Damn, I just don’t plan well enough when it comes to these modern-day consoles. PS2, you upset me so. If you don’t want to watch 24 minutes of failure, hold tight for the short and sweet version coming up next!

I’ve got a PlayStation 2 SCPH-5002 here that will happily play audio CDs, but refuses to recognise PlayStation 1 games. Unfortunately, I don’t have any PlayStation 2 games or DVD movies handy to test the rest of the drive properly. Not a particularly comprehensive collection of test media, is it?

Fortunately, there’s another PS2 nearby that powers on but produces no picture or sound. Perhaps I can borrow its optical drive and get somewhere with this one. That was the plan, anyway! The donor is an older model, and I hadn’t spent much time checking whether its optical assembly was actually compatible.

Pulling the consoles apart turned into quite an adventure. I’d forgotten that some of the little square covers on the underside conceal screws, rather than being purely decorative. There were different screw lengths too, which is always delightful when you’re trying to remember what goes where.

After removing the case, I thought perhaps replacing just the laser would be easier than swapping the entire optical drive. There was also the small matter of some broken plastic on the donor drive’s front bezel, which didn’t exactly encourage me to transfer the whole assembly.

Unfortunately, getting the optical drive out required considerably more dismantling than I’d anticipated. Between the controller ports, metal shielding, power supply and collection of ribbon cables, the machine seemed determined to make the job as unpleasant as possible. At least I found plenty of dust to keep me entertained.

Once the two mechanisms were finally sitting together, the differences became much more obvious. The laser pickups initially looked similar, but the connectors and guide arrangements weren’t the same. A little research confirmed what I probably should have checked before dismantling half the console: the assemblies weren’t interchangeable.

Since the donor machine was already destined for spare parts, I continued pulling its laser mechanism apart, although things didn’t exactly improve from there. By the end I was more or less demonstrating how not to remove a delicate optical pickup. Wonderful!

So there you go. No successful laser replacement, no miraculous PlayStation recovery, just a considerable amount of dismantling and another reminder to check component compatibility before getting too enthusiastic with the screwdriver!

I suppose I could have saved myself rather a lot of trouble by checking the laser models beforehand. But then we wouldn’t have this lovely video of me discovering all the things that don’t fit together. Another successful failure!

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