Ben Heck's Nintendo-Playstation Prototype Teardown Part 2 Repair Episode -- Episode 247

My issue with your hypothesis are the buttons located on the console for CD playback(repeat,skip track, play, pause, etc...). 

Not to mention in the newer episode they actually got a track list to populate, the elapsed time to progress, and the track seek to move the head.

I think the issue is more like in how the CD side sends it data back to the SNES side..possible the cache?

its also quite likely that the laser diode uses in the drive is just picky about what discs it will read. the original playstation 1 would only use genuine audio CD's and was fussy with burn disc support. same with the PS2 and DVD-R's. theres a lot of older CD based consumer goods that have issues reading discs using different dies and so forth

Actually, I think that I can come up with an answer as to why the music CD would not play, and it is a design feature that Nintendo has put into their disk based consoles since the Gamecube (sometimes it pays to pay attention to the minor details of a console's design).  When you look into how Nintendo designed their disk-based consoles, all of them have an inherent design feature that they can't play movies in the disk's native format.    So in this provided history...

- The Nintendo 64DD would have used a proprietary disk format that isn't similar to zip disks.  Since the add-on never made it to market in the US, we could tell how big of a flop that was.

- The Nintendo Gamecube had a proprietary disk format to prevent DVDs and CDs from being played on the console.  But it proved costly to produce, and the space that the disk provided equated to a mini-DVD (1.5 GB).

- The Nintendo Wii would not be able to play DVDs or music CDs, but used DVDs as the base of their proprietary disks (4.7 GB single layer, 8.54 GB double layer) for their Wii software, and is backwards compatible with the Gamecube software.

- The Nintendo WiiU will not be able to play Blu-Rays, DVDs or music CDs, but uses Blu-Rays as the base of their proprietary disk (25 GB) for the WiiU software, and is backwards compatible with Wii software, but not Gamecube.

...We could safely guess that the Nintendo-Playstation would not have allowed music CDs to have been played for one reason and one reason only.  Nintendo has always had their consoles prided as video game consoles, and not the entertainment machines that consoles have become today (why else wouldn't have they patched in streaming support for the WiiU).  Hence, we can safely assume that one of the design specs that Nintendo would have insisted upon with Sony was that they can't play music CDs, and instead use a proprietary CD based disk for all of the drive's interactions.  The fact that the drive was spinning the disk with no message on the screen would have been proof of that.

Ben wonderful job you did but I think you did not mention something when you were working on the system. Now that you got the CD function to work by all rights it should at least play the music disc but it did not. So why not check the Lens it either could be not functioning or even dirty that may be able to resolve that issue

WOOHOO! Thanks to "The Ben Heck Show" for all of the Amazing work that you did for us on the Nintendo/PlayStation Console Prototype. You Guys Rock!!

Sincerely,

Terry

Great episode.

Nice debug and repair plus an awesome display of gaming skill.

Well done.

DAB

Awesome episode, Cant wait for a follow up with a cd game… :-)