Somebody chipped this PSone with hot glue
The first console I brought back. A PSone covered in spark plug stickers, sold as a non-reader, with a picture full of noise. The drive was fine. The real problem was a modchip a previous owner had stuck to the board with hot glue instead of solder.
Before
After
This is the first console I brought back, and it's still the strangest one so far.
It came in a two-console bundle from a seller in Québec City: a big grey PlayStation and this PSone, sold for parts because neither would read the one disc he had on hand. The other console has its own story. This one was the ugly duckling of the box. Somebody had covered it in automotive decals, a big round NGK Spark Plugs sticker across the lid, an L.A. Sleeve banner above it, Erson Cams diamonds on the shoulders and a Valvoline square on each memory card door. Somebody's garage console. Under the stickers, the plastic was a greyish yellow and the whole thing felt grimy.
The PSone is the small 2000 redesign of the PlayStation. Same guts, smaller box, and it runs off an external 7.5 V adapter instead of a power supply inside. There was no adapter in the bundle, so before anything else I had to find one. Then the fun started.
Lens first, then the discs
On this first console I cleaned the lens before testing anything: one gentle pass with isopropyl alcohol on a cotton swab. I've since learned to test first, so I can't tell you whether that pass changed anything. What I can tell you is what happened next.
An audio CD went in and played, and I could hear it clearly all the way to the last track. That's a good sign, because the outer edge of a disc is where a tired laser gives up first. Then Legend of Dragoon. It loaded like it should and ran without a hitch. The drive that was sold as broken worked.
Except for the picture
Then I looked closer at the screen. Horizontal bands of little dots were crawling up the picture, slowly, from bottom to top. Electrical interference, and not subtle.
I did the free tests first. Wiggle the power plug: no change. Move the console around, turn it, lift it: no change. Same cables and same TV as my other PlayStation, which gives a clean picture, so it wasn't the cables and it wasn't the TV. Whatever it was lived inside the console. Time to open it.
Opening it up
A PSone opens easily, and once the top metal plate over the board was lifted, I found this.
Someone had tried to install a modchip in this console at some point, and did the sloppiest job I have ever seen. The chip was buried in a mountain of hot glue. Of all the wires, only two were soldered, and only halfway. The rest were simply hot glued onto the board where they were supposed to connect. More dabs of glue held the wires in place here and there. My guess is someone wanted to chip the console, didn't have a soldering iron, and grabbed the first thing within reach.
The thing is, it almost worked. The console booted and played discs. But loose wires draped across a video chip, held down by glue that doesn't conduct, is a pretty good recipe for noise on the picture. That was my main suspect from the moment I saw it.
Taking it out
I desoldered the two wires that had actually been soldered, then went after the glue. Here's a tip I'm glad I learned early: hot glue lets go almost instantly when it touches isopropyl alcohol. A bit of alcohol at the edge of a blob and it peels off the board in one piece, no scraping, no heat.
Then the whole board got cleaned with alcohol and cotton swabs. It was filthy. I went through a ridiculous number of swabs, and they kept coming back yellow long after I thought I was done. My guess is this console lived in a house where people smoked. After a lot of patience, the board looked like a board again.
The shell
The board was the easy part. The shell was in such bad shape that I honestly wasn't sure I could save it. My biggest worry was the stickers. After years in place, I expected them to leave clean rectangles in the yellowing that I would never get rid of.
Every plastic part went into hot water with Dawn dish soap, and given the state of it, I left it to soak for a couple of hours. Then the stickers. I peeled them with a plastic spudger and some isopropyl alcohol so they wouldn't leave glue behind, and after the long soak they came off easily.
The yellowing needed something stronger. I know a magic eraser is an abrasive and that it will dull the finish if you overdo it, but at this point there wasn't much to lose. And it did some real magic.
That photo is the moment I understood what I was dealing with. The yellow wasn't the plastic itself going bad, which you can't scrub off. It was a coating of smoke, and the eraser took it right off. After a few hours of scrubbing every part, I had a shell I never thought I'd see: white, clean, and without a single mark where the stickers used to be. Even better, the stickers had been sitting on top of the printed PSone logo and the button symbols all those years, so they protected them. Those markings are in better shape than on most PSones.
Final test
Everything back together, adapter in, disc in. The bands of dots were gone, completely. The picture was clean, the game ran, and the console that was sold for parts was a working PSone again.
So the "doesn't read discs" was somebody's one bad disc, and the noise on the picture was a modchip installed with a glue gun twenty-odd years ago. Zero parts, a lot of cotton swabs, and one lesson that has stuck: on an old console, always look for what the last person did before you decide what's wrong with it.
