Dai
Death Scythe
As someone who is generally unhappy with the inaccurate, fiddly and buggy nature of much game emulation, maintaining access to my full collection of games becomes increasingly difficult as the decades roll on and things start to wear out or break. I'm curious what problems others have run into with their consoles or other electronics, and whether you were able to fix them.
I turned on my Xbox 360 for the first time in a couple of years yesterday, only to find that the disc tray wouldn't open. I figured the drive belt had probably perished, so I looked up Microsoft's instructions for how to manually open the tray. Their guide consisted of jamming the end of a paper clip into each of three small holes in the case to see which one would make the tray pop out a bit. It was presumably this haphazard due to them using a few different models of DVD drive over the years. Looking at the diagram, the paper clip wasn't intended to trigger a release catch, but instead to be jammed into the gears and push them round manually! Advising customers to blindly poke a piece of metal into the gears struck me as a bit nuts, but I gave it a go. No luck.
Fortunately, Youtube came to the rescue as usual. I saw a video of someone showing a few different ways to pry the disc tray open, and that worked almost immediately. It did involve jamming a pry tool into the edge of the tray while it was switched on though, which is probably why Microsoft didn't suggest it.
The drive belt seems to be fine, surprisingly. Instead, one of the gears had come out of alignment. I don't know if that was the original source of the problem or if I knocked it out of place while following Microsoft's poke-the-glory-hole instructions, but it was easy enough to nudge the gear back into place.
On the subject of drive bay problems, I have a top-loading PS2 slim that stopped recognising that the lid was closed. That's apparently a common fault caused by wear to the plastic that stops it connecting to a sensor properly. My interim solution was putting a paperweight on top of the console, which did work, but made me worry it might damage discs while they're spinning. Youtube had the answer again, which involved disassembling the console and putting a tiny square of duct tape over the sensor. That's worked surprisingly well so far, but I have no idea if it will come unstuck at some point.
I'm dreading what it will be like if one of the slot-loading drives on a newer console starts to act up, since that will probably be much more difficult to fix, if even possible. These days I lean about evenly between buying games digitally or on disc; that way I don't have my eggs all in one basket. There's always a potential point of failure somewhere.
I have plenty more tales of unreliable hardware, but I leave it there for now.
I turned on my Xbox 360 for the first time in a couple of years yesterday, only to find that the disc tray wouldn't open. I figured the drive belt had probably perished, so I looked up Microsoft's instructions for how to manually open the tray. Their guide consisted of jamming the end of a paper clip into each of three small holes in the case to see which one would make the tray pop out a bit. It was presumably this haphazard due to them using a few different models of DVD drive over the years. Looking at the diagram, the paper clip wasn't intended to trigger a release catch, but instead to be jammed into the gears and push them round manually! Advising customers to blindly poke a piece of metal into the gears struck me as a bit nuts, but I gave it a go. No luck.
Fortunately, Youtube came to the rescue as usual. I saw a video of someone showing a few different ways to pry the disc tray open, and that worked almost immediately. It did involve jamming a pry tool into the edge of the tray while it was switched on though, which is probably why Microsoft didn't suggest it.
The drive belt seems to be fine, surprisingly. Instead, one of the gears had come out of alignment. I don't know if that was the original source of the problem or if I knocked it out of place while following Microsoft's poke-the-glory-hole instructions, but it was easy enough to nudge the gear back into place.
On the subject of drive bay problems, I have a top-loading PS2 slim that stopped recognising that the lid was closed. That's apparently a common fault caused by wear to the plastic that stops it connecting to a sensor properly. My interim solution was putting a paperweight on top of the console, which did work, but made me worry it might damage discs while they're spinning. Youtube had the answer again, which involved disassembling the console and putting a tiny square of duct tape over the sensor. That's worked surprisingly well so far, but I have no idea if it will come unstuck at some point.
I'm dreading what it will be like if one of the slot-loading drives on a newer console starts to act up, since that will probably be much more difficult to fix, if even possible. These days I lean about evenly between buying games digitally or on disc; that way I don't have my eggs all in one basket. There's always a potential point of failure somewhere.
I have plenty more tales of unreliable hardware, but I leave it there for now.
