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NEC TG-16/TE/TurboDuo => TG/PCE Repair/Mod Discussion => Topic started by: tokyoscarab on October 28, 2016, 01:45:01 PM
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I recently upgraded my PC Engine with the CD-ROM2 and IFU. So far it's been a little bit of a pain. I had to replace the gear, which I expected I would have to do. It seems to play my backups just fine, but there have been a couple games it just has trouble with, Rondo and It Came From the Desert. Rondo 80% of the time will crash when it loads the file select screen, but the music plays. But it will play the demo, and if you get it to work, it'll play the game fine until you either freeze or get softlocked by a door that won't open. The problem with It Came is that the FMV is really choppy. It will play fine for a couple seconds or so, but then it pauses for 5 seconds or so and plays more. You can experience the game this way for a bit but it will also eventually just crash for no reason but always during FMV. After doing some research, I tried adjusting the tracking pot, VR103, and seeing if it would do anything. After a half hour of trying with no multimeter and minute changes, it didn't seem to change anything. I'm thinking it might be the laser itself, but have no idea. I'm using a white pce, verbatim cdrs, TED 2.4 running elmer's patched 3.0 card BIOS for the cd card.
I have looked into a replacement laser and seeing what people do for it, but most posts I see are from 6 years ago and things have changed since then. I see you can harvest these lasers from various models of Sony discmans and a few offbrand cd players, but I'd like to get something new(er) if possible. Where are places to get kss-220a / kss-162a or just a compatible laser? It seems like most people have duos and it hinders my searching as they seem to use different parts and most guides or sellers have parts for those devices :( . What's the best way to go about this? Sorry, I'm new to owning one of these, but I tried to make sure I did as much research into it as I could before posting here. Any help is greatly appreciated! :)
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It sounds like you did your research but compatability with formats that were still years into the future (ie: CDRs) wasn't a design priority for NEC when they made all this stuff in the 80s. Some machines play CDRs better than others. How well does it play real games?
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I understand that these devices predate cdr technology. The thing that is baffling is that there are games I can play in their entirety on cdr and have no problems at all and play for an hour or more and never encounter any problems, but these 2 just seem to have issues. Real games are in the same barrel as far as CD games go.
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I would recap it then adjust the pots
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You may be using bad rips found online and or media/discs for your CD drive.
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For some reason, It Came From the Desert seems to work now with no choppiness. Rondo still is having the same problems. All I had did since then was clean the lens and mess with tracking. I'm fairly certain I put the tracking back in the spot it was normally. The version of Rondo was verified and I've tried like 3 other versions. All seem to hang up in that spot.
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For some reason, It Came From the Desert seems to work now with no choppiness. Rondo still is having the same problems. All I had did since then was clean the lens and mess with tracking. I'm fairly certain I put the tracking back in the spot it was normally. The version of Rondo was verified and I've tried like 3 other versions. All seem to hang up in that spot.
If only Rondo ( cdr ) is unable to play well. I wonder if you source of copy have issue.
Do you have original Rondo cd ? Do you have issue when you play original/real/non-cdr Rondo?
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Try different brands of media. Some drives works fine with cheap stuff like Memorex or verbatim but other drives require better media such as Sony, TDK, or taiyo yuden
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Well, I tried to do a full play through of It Came From the Desert after my last post. The video is much smoother, but had a few hiccups during me playing it (4 times it had to pause to load). I played the game for about 2.5 hours or so with no problem, but did eventually crash trying to load the next video or set of options to choose from. I wish I had the actual version of Rondo, but atm it's just way too steep for me lol Someone said recapping and adjusting pots. Does anyone have the factory values for those I could use?
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It Came From the Desert has FMV, therefore it accesses the disc a thousand times as often some other games. If you are having any loading issues at all this game is going to make them worse.
Rondo on the other hand is very conventional. I think your burn of it just sucks.
You may be resurrecting your caps slightly by playing the system. People don't talk about that here much but exactly how to go about using something electronic that may not have been turned on in decades is actually a whole thing in other vintage scenes, like home audio or synthesizers. Japanese game systems are usually designed in a much more homegenous way and have more reliable designs and components and usually aren't as old as a collectable amp or keyboard but...who knows? Maybe we'll get there. We never used to talk about recaps and now that's getting to be something all noobs seem to require if they buy a system that hasn't been run since Victory Gundam was still on the air.
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I've tried just about every version of Rondo I can find. Unless there's a certain place I can look that I'm not sure about. Even the one english translation I found seems to have the same problems. All of them just seem to have the same problem. The file select seems to not be as wonky now, but I still can't seem to get it to load the first boss no matter what route you take lol
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Try a different brand of cdr discs.
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UPDATE
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Sorry for the big chunk of time off. Just life stuff. I recapped the unit and the problem still exists with those games. I bought a multimeter and tried to find pot values to retune it, but apparently people really don't post that sort of information on forums or at least from what I was able to find outside of one post here. I think I may have found an issue. While testing for resistances across the 3 pins for each pot, there was one I could not pull any data from. Here's my findings as of last night. These values are with the pots in the same position when I opened the system.
Pot Pins A
B C
Resistances measured on 20K Ohms setting on multimeter:
Pot: AB AC BC
101: 10.46 10.75 18.54
102: 7.16 8.27 10.33
103: 4.37 17.60 N/A
104: 3.95 15.93 18.65
105: 0.00 0.18 0.18
used this post as a guide
http://www.pcenginefx.com/forums/index.php?topic=16150.msg331520#msg331520
I did, however notice that Rondo makes more progress after these changes. It still hangs up on the door, but at least attempts to walk through it instead of treating it like a wall. It'll hang up just after that,but hey, it's progress. Does anyone know the actual pot values these are supposed to be set to?
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I have just now bought some taiyo yuden cdrs and it still suffers from the same problems of just being very sporadically reading from the disc
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if you want to try adjusting the potentiometers here is the first one that you should try. There are two black potentiometers next to one another. Try turning the one that is labeled with the numbers 223 clockwise slightly.
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I'm so glad that I found this post! I spent the better part of this evening trying to tweak the pots on my CD-ROM2 with very little success. When I initially received it, it wouldn't read any discs at all - even audio CDs. It would do one quick burst spin of the disc & then nothing. Popped it open & the middle gear looked fine & the lens carriage moved pretty smoothly. Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that it must be a dead lens.
I bought a Sony Discman D-34 & quickly harvested its lens. After swapping that out, the CD-ROM2 started coming to life. It started to play a burned copy of Rondo flawlessly. It ended up crapping out about 5 mins in. I started playing with the pots referencing cran's post here: http://assemblergames.com/l/threads/please-set-disc-on-turboduo.53989/. After several hours of tweaking, I've got audio CDs playing well now but even legit PCECD games take FOREVER to load and the audio promptly cuts out shortly after starting. I'm beginning to think that this is all moot & no amount of potentiometer tweaking is going to help until I replace the caps.
Anyway, the main reason I wanted to contribute to this thread is to let you know that I have 2 TurboGrafx CD drives that generally work well (one better than the other). They both suffer from the audio cutting out sometimes (again, one more than the other) but they load games pretty quickly. I tried matching the potentiometer resistance measurements form one of those on the CD-ROM2 & it was a total bust. Didn't work at all. Again, I'm not sure if this is related to caps... I'll post the resistance measurements from my TurboGrafx CD drives on here later this evening or tomorrow evening. It might at least be helpful to someone.
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I ended up going ahead & measuring my 3 CD drives this evening. Here are the results:
Best working TGCD
AB AC BC
VR101 14.16K 7.62K 19.2K
VR102 8.91K 7.31K 10.69K
VR103 5.35K 16.63K 20K
VR104 3.71K 15.66K 19K
VR105 0 470 470
'Meh' working TGCD
AB AC BC
VR101 11.02K 11.25K 19.5K
VR102 8.34K 9.16K 11.11K
VR103 5.10K 15.02K 18.2K
VR104 5.90K 14.62K 18.7K
VR105 0 441 441
Mostly non-working CD-ROM2
AB AC BC
VR101 13.95K 8.08K 19.1K
VR102 10.44K 9.04K 11.95K
VR103 5.99K 15.53K 19.3K
VR104 6.07K 15.43K 19.4K
VR105 0 367 367
Tomorrow I'm going to experiment with adjusting the 'meh' working TGCD pots to be closer to the mostly working TGCD's pots. I'll also be ordering replacement caps for all 3 drives tomorrow. I'll be sure to report my findings!
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some drives may work better with other settings than others due to the lens maybe needing a slightly higher gain. Possibly from being older?
I've worked on many of these drives and I'd say maybe 50% of them have close to the same settings and work great whereas the other 50% end up needing certain things tweeked a bit to run well. I have not noticed any difference with newer capacitors with this issue.
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Literally just spent the last 3 or 4 hours trying to tweak the pots on my CD-ROM2 with no luck. This has been by far the most frustrating thing I have done in a long time. I'm basically at my wit's end here. I would be so gracious for any advice. I feel like I'm going mad working on this damn thing.
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what is the Drive doing? Does it still work but just not reading very accurately? if this is the case you are going to have to do it by process of elimination. meaning, try changing the settings on one of the potentiometers. If it doesn't make things better then put it back to the way it was and then try another one.
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what is the Drive doing? Does it still work but just not reading very accurately? if this is the case you are going to have to do it by process of elimination. meaning, try changing the settings on one of the potentiometers. If it doesn't make things better then put it back to the way it was and then try another one.
Finally made some progress the other day! I had originally replaced the laser with a laser from a Sony D-34 because I thought it was dead. I ended up putting the original laser back in & it became evident that it was not dead! Tuning the pots with this new laser has been much less challenging. I finally got real games playing (slow loading, but they worked). With some more tweaking, I had it playing the audio from burned CDs almost perfectly... but it completely refused to load a burned game. It didn't even seem like it was trying.
I accidentally pressed the "run" button with the disc tray open and I noticed that the console thought it was trying to load the game rather than telling me to close the lid... Keep in mind, I have used this exact interface unit, pc engine, power supply, etc... to play burned games with a different CD-ROM drive and it worked beautifully. Regardless, I swapped the interface unit for a spare that I have and it magically started playing burned games. I still have a few burned games that it doesn't like but burns on high quality media seem to be working very well now.
I'm starting to wonder if a lot of my frustration came from that interface unit that was apparently on its way out. Sometime this week I'll pop it open & see if I can figure out what's wrong with it. Thanks to everyone for the help! =)
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a while back I did come across a docking station that had the same problem. I did not try to fix it at the time and cannot remember what I did with it. Wondering if it's maybe a bad capacitor issue or not. the docking station in question would barely read regular discs and would not read CDR discs at all. However, if I move the CD drive over to another docking station it would work perfect.
so are you are not crazy in thinking that the docking station could have been the problem.