Monday, January 9, 2012

My first bad eBay experience :'(

Well it had to happen sometime. I got a perfectly good saturn from a seller in a recycling centre and a pristine Virtual Boy from a seller normally dealing with antiques he picks up from car boot sales. I noticed just before Christmas that nobody was bidding on ebay anymore so had a look to see if the one thing I've been after the last few months was on sale, a Philips CDI. Yeah, I know it's probably the worst console ever but me and my girlfriend get a good laugh out of crappy FMV games and there's always a few gems on every system to be discovered. I also wanted to give the first two CDI zelda games a go since I heard that they are actually quite good, despite what people that have never played them will tell you.

Anyway there was a CDI up for auction that had decent shipping and most of all a control pad which seem to be pretty hard to come by. I won the auction and it arrived a few days ago. Unfortunately the CD drive was screwed. I think the seller leaving a game in the drive when he shipped it might have been the culprit and not because he wanted to screw me over. It won't read any games or CD's. The seller offered me a refund but by ebay policy I'm not due the shipping cost and also must ship the item back at my own expense. If I went this way I would have pretty much wasted 80 euros on nothing.

If only you worked :(


It's not all bad though, apparently replacing the CD drive on the model of CDI I had is quite an easy process so I decided to repair the machine myself. I ordered a new laser unit and surprisingly the threat of bad feedback got me the price of the replacement part back from the seller. I just hope that the repair job works out since it will be the first time I've used a soldering iron and performed a console mod!

8 comments:

  1. Sorry to hear about the bad purchase experience. Hopefully you can get the parts and fix it up right though. I've had some luck with other consoles over the years, but never this one - I'll be curious to see how it goes!

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  2. Wahhh that sucks! I've bought a few things off eBay and haven't been unlucky yet. What other games did you get with it?

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  3. @ Chalgyr: Doesn't seem like too hard of a fix although this is my first and I'll be using an atari jaguar CD tutorial as a reference since it's supposedly the same. The CD drive at least is very cheap. Wish me luck!

    @ Daisy: the games I got aren't the best really, 7th Guest, Lost Eden, Mad Dog 2, Voyeur, Inca, Secret Mission, some french Asterix game and a French adventure game called Angels and Demons. I've a funny feeling they'll all be in french as well since I got the CDI from France. Thankfully the CDI has no copy protection so I can play them in English! I also didn't get a digital video cartridge with the console so some of the games aren't playable. It's silly to think but you had to buy an add-on to get most FMV games and a few others to actually work on the machine!

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  4. Similar experience to me with a nes, but bought in a flea market.
    I bought it as "fully functionally" but it wasn't, good that i have some electronic and soldering skills or it was to be trashed...
    The flea market obviously didn't want to pay me back my money...
    It's always an hazard buying old electronics things

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  5. Have a similar banged up NES from a car boot sale that needs a 72-pin connector. I'd get around to fixing it but I'm lazy and it's also a PAL model when I probably wouldn't use it because I hate playing PAL games. It's so difficult getting a NTSC machine here though for a decent price.

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  6. Mine it's PAL too, but it has the gpu fried, it display only black & white and no sounds... By the way, you can mod your nes to be compatible with NTSC games simply by cut a contact on chip if you didn't know :)

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  7. I didn't know that? Will it run them in 60 Hz as well which is the big deal breaker for me?

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  8. I don't really know if they can run at 60hz, but you can have a universal nes that plays all games.
    You can found more info about and other cool thing to do here:
    http://www.raphnet.net/electronique/nes_mod/nes_mod_en.php#4

    The lockout chip mod also let you play your game without that nasty grey blinking screen :)

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