Hey, fellow CD-i fans!
There's quite a huge history/story/reason how it came to be that I ended up here and eventually registered.
For as long as I can remember, my parents have had a CD-i player (205/00 for those interested), costing at that time a massive 1500 guilders (around 680 euros). Spending literally hours on end, my youthful life wasn't much bigger than the TV and the console hooked to it.
Years passed and eventually, CD-i lost the race and the local library sold their collection of CD-i games one evening. Still, young and ignorant as I was, I kept asking for more. I even broke a controller once, its rubber D-pad was completely gone ghehe. But then the PC made its rise and slowly the CD-i was forgotten, but not lost as once in every while, it was used.
Years later, we found out that there was something wrong with the memory.. because the device started to lose memory after being turned off for a couple of hours. At the time, dad opened the device, but couldn't find anything that would serve as a battery. Oh, and the display had some problems. The only was to show it, was to put pressure on it.. weird stuff.
Anyway.. about 4 months ago I got interested in wanting to get myself one of those new thingies (Wii) and as of January '10 I had one. Also, I wanted to have my own TV on my room, so that my parents wouldn't be naggin about 'I can't sit in the living room quietly without you lot playing games anymore'.
So later, I had in my room a TV and a Wii. Somehow, the FHD LCD screen triggered my parents to take a second look at the other TV downstairs (a 7+ year old 32" CRT).. and decided that it had stood there long enough.
But after the switch, there were no longer 4 SCART plugs, so the CD-i could no longer be hooked up. This is where I decided to hook it to mine (I had only used the YCbCr connection).
Feeling all nostalgic when playing Link and Zelda and The Apprentice all over again (and loads more ghehe), I wanted to see how far people had gotten into developing a program that could rip the audio tracks from the CD. I already had done a couple of games years ago (thanks to Vision Factory for adding them in an Audio-CD format to the game-disc).
This is where I started to look for games and consoles as well. One console advertise had something interesting in its description; something about a recently replaced NV-RAM chip.. knowing that RAM includes memory, I researched what kind of memory chip was in the device, and eventually found
this FAQ. "10-25 years" huh? Well, it seemed I had found my problem and with more searching, the solution.
Now, the difference between the past and the present, is that I now had followed an Electrical Engineer study and, like many others, wanted to take a look inside. I had found solutions that included removing part of the TimeKeeper and replace the batteries, or drill a hole and hook up new batteries. The third, and kinda my preferred method, is to unsolder the 'dead' chip and insert a new one on an IC-footing.
But right now, I can't find the fitting tools to open the device, and frankly, without consent from my parents, I'm not going to perform surgery. Especially not without a new chip at hand.
So why register at a forum, when I know all I need to know to fix my 'dying' player? Well, it just to happens to be that there are probably people here who know more than me, and could help ghehe. (stupid YTP about Mario..)
Epic win on longest first post?
So.. hiya!