this month i’ve spent learning how to solder shit finally. so far it’s been an enjoyable process and i haven’t irreversibly broken any of my consoles (i say, sitting next to an original xbox that i’ve given the “christmas lights” frag error to, we’ll fix that soon i’m sure…) so why don’t i let you lot know what i’ve worked on so far.
first thing i done (after practicing of course) was my dreamcast. it just needed a replacement clock battery. soon i might do the resettable fuse mod but i’m not too concerned about that. it was easy enough to take out the old ML2032 and replace it with a vertical coin cell holder. clipping off the leg of the resistor next to it and soldering in the diode went well too. i popped in the new CR2032 and this is where the fun starts. so i plug it in, turn it on, and nothing happens at all. after loads of troubleshooting i give up and assume i’ve somehow broken my dreamcast while attempting to replace the clock battery. hours later i make a realisation though and go back to my work area to get the cable i was using to try and power the dreamcast. once i see the plug my realisation is confirmed. my smart ass used a cable that had no fuse in the plug. i put one in and who would have guessed that the dreamcast works fine now that i’m using a plug with a fuse in it. i take it upstairs and it does indeed remember the time now.
next was my gamecube. i take that apart, replace the power led with a green one, install a coin cell holder in place of its clock battery and tear it down to the motherboard to solder in a pi pico for picoboot. as the guide states it is one of the easier soldering jobs you can take on but it is still one that takes time, as soldering does indeed tend to do. it’s nice to have some form of magnifier to help line up and solder in the cables to the board too i found. once everything was soldered in and i was sure that it all looked good i put it back together and turned it on. this time it actually came on but it booted to the gamecube’s ipl for some reason and not gekkoboot (which would then load the first ipl.dol it sees, in my case swiss). i try flashing the pi pico again (fun tip, don’t do this with the pico’s power still connected to the gamecube. it will try to power whatever the pico’s soldered into and it was very weird seeing my gamecube to hdmi adapter’s power light coming on when i plugged the pico into the computer. it didn’t harm anything in my case but still it’s best to be on the safe side with these things as i understand it.) and that doesn’t change anything. and then i realise i’ve forgotten about their golden rule for the wire length. they can’t be any more than 10-12 cm long. the way i was trying to mount the pico meant that the wires were way over that so after referencing this video from macho nacho on the topic i mount the pico somewhere reasonable and the gamecube does indeed boot into swiss. a few days later once the parts arrive i bring the gamecube back in to install a set of green leds to the controller ports. i set up each led by clipping the leads, attaching a resistor to the positive end of each lead, adding wires to each lead, then using heatshrink on anything that needed it. i was having trouble putting the top shell back on and at that point i reference this video from MVG to realise that i put on way too much heatshrink. so i manage to get off the excess and hot glue the leds in place like he does in the video and now my gamecube looks very green and i love it.
now the xbox. and by the xbox i mean the xboxes. i bought three of them in various condition for not that much more than the price of one working one (around £70). so far i’ve removed the clock capacitors on each board and today i brought in the most fucked of the three (a what seems to be 1.0 that’s absolutely had someone in it and displays many a hard drive error on bootup) in hopes of installing a pi pico in there to use as a modxo chip. i took my time installing each wire to the points on the LPC and D0 and then didn’t take as much time installing the wires to the pico, something i regret but not necessarily because i think i’ve broken the xbox (since i right now don’t think that’s the case), more because i realise that if i want to keep doing this i really should learn how to manage time and stress better. anyway i put it back together and as stated in the first paragraph it’s now showing me that it can make christmas lights. from researching what that error is i believe what’s happening is that D0 is being sent to ground which is telling it to look for a bios off the LPC bus but it’s not able to get any bios image off the pico when searching for one there and so it gives that error. if that golden rule from installing the picoboot is just a general rule of thumb/it’s just a good idea to keep cables as short as possible then it may just be that we’re looking at another case of cable too long. i shall keep you updated.
merry late christmas to those who celebrate and happy new year :D