PS3 Frankenstein PHAT PS3: CECHA with 40nm RSX

RE: Got I think my first Frankenstein working again. For some reason, it decided it was time to go via 3034. Adjusted my profiles per Victors specs and it's once again back to life doing its thang. This guy is a COK-002 model CECH-E01 motherboard. Currently having looping in the background with no issues once again.

Bringup Count: 2232, Shutdown Count: 2202
Runtime: 231 Days, 11 Hours, 4 Minutes, 33 Seconds
 
I've got 4 BC PS3's here that I'd be willing to send to someone if they pay for the shipping.
2 CECHAs
Screen artifacts/YLOD on the first unit
YLOD on the second unit
2 CECHEs
YLOD/GLOD for the first unit.
YLOD with what looks like a little bit of water damage near where the button board plugs in on the second unit.
If they can't get them working with an RSX swap I'd like to get 100% of the components removed from the boards so I can take some high res scans of the PCB.
Would any of you be interested? (in NA btw) @squeept @Computer Booter
 
If they can't get them working with an RSX swap I'd like to get 100% of the components removed from the boards so I can take some high res scans of the PCB.

Haha...an "everything must go" stream. That'd be a fun one @Computer Booter

EDIT: I'm not sure why you'd want the scans, since the schematic already have the traces laid out for SIDE A/B. That's all you can see anyway. What would be useful is to sand the layers down to reveal the internal trace layout! All five of them.
 
I've got 4 BC PS3's here that I'd be willing to send to someone if they pay for the shipping.
2 CECHAs
Screen artifacts/YLOD on the first unit
YLOD on the second unit
2 CECHEs
YLOD/GLOD for the first unit.
YLOD with what looks like a little bit of water damage near where the button board plugs in on the second unit.
If they can't get them working with an RSX swap I'd like to get 100% of the components removed from the boards so I can take some high res scans of the PCB.
Would any of you be interested? (in NA btw) @squeept @Computer Booter


Yes please! Ill pay pirateship.com rates for those CECHA consoles! I've got boards I can wipe for high res photos for you either way, if they do or don't work. Shall I message you to setup shipping? ^_^
 
I've got 4 BC PS3's here that I'd be willing to send to someone if they pay for the shipping.
2 CECHAs
Screen artifacts/YLOD on the first unit
YLOD on the second unit
2 CECHEs
YLOD/GLOD for the first unit.
YLOD with what looks like a little bit of water damage near where the button board plugs in on the second unit.
If they can't get them working with an RSX swap I'd like to get 100% of the components removed from the boards so I can take some high res scans of the PCB.
Would any of you be interested? (in NA btw) @squeept @Computer Booter
You were asking for somewilling to perform this as a service right? Or were you offering to give them to someone for the price of shipping? I couldn't tell from the context of your post.
 
Haha...an "everything must go" stream. That'd be a fun one @Computer Booter

EDIT: I'm not sure why you'd want the scans, since the schematic already have the traces laid out for SIDE A/B. That's all you can see anyway. What would be useful is to sand the layers down to reveal the internal trace layout! All five of them.
Scans are no substitute for a photo of the real thing when I'm trying to make a nice looking diagram for a tutorial like this one.
I'd also maybe want to send it to a place like creative electron to see if they can x-ray it.
 

The Libereco "partner" link on that page looked legit, had an option to select Ukraine specifically, and worked.
DJQA8MB.jpg
 
Are we uhh..... totally sure about the uptime on Sherwoods being reported correctly? I just pulled a 40nm donor that reports 1650 days uptime. Donor system works fine, ohms all good. I'm just a little turned off by that number.
 
Are we uhh..... totally sure about the uptime on Sherwoods being reported correctly? I just pulled a 40nm donor that reports 1650 days uptime. Donor system works fine, ohms all good. I'm just a little turned off by that number.
If you have the original hard drive, maybe you could check SMART analysis and see if it is consistent with the 1650 days.

Otherwise... Yeah it sounds like a lot but it could be possible. I have seen newer fat with 800days and heard of machines over 1000.
So even if its a lot, it could be true yes.

I have once or twice seen bogus uptime data but only presented by Webman. And a reboot caused the number to make more sense
 
Are we uhh..... totally sure about the uptime on Sherwoods being reported correctly? I just pulled a 40nm donor that reports 1650 days uptime. Donor system works fine, ohms all good. I'm just a little turned off by that number.
The other day i was looking at it and wrote something related here
https://www.psx-place.com/threads/f...nd-error-reporting.30100/page-133#post-326540

Long story short... this counters are stored in a syscon area that was squeezed for sherwoods (half the size) and the format of that area was modifyed a bit for sherwoods
They also removed the command "becount" in sherwoods, but you can still read the data in raw with command ">r 800 8" (the first 8 bytes at offset 800)
 
@sandungas yep, that's the comment I used for my notes so that's how I got the numbers. I'm also having the same problem as that guy where there's no error log entries whatsoever. Do some Sherwoods just not have the errorlog enabled? I'd have a hard time believing something didn't end up in there one way or another, especially after 1600 days.

As for highest uptimes.... I just popped open another A01 tonight, and the uptime says 7 days.
 
@sandungas yep, that's the comment I used for my notes so that's how I got the numbers. I'm also having the same problem as that guy where there's no error log entries whatsoever. Do some Sherwoods just not have the errorlog enabled? I'd have a hard time believing something didn't end up in there one way or another, especially after 1600 days.

As for highest uptimes.... I just popped open another A01 tonight, and the uptime says 7 days.
7 days??? and what error is it getting? or is it just an rsx swap?
 
7 days??? and what error is it getting? or is it just an rsx swap?

A0801001 with artifacts/freezing if it did display, but usually GLOD. Cap signals looked a little dirty, so I swapped all the TOKIN out first. No change. Ohms all looked okay. It's in the drying oven now and I'll decide on reball or bin of the 90nm when I see what's underneath tomorrow.

It did have like 100 more boots than shutdowns, but I'm inclined to believe that 7 days isn't too far off. The thermal paste was still wet. So it's likely a factory defect either way, BGA or RSX.
 
@sandungas yep, that's the comment I used for my notes so that's how I got the numbers. I'm also having the same problem as that guy where there's no error log entries whatsoever. Do some Sherwoods just not have the errorlog enabled? I'd have a hard time believing something didn't end up in there one way or another, especially after 1600 days.

As for highest uptimes.... I just popped open another A01 tonight, and the uptime says 7 days.
There is something in sherwoods related with the timers that smells a bit fishy but i dont understand it well
For curiosity sake, the timestamps used in the errorlogs are counting seconds too. In mullion syscons if you remove the battery cell and the PS3 triggers an error without it the timestamps in "human readable format" displayed by the errorlog command starts counting from 2000/1/1 12:00:00 and are summed 946684800 seconds (around 30 years), but if you boot with the battery cell it starts counting from 2005/12/31 00:00:00
I wrote some notes about it here, i added also some links to a web where you can convert the values https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps3/Syscon_Error_Codes#Error_log_format

The runtime displayed by the becount command you are talking about is a different time counter, but i think it could be related with the timers of the errorlog, most probably sony canged how that timers works in the same syscon firmware version... i guess is one of the changes they made for sherwoods but im not sure which syscon models are affected by this kind of changes or/and how many times they changed it

The empty errorlog is something really weird, i agree with you, is very unprobable to find an empty errorlog, even if the hardware was always working fine there are some error codes that can be triggered by normal use of the PS3... dunno, when the games crashes there are (at least) 3 different types of crashes that affects different components of the PS3, in a light crash the PS3 reboots normally or displays that warning screen telling to do a hdd filesystem check, but sometimes the crash affects syscon (the PS3 becomes insensitive to the press of the power button just because the power button is directly connected to syscon, but syscon is k.o.), and there is another uglyer crash that affects CELL, in this kind of crashes the PS3 displays a warning screen where the only thiing you can do is to press a button (and pray, because it means the PS3 doesnt knows if the firmware is damaged)... i guess some of that crashes triggers an error code
When i was discussing this in the other thread i was wondering if there are other ways to force an error code... i mean... without need to use a solder iron to knock off components... it could be handy to find an easy and safe way to trigger error codes just to have a confirmation that the errors are recorded normally, but i dont know how

A0801001 with artifacts/freezing if it did display, but usually GLOD. Cap signals looked a little dirty, so I swapped all the TOKIN out first. No change. Ohms all looked okay. It's in the drying oven now and I'll decide on reball or bin of the 90nm when I see what's underneath tomorrow.

It did have like 100 more boots than shutdowns, but I'm inclined to believe that 7 days isn't too far off. The thermal paste was still wet. So it's likely a factory defect either way, BGA or RSX.
Many months ago in the other thread about webman someone reported a runtime really low and it didnt made sense... i dont remember the details of it but it was something imposible... lets say a runtime of 7 days, with the warranty sticker in his place, but the USB ports very scratched and/or some other components with clear signals of abuse

At that time i started speculating if the time counters could do a "loop"... you know, this depends of the lenght of the values used to store times. My theory was.... if the values are short there must be a point when the counter is completly filled, and there are only 2 posible solutions to this problem:
1) syscon locks the counter with his max value forever
2) it resets back to zero
3) it resets back to zero and another counter cummulates 1 unit (that unit represents 1 loop)

I was in the oppinion that 1) is not an aceptable solution... but that talk happened way before syscon was hacked so we was not able to take a look at the data inside syscon EEPROM, but the other day i was doing the calculations for curiosity sake and the highest value that can be stored inside the "runtime" timer (4 bytes) is around 1500 days... this amount is big enought to allow sony to use the solution 1) i mentioned above
So... right now im doubtful because the 3 solutions are posible

What could be a bit clarifying is if someone dumps the becount syscon area entirelly (size 0x100 on sherwoods or 0x200 on mullions) from a working console and use webman to see how the data is converted to "human readable" format
The point is... webman is reading the data using syscall 391 sys_sm_request_be_count so is the PS3 firmware who does that conversion
We could find the details of how the data is converted for every syscon model by reverse engineering that syscall, but as far i know nobody did (and i cant do it), but looking at the info displayed by webman and comparing it with the data inside syscon EEPROM could help to figure it
 
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@RIP-Felix do you still have the frankenstein that went black screen on PS2 games laying around? I need you to perform the dumbest experiment in the world if you haven't tried this already. I just had one that did the same thing, and I apparently "fixed" it, but I don't know if I'm comfortable selling it without a confirmation from someone else or an explanation of what the hell happened....

Anyway, tried a bunch of stuff, new drive, new cables, swapped out some chips and various components. Nothing. I was about to give up and blame the RSX like I normally do, so I was just dicking around. Since I could still access the PS3 menu from the black screen, I hit the "reset game" option and it fired right up. Now, that was unusual enough by itself....but now it works perfectly every time. Removed disc, shut down, unplugged, waited 15 minutes, fired back up and put the disc in.....still working perfectly. It now boots every single time.

I am.... uncomfortable.... with not knowing why it works now.
 
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