Anybody know how to fix a Playstation 1?

Hey, so very off topic, but please bear with me. I found a Playstation 1 at a thrift store, and when I plugged it in and popped in a game, nothing happened. The disk will spin and everything, but I get no picture. My display says it’s getting a signal, but the screen is black. The darn thing won’t even go into the BIOS. So is there anyone out there who knows these things? I’m good with electronics, so I don’t mind if i have to whip out my soldering iron.

easy fix, just take of the back,and solder in 2 wires running from the 2 pins 3rd from end on the left bank of the gpu, and run them into the empty io pins on either side of the APU, from there just flip the polarisation of the initlal coupling trans-resistor and it should be working fine. I’ve had to do this to a few old Playstations back in the day.

tldr: no

6 Likes

Okay, that’s too funny. Watch that actually be the solution.

If you can find the part… then you can fix the issue. I’m not sure what it’s called but it’s part number is PS2. It’s a large part… it basically replaces everything from the cabled ends on. It does have the advantage that you will end up supporting more games… :wink:

tldr: no

2 Likes

Easy fix … it’s called a big hammer. The bigger the hammer the faster the fix. Did it to mine 20 years ago. Worked GREAT.

1 Like

Never broke again since then eh?

1 Like

Likely consumes considerably less power, too.

Sometimes, if done exactly right, it can even eliminate house maintenance issues, also. (Thought you may want to disable the smoke detectors first to avoid permanent hearing loss.)

1 Like

Why am I suddenly remembering the misshapen “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a night. Give a man poison fish, and he’ll eat for the rest of his life.”

3 Likes

On a serious note, to try and fix such a complicated electronics device the first thing you’d do is look for blown capacitors. The top will bulge if they over-heated. Replace those - actually just replace all of them, the normal lifetime of these is about 20 years before they dry out, though Sony probably used a proper brand there.

Then if it doesn’t work you could try to take out the main board and use a hot air soldering gun to basically reflow ALL of the solder connections. If the board has no plastic connectors (which it probably has) you can also try and put it into a reflow oven.

Then if that doesn’t work you’ll have to go nitty-gritty and get the service manual and check all test points on the board and follow all paths on the board, best also use a logic analyzer to check if the buses send the data they’re supposed to. Still all of this probably gives you only a slim chance that it will work again. More so because the disc drive is probably mechanically out of whack by now anyway.

3 Likes

“Give a man a fire, and he’ll be warm for a night. Set a man on fire, and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life”

You people are really evil right now :smiley:

Well, thank you everyone! All those replies made my day, especially the setting a man on fire one. But on a serious note, when I opened it up, there was gunk all over the CPU, like someone spilled something on it. But it may also be that my display doesn’t like it, I’ve heard of this being the case several times. So if it doesn’t work on a different TV, then I may have just gotten someone else’s garbage. Eh, whatever, the GPU is still good, and I found documents on how to use it, so I might make something using it. And no, I’m not taking a hammer to the thing, I can scrap it for parts.

2 Likes

Yeah, tested it with an actual TV, and it doesn’t work. Time to scrap it!!!

Wait. Do what Normen said. It sounds like either some caps exploded or the solder has gone away.
You could show us a picture :slight_smile:

Okay, fine. Hang on while I take a pic of the problem. But I do know that the caps are good, I tested them.


Not sure if you guys can see it, but there is dried stuff on the CPU and RAM. I used my oscilloscope to check the signals on both, and they seem to be stuck at 5 volts. A very noisy five volts to be exact. Both chips warm up as they should, so I know they’re getting power and nothing shorted out.

I did notice that a pin on the GPU was touching another pin, but it was only a power pin. I fixed that issue.

not very sharp pictures to be honest.

Sorry, my phone camera sucks.