PC-Engine CD-ROM2 Laser problems?

[tokyoscarab]

I recently upgraded my PC Engine with the CD-ROM2 and IFU.  So far it's been a little bit of a pain.  I had to replace the gear, which I expected I would have to do.  It seems to play my backups just fine, but there have been a couple games it just has trouble with, Rondo and It Came From the Desert.  Rondo 80% of the time will crash when it loads the file select screen, but the music plays.  But it will play the demo, and if you get it to work, it'll play the game fine until you either freeze or get softlocked by a door that won't open.  The problem with It Came is that the FMV is really choppy.  It will play fine for a couple seconds or so, but then it pauses for 5 seconds or so and plays more.  You can experience the game this way for a bit but it will also eventually just crash for no reason but always during FMV.  After doing some research, I tried adjusting the tracking pot, VR103, and seeing if it would do anything.  After a half hour of trying with no multimeter and minute changes, it didn't seem to change anything.  I'm thinking it might be the laser itself, but have no idea.  I'm using a white pce, verbatim cdrs, TED 2.4 running elmer's patched 3.0 card BIOS for the cd card.

I have looked into a replacement laser and seeing what people do for it, but most posts I see are from 6 years ago and things have changed since then.  I see you can harvest these lasers from various models of Sony discmans and a few offbrand cd players, but I'd like to get something new(er) if possible.  Where are places to get kss-220a / kss-162a or just a compatible laser?  It seems like most people have duos and it hinders my searching as they seem to use different parts and most guides or sellers have parts for those devices .  What's the best way to go about this?  Sorry, I'm new to owning one of these, but I tried to make sure I did as much research into it as I could before posting here.  Any help is greatly appreciated!

[SignOfZeta]

It sounds like you did your research but compatability with formats that were still years into the future (ie: CDRs) wasn't a design priority for NEC when they made all this stuff in the 80s. Some machines play CDRs better than others. How well does it play real games?

[tokyoscarab]

I understand that these devices predate cdr technology.  The thing that is baffling is that there are games I can play in their entirety on cdr and have no problems at all and play for an hour or more and never encounter any problems, but these 2 just seem to have issues.  Real games are in the same barrel as far as CD games go. 

[schweaty]

I would recap it then adjust the pots

[Keith Courage]

You may be using bad rips found online and or media/discs for your CD drive.

[tokyoscarab]

For some reason, It Came From the Desert seems to work now with no choppiness. Rondo still is having the same problems.  All I had did since then was clean the lens and mess with tracking.  I'm fairly certain I put the tracking back in the spot it was normally. The version of Rondo was verified and I've tried like 3 other versions.  All seem to hang up in that spot.

[choijimmy]

For some reason, It Came From the Desert seems to work now with no choppiness. Rondo still is having the same problems.  All I had did since then was clean the lens and mess with tracking.  I'm fairly certain I put the tracking back in the spot it was normally. The version of Rondo was verified and I've tried like 3 other versions.  All seem to hang up in that spot.

If only Rondo ( cdr ) is unable to play well. I wonder if you source of copy have issue.
Do you have original Rondo cd ? Do you have issue when you play original/real/non-cdr  Rondo?

[Keith Courage]

Try different brands of media. Some drives works fine with cheap stuff like Memorex or verbatim but other drives require better media such as Sony, TDK, or taiyo yuden

[tokyoscarab]

Well, I tried to do a full play through of It Came From the Desert after my last post.  The video is much smoother, but had a few hiccups during me playing it (4 times it had to pause to load).  I played the game for about 2.5 hours or so with no problem, but did eventually crash trying to load the next video or set of options to choose from.  I wish I had the actual version of Rondo, but atm it's just way too steep for me lol  Someone said recapping and adjusting pots.  Does anyone have the factory values for those I could use?

[SignOfZeta]

It Came From the Desert has FMV, therefore it accesses the disc a thousand times as often some other games. If you are having any loading issues at all this game is going to make them worse.

Rondo on the other hand is very conventional. I think your burn of it just sucks.

You may be resurrecting your caps slightly by playing the system. People don't talk about that here much but exactly how to go about using something electronic that may not have been turned on in decades is actually a whole thing in other vintage scenes, like home audio or synthesizers. Japanese game systems are usually designed in a much more homegenous way and have more reliable designs and components and usually aren't as old as a collectable amp or keyboard but...who knows? Maybe we'll get there. We never used to talk about recaps and now that's getting to be something all noobs seem to require if they buy a system that hasn't been run since Victory Gundam was still on the air.

[tokyoscarab]

I've tried just about every version of Rondo I can find.  Unless there's a certain place I can look that I'm not sure about.  Even the one english translation I found seems to have the same problems.  All of them just seem to have the same problem.  The file select seems to not be as wonky now, but I still can't seem to get it to load the first boss no matter what route you take lol

[Keith Courage]

Try a different brand of cdr discs.

[tokyoscarab]

UPDATE
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sorry for the big chunk of time off.  Just life stuff.  I recapped the unit and the problem still exists with those games.  I bought a multimeter and tried to find pot values to retune it, but apparently people really don't post that sort of information on forums or at least from what I was able to find outside of one post here.  I think I may have found an issue.  While testing for resistances across the 3 pins for each pot, there was one I could not pull any data from. Here's my findings as of last night.  These values are with the pots in the same position when I opened the system.

Pot Pins          A
                   B     C

Resistances measured on 20K Ohms setting on multimeter:

Pot:    AB        AC       BC
101: 10.46   10.75  18.54
102:  7.16    8.27    10.33
103:  4.37   17.60     N/A
104:  3.95   15.93   18.65
105:  0.00    0.18    0.18

used this post as a guide
http://www.pcenginefx.com/forums/index.php?topic=16150.msg331520#msg331520

I did, however notice that Rondo makes more progress after these changes.  It still hangs up on the door, but at least attempts to walk through it instead of treating it like a wall.  It'll hang up just after that,but hey, it's progress. Does anyone know the actual pot values these are supposed to be set to?

[tokyoscarab]

I have just now bought some taiyo yuden cdrs and it still suffers from the same problems of just being very sporadically reading from the disc

[Keith Courage]

if you want to try adjusting the potentiometers here is the first one that you should try. There are two black potentiometers next to one another. Try turning the one that is labeled with the numbers 223 clockwise slightly.