Fixing the Forgotten Playstation

believe it or not this is a Playstation it's called the PSX and when it launched in 2003 it was the most badass Overkill machine for your living room that money could buy and now I finally have one only this one's partially working but I think I can fix that so in this video I want to talk about what made the PSX so cool and to see if I could bring this console back to life let's Jump Right In for all intents and purposes the PSX really is just a normal PlayStation 2 but in a much bigger shell and with more features and before anyone brings it up yes the term PSX was used as a nickname for the PlayStation 1 but this this is the real PSX it has the emotion engine chip and graphic synthesizer to let you play all of your PS1 and PS2 games and even has two memory card slots and the two controller ports on the back to hook up your dual shocks just like a normal PlayStation 2 but in reality the PSX was more than just a game console it was meant to be your home media center of course with a disc drive you can play both CDs and DVDs but the PSX also allowed you to watch and record your favorite TV shows that's due to the fact that this system has a bunch of inputs on it from RCA to a bunch of coax and it also has a large built-in hard drive they came configured with anywhere between 160 to 256 gigs of storage all the way back in 2003 which was a lot back then and of course if not for using your PSX as a TV DVR you could use that extra hard drive space to rip your whole library of CDs or Stow all of your downloaded movies all of this to say that the PSX was clearly aimed at media Junkies that wanted the best of the best in their living rooms I mean look at the back of this thing that's just a stupid amount of iio this is some serious Hardware all of this functionality is cool and all but as a Sony nerd what really gets me going about the PSX is that this is the first time the company ever used the cross media bar or xmb it's most known for being the home interface for the PSP the PS3 and a bunch of Sony's TVs in the late 2000s but where it all started was the PSX however for as cool as this whole package is unfortunately it never saw any Commercial Success turns out that Overkill home theater boxes are very hard to sell and this one was expensive at that when the PSX debuted in 2003 it retailed for a whopping 80,000 yen or $800 oof oof yikes and while Sony was ultimately planning on releasing the PSX in markets like North America poor sales ultimately LED them to pull back however that doesn't stop me from loving what this machine is all about and to appreciate it in the best possible way let's figure out what's wrong with this thing and go and fix it now if you're familiar with us at overclock media you might have seen Austin Evans do a segment on this in his syo video where he paid $170 at auction for it unfortunately in that video we found out that the disc drive doesn't work it does boot up and show us the xmb but unfortunately as a PS2 in its current state it is not working inside of here there are two lasers the first one is a standard DVD reader which also burns discs as well but what this standard laser does is verify what kind of disc gets inserted into the PSX and if it realizes that a PlayStation game is inserted then it'll fire up the second laser which is more kin to one that you'd find on an actual PS2 my working hypothesis right now is that the first laser the one that does all of that verification to tell the PSX what kind of disc you have in here is the one that's failing since we couldn't even get a DVD video to load up so I'm going to take this thing apart and we'll try to do some surgery before we continue on with the video I want to take a moment to thank today's sponsor Squarespace Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building a website for your personal brand or business with a variety of stylish templates and plenty of options for customization making a website that's truly your own is a breeze and that can make a world of difference when it comes to engaging your audience whether you are selling your own products showcasing your portfolio to prospective clients or simply making a landing page for your project whatever the need Squarespace has you covered and will even help you set up a custom domain with just a few clicks if you're interested in checking them out and supporting the content we do here on Deni head over to squarespace.com Deni there you can try out the service for free and if you like what you see they'll give you 10% off your first purchase of a domain or website thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring today's video and now back to fixing our PSX in order to do transplant surgery on our disc drive we need a donor and this right here is a period correct DVD burner from 2004 what's really annoying about the PSX is that it's pretty finicky if you need to do any repairs or Replacements on it the disc drive replacement actually requires specific lasers that are typically found in burners like this from 2004 from Sony or light on drives from PowerBook g5s those are the only two places that you can find them luckily there were a handful of posts on Reddit and some some PlayStation forums of people working on their PSX which proved helpful for preparing for this video however for the sake of the content I want to go in a little blind there's a huge part of me that wants to be surprised with what the PSX has in store though hopefully I won't regret this so I think I'm just going to jump right in so let's open up the PSX over here in theory one laser should look identical to the one on my burner and that's the one I'm going to be taking out I'm kind of intimidated by opening up a PSX because I haven't even opened up a PS2 much less a special PS2 after playing what seemed like whack-a-mole undoing a bunch of screws under the PSX so smelled a little bit like Grandma Agnes in there next time Grandpa Charles should stay in the N okay well maybe I shouldn't spend time cleaning it now if we don't even know what the condition of this console is where do where I want to put my Dust Bunny somewhere okay well at least the actual component parts look pretty clean actually uh let's see if we can hone in on our disc drive yeah buddy it took a little bit to figure out how to get the covers off of the PSX that is the power supply let's not touch that but eventually all right and our PSX is opened up we have our disc drive over here the power supply which we certainly will not touch and we also have our hard drive we're not going to touch that but I do want to note that these things are also a ticking Time Bomb these things are actually firmware locked so you actually need to Source other drives from a PSX in order to have them work with this machine so if a drive goes wrong on your PSX it's not the easiest thing to replace as well so I want to uh do some backups and stuff and make sure that if this thing dies my PSX isn't just DOA or Not Dead on Arrival it would be uh dead again no dead just dead but regardless let's get to our disc drive how what made the PSX particularly hard to deal with was the annoying amount of screws hidden in plain sight it's clear that Sony didn't want you messing around with this console whatsoever but eventually the disc drive is free oh my God there's so much dust okay so the disc drive is out let's hope it wasn't for not let's grab at these screws here we go all right if I had to Hazard a guess the big Sony one is the PlayStation one and this is our first laser the one that does all of the verification in order to find out though let's take apart our donor drive and see what's in here and here is our laser so let's try to take this apart even further I want to actually free this after some further disassembly our donor Drive is almost good to go and I can confirm that the laser on this guy is the same as the one on our PSX I'm really happy that that's the case because different versions of the PSX have different lasers that go to them as well now the only thing that I have to do is figure out how to do the transplant itself and so I pushed further I figured out how to get the donor laser off its track heyo I'm so smart then I was going to figure out how to get the laser off the PSX when something weird happened [Music] uh what what there's an SD an SD what what wait what where this thing does not have an SD card slot just buried in here right this is some this is some Shenanigans what is happening I swear to God I did not contrive that literally I just was like what is rattling inside and an SD card fell out did someone insert an SD card into the drive Bay by accident it's just three files it's literally it's literally just some dude's renovation photos what were they taken in March of 2006 cool that's awesome that's a thing wow um I mean when you pay $180 for a random PSX on sendico that has no quality to speak of whatsoever um sometimes you will find random stuff yeah it's a bonus buy it Grandma Agnes and her house all right but let's get back on track we have a PSX to fix all right so we've separated the laser chassis if you will and there are these two retention screws that we have to take off that hold in our rails it should be a cakewalk now rail off look at that isn't it cool when things work there we go okay okay okay we're good now old laser we're putting it off to the side new laser let's put it in this should just be as easy as sliding it back on one rail only goes on a the track properly then the other one is just kind of sitting on there so sick there we go it is on there all right we're getting somewhere okay okay all right so ribbon cable is now in this drive should be good to go we did it well we'll see if it works we have to reassemble it now at this point I can see the light at the end of the tunnel it's a Sprint to put the PSX all back together to find out if our efforts were all worth it all right so the PSX is mostly together I haven't put the shells on yet because I want to make sure that it boots on and does everything we want it to do let's power it on and see if we did a good job or not cuz I don't tear things apart that often hard drive spinning up power is on let's make sure our TV is fired up video [Music] one not the best sign maybe it's doing some kind of reset let me plug into other rcas and and see if that is our problem no no video on that one no video on that one either okay plugging in that ribbon cable at the top it might need to make a circuit so what that attaches to is this top plate at this point I'm willing to try anything to make this work the other thing too is that this is annoying to put back on you know what I'm just going to rest this on here I'm not going to properly seat it in case we have to get back into the console but I think we should be good enough to plug this in again oh okay so we got some lights so the ribbon cable is doing its thing the light static okay okay okay okay so hit the button that's doing new stuff oh let's go yeah bro we plugged into video nope oh rookie mistake don't do it to me come on come on man this thing is clearly on on okay so I turn it off let me try to turn it on again yo hello okay so we didn't royally break it oh we have to do is just turn it on and off right Arc well when you say it like that you know in high and TI yes that yeah we should have done that to begin with um okay but we have a loading screen here so it is properly working I want to get us into the xmb wait oh here we go okay we have the xmb well I'm still recording TV uh let's try to play a DVD first to test this I have a CD and DVD here but we'll just use the DVD this is from one of my favorite J-pop artists supercell just be careful here let's put it in okay well the motor's not taking it oh no please pretty please okay well yeah I don't think that's functioning H whatever we did I think kind of messed with the motor at the very least the console still powers on and I kind of do want to go back into the disc drive to see if we can repair the motor for me that's almost not worth it at this stage I kind of want to count my blessings in that this console does work all right pause you know when people say always trust your gut well it turns out now there's a reason for that you see shortly after this bit I decided to open up the PSX again to see if I could rectify the situation with our disc drive and things ended up taking a turn for the worst man I spent way too long on this it's like 9:45 in the evening and I think I've hit the point where I've actually done the thing I didn't want to do which is kill the console this thing for some reason is not powering on anymore and I think it's because I accidentally snagged one of the ribbon cables it is just mangled to hell and I tried to put it back in but now it just won't power on man I should have just left it I should have just left it the way it was it also doesn't help that I was a big idiot and realized way too late on how to take off the side panels on here so that I could easily take the bottom and top shell off um so I could have probably saved myself some Hardware pain I'm just not in a good spot for shame man well it's hard to say What specifically broke with our PSX I at least for myself can learn a little more patience care and at least can be a little more prepared when it comes to taking apart consoles there's no doubt that the PSX would have had a better shot at life otherwise also with the benefit of hindsight I think I could have switched around my order of operations I was planning on doing software mods after fixing the disc drive but I really should have done that before the hardware fix in theory that would have allowed me to force the PSX to try reading the PS2 discs directly instead of relying on that DVD verification of course there's no way to tell if that would have worked but it's frustrating that we'll never know and on that disappointment thank you so much for watching this episode on Dany Channel and now I'm going to cry myself to sleep

Channel: Denki

Views: 158,349

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Id: xTNrVi_gSro

Length: 17min 9sec (1029 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 28 2023