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controller port repair help

Posted: Tue Dec 02, 2008 9:34 am
by Shroo-man
a while ago I got a french lot which included a Philips 210 CD-i. the seller said that the touchpad that came with it doesnt work but I found out that the touchpad works fine its the controller port which doesn't work. so I opened it up to have a look at it

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I think I found the problem looks like its a missing wire. can someone please check their player to confirm that the mini din plug is meant to have 9 wires coming from it? if that is the problem then it shouldnt be that difficult to fix

Posted: Tue Dec 02, 2008 3:43 pm
by cdifan
The missing pin is number 6 which according to the documentation in http://www.icdia.co.uk/docs/pointing_devices.zip is "reserved" and hence not necessary.

For a working pointing device only four wires are needed:
pin 2 - RXD (data from device to player)
pin 5 - GND (signal and power supply ground)
pin 7 - RTS (reset pulse from player to device)
pin 8 - +5V (power supply for device)

So your missing wire almost surely isn't the problem; it may be that the electonics inside the player are broken. Have you tried the other pointing device port (there is one on the front and one on the back).

Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2008 7:28 am
by Shroo-man
thanks for the info. I tried the one on the back and it doesn't work either. the manual says that the back port is for serial connections and the front one is for pointing devices. or is the back one meant to work for pointing devices as well?

Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2008 5:45 pm
by Bas
I thought the port on the back was meant for the modem connection or when you have a second player in games like Pac Panic, Striker, ROTR, Wack a Bubble... It doesn't work the same as the front port (you can't use only the back port). -->> iirc

Posted: Thu Dec 04, 2008 12:17 am
by cdifan
The front port is connected via the so-called "slave" processor and supports only pointing devices (these are all input-only); the back port is connected to the main processor and supports bidirectional i/o and hence more devices (is is essentially a "normal" serial port and can be used as such by CD-i software).

Players supporting a splitter combine the two ports in a single connector and usually have a third port supporting only pointing devices.

CD-i software is supposed to support pointing devices on all ports (this was a publishing requirement by Philips Media) but it wouldn't surprise me if some software out there doesn't do this correctly.

If it doesn't work on either port I would assume that the device is bad, not the ports. The only way to know this for sure is to test with another device or player...

Posted: Sun Dec 07, 2008 11:58 am
by Shroo-man
yeah I thought it was for the modem as well. I can't test it with my DVS player as there is no only 1 mini din the one on the front. can someone try plugging a controller into the back of their CD-i and see if it works?

Posted: Sun Dec 07, 2008 11:05 pm
by cdifan
I am 100% positive that it does work; I've often done it to avoid dangling cables in the front of the player. That was on 210 and 220 players of various revision levels and also on 605 players.

Posted: Mon Dec 08, 2008 8:32 am
by Shroo-man
ah so it does work? that probably means my player is unrepairable. just in case though I'm still going to try and replace the mini din cable before giving up on it. thanks for your help cdifan