here's my special playstation edition volume 1 :o i guess. original playstations are a good way to hone your soldering powers. they're cheap, they're common, and every model is really different. there's no telling what surprises may lie in wait :o
you can use a 12c508 or 12f629 to mod any playstation model. the latter is currently in production and pretty cheap so that's what i use, you aren't likely to need to spend more than $1 for one. you will need to have an 8pin pic programmer to put the appropriate code into one but you can build your own with about $5 worth of radioshack parts as i did.
that's my pic programmer, as you can see it has an 8pin dip socket on it and isn't sure how it feels about all this nonsense.
this is a scph5501 playstation. this and the 7000 require 6 wires going to the pic instead of the usual 3, this one just happened to be at the top of the pile. i actually have never modded a 5501 before so i kinda made a huge error in how i ran the wires and had to adjust the heat shield a lil to make up for it. the 7501 also has a soldered on auxillary heat shielding but in this case i'm going to be attaching wires to the bottom of the board and can just ignore it and the weird copper sheet thing i dunno.
i was gonna take a picture of the wires actually on the board but i got interrupted in the middle to perform some random errand and just flipped it over without thinking about it when i got back. i only have 3 different colors of wire at the moment so i grouped them up with heatshrink so i dont forget what goes where.
what a mess :< the first switch i picked up was actually an illuminated automotive switch for mounting on a dash so i had to run an extra ground and with all that nonsense on the pic already it dangerously approaches the class of a rat's nest. i think i only use heatshrink so liberally because it's fun :o
cruddy picture. the switch does light up when it's active, but since it was meant to go on a car it's expecting to be getting 12v and not a meager 5 so it's pretty dim.
and there it is playing castlevania 2. i couldn't get a picture of that switch not looking awful, but i think that may just be because it looks awful on a playstation. i measured it over and over and it is perfectly level with the edges of the playstation but it always looks crooked to my eyeballs. :<
the pic is constantly sending a string of characters equal to the possible region codes in order to make the playstation think that whatever disk you have in there is an original disk of your region, but a couple of games (legend of the dragoon, strider 2, others that i forget) do a check during their initial loading if that stream of data is still going after the console would normally have been satisfied. if so, they give you a screen telling you your console is modified and refuse to run. having a switch lets you play those games without issues :o
beyond playing backups or games of other regions there isn't much benefit to modding a playstation. the nes emulator is pretty good though, i gave one of these and a disc of nes games to my brother when he was sick cuz he doesn't have any game consoles at all and he seems to really enjoy it :o
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