1) Is there any way I can get general-purpose ribbon cable? I mean the ribbon cable that actually looks like a flat ribbon with flat leads at the end. The CD drive and the controllers are connected to the main card by ribbon cables that are rather short.
I’m sure it’s possible, but I suspect it’s going to be a serious pain in the tail to track it down. One good bet may be to take the CD drive and cable to a good electronics repair shop and see if they have any junked equipment lying around with a compatable but longer cable.
You can try net searches for “ribbon cable supplier” or somesuch also. Probably be hard to know if the stuff you find will really work or not though.
** 2) The power supply for the console seems to be a completely separate board, and could possibly be rendered unnecessary by the computer power supply. The problem is, I’m not sure of what the voltage is, and how I would convert it. Also, the connection consists of five leads, as opposed to the computer’s 4.**
A typical computer hard drive power plug has a ground (black wire), a +5 (red wire), +12 (usually yellow) and -12 (usually orange). Most of the PSX electronics runs on standard +5, so you’re golden there. However I seem to remember that the CD drive takes a +7.6v supply voltage, so you’ll probably have to buy a voltage regulator chip to tone the 12v down to 7.6v. These are not hard to get, and they only have three connections - supply +12, out +7.6 and a ground. Real easy to hook up. They look like a normal transistor, except sometimes with a small metal plate heat-sink molded onto the back.
But you’d better be sure before you start turning stuff on. Get a multi-meter and find the ground on the PSX power supply board, and then measure the other four outputs relative to it. This will tell you what kind of voltages you need to supply.
The only other sticky thing is that I don’t know how much current the PSX power supply supplies. I don’t imagine it’s too much. My PSX here says “120volts - 17watts” on the sticker on the bottom. This leads to the rather unbelievable figure of 0.14 amps of current draw - which seems WAY too low to me, given all the chips I know are on the mobo of that thing.
Ah heck, I have my meter right here, and I love excuses to take apart my toys…
Letsee, the mod chip I installed is still in here. Cool. There’s a fuse on the power supply board - “125v - 2A”. So you can be sure the PSX mobo is taking less than 2 amps of current. Let’s pull the 5 wires and then measure voltages…
Well, looks like I was wrong about 5 volt logic. Assuming the brown wire is ground, I’m seeing two -7.56v wires (red and yellow) and one -3.96 (orange) and one neutral/ground (white). I don’t know why these are negative with respect to ground. I just went and checked around on the net, and nobody seems to have PSX power supply diagrams.
However, this site shows how to build a PSX power supply from the +12 of a computer power supply. It’s really about that simple, actually. He confirms that there are two voltages: 7.5v and 3.5v. (Again, why I’m finding them as negative 3.5 and negative 7.5 I don’t know.)
HTH…
-Ben