Supplemental Clicking Jaguar CD Repair Guide

[+cubanismo]

Hi all,

 

This is my first post here, but I've been lurking for a few months.  I recently bought a Jaguar on the bay after watching a few youtube videos about its history. I'd always wanted one as a kid, but after much deliberating my brother and I held out for a Sega Saturn instead (We were big Daytona USA fans, and when it launched early, we pulled the trigger).  The Jaguar always had that special draw though (Do the math!), and even though I know better than to do Atari's suggested math now, after reading up on the specs, it does sound like a hell of a machine so I knew I had to get one and write some code for it.  I've been ramping up on that (setting up my dev environment, etc.), and enjoying the existing library (retail and homebrew as of recently) in the meantime.  Various existing posts here have been very helpful with all of that, so thank you all.

 

I also picked up a Jaguar CD (Two actually, but that's another story) off Ebay knowing it had some issues.  I'd already found @LinkoVitch's repair guides, and decided the slightly lower price was worth the risk.  The repair went well, but being a repair n00b, I ran into a few minor issues along the way that I figured were worth documenting and sharing in case anyone else runs into them, so I wrote up a supplemental guide here:

 

http://www.theinnocuous.com/jagcd_suppl/

 

Hope this helps someone else in the future.  And if you're like me, biting your nails trying to decide whether you have the skills to repair your own super-rare piece of hardware, I say go for it!  Amazon has soldering irons at every price point.  Youtube has soldering tutorials.  It's not hard.

 

Thanks again to everyone in this community for keeping the fun of a ~25 year old console alive long enough for me to rediscover it, especially @LinkoVitch for the repair guides, @Zerosquare for his updated lo_inp and master-thread of developer tools, and Reboot for all the tools they've provided (@Shamus, still waiting to hear back on that remaining issue I'm having with the rmac/rln Bugzilla so I can send the rest of my patches ).

[LinkoVitch]

D'awww *blushes* thanks for the kind words.  Glad that guide is still coming in useful on occasion, and glad you got your issue sorted most importantly!

Word of warning, don't get it wet, or leave it alone in a dark loft for years.. they multiply! (alas mostly dead units but still ).  Welcome to the crazy world of Jaguar (well, sounds like you are already well and truly in anyway, but meh, welcome )

[+cubanismo]

I've repaired an additional CD unit now, and I ran into a problem not covered by LinkoVitch's guides at all, so I've expanded my repair site a bit to include the new info.  In this particular unit, the CD wouldn't spin.  I figured a laser transport replacement was in order and went ahead and made that repair, only to find out the problem was simply that the lid-closed detection switch had a bent contact ?  Hopefully this little guide saves others some trouble in the future:

 

http://www.theinnocuous.com/jagcd_suppl/lid_switch.html

 

The original link from my post above now points to a little landing page containing this and the old supplemental info I wrote up for the clicking/limit switch problem as well:

 

http://www.theinnocuous.com/jagcd_suppl/

 

Also, I can now vouch for the somewhat generic looking CDM12.1/VAM1201 transport units sold from China that you can find on Ebay for ~$8.  As of writing, you can find them from sellers like this: https://ebay.us/5Jf81l, or the one I purchased from personally, but has since raised the price rather substantially: https://ebay.us/W7r5Jv, but they all seem to be roughly the same thing and don't necessarily match the ones shown in the pictures exactly.  FWIW, here's the exact (since ended) listing I used when purchasing mine: https://ebay.us/yJbbCF

Edited June 7, 2020 by cubanismo

[+cubanismo]

Seems like every time I go through the repair process, I run into something worth documenting.  This time I had to deal with a replacement laser transport that had a defective platter.  How can a platter be defective?  Read all about it:

 

http://www.theinnocuous.com/jagcd_suppl/black_platter.html

 

It's worth noting the transport I used here came in an identical box from the same seller and same listing as the working one I used in the above repair.  Never know what you're going to get when ordering theses old parts for bargain prices.  In the end it was another successful repair though, so I can't complain.