, we’ll need to go back in time a decade or so. Back then, I was modifying my “This is COOL” skeleton SegaSaturn (HST-0021/HST-3220) like crazy, stuffing everything inside that I could find:
