The past few articles have covered a week and a half word of time, from the system originally being left at the shop to this day about a week ago where I finally had time to do what I needed to with the system to make it usable at home.
Keep in mind since the system still had the European power supply in it it was effectively useless to me as it was, so I left it at the shop, only bringing it out of the back room to work on a few separate occasions, each documented as a part of this story. Here we’re at the final day of the repair and refurb side of the project — the day I put a new power supply in it, did my final testing before bringing it home.
Something I didn’t mention in the last article was that while I had the system powered up from the 240 volt transformer in the back was that I did let a Call of Duty game run on it, as a stress test, and I did browse the system a bit, enough to judge that it did spend its life in Europe for a while.
First, though, the new Power Supply. It wasn’t much effort to actually get another one — I found a unit in the back that we had tried to repair previously (to no success) and simply swapped that one out for the one the system had in it.
In an ironic twist, this power supply is rated 120-240 volts, meaning were this system to find its way back to Europe (for some reason) it would still work fine. This does mean the label on the back is incorrect, but as I don’t get rid of game consoles and hardware (at least, nothing in a working state) this shouldn’t be an issue — more of something only I’d know, and maybe would point out to friends for fun. “Yeah, I rock a European PS3 I modded to work here in the states” or something like that is what I’d say, like claiming that makes me some kind of badass. Hah.
Anyway, beyond that I took time to blow the system out as good as I could. It was a bit of a mess, somewhat funky in that “musty, cigarette smoke funk” way that oh so many game systems these days seem to wind up and of course the case is scratched to hell and back, but not too terribly so as to make me not want to look at the unit. I dare say it’s in somewhat decent shape all things considered, compared to some I’ve seen.
I couldn’t get all the filth out of it, of course — not without the hell that is tearing apart of original model PlayStation 3, so I left things as they were. It was good enough as it was, and I could always bring it back in the future if I wanted to do a full teardown.
So, with the console cleaned within reason and reassembled, with a proper power supply for the US in it, things were good to go. As it stood I had a decently cleaned fully functional PAL PlayStation 3 capable of running on 120 volt North American mains power. Killer. This is where the fun came in and I took a look at the history of the console.
I didn’t document it much — it was more of a quelling of curiosity than some kind of archival operation. The system setting were all in typical European style — the dates were in day-month-year format, the time was in 24 hours, common in the UK, and the system language was of course The Queens English (okay, UK English, but still, when will I get to use that phrase again on this site? Not bloody often.)
This was where I got to the more interesting aspect — the messages from the user account on the system. There were actually 3, but I didn’t pry into anything more than the first one that came up.
This is where I learned a few things. One, PlayStation gamers apparently, at least in this time, would use just the subject line to be the whole message, saying things like “Nice Goal” or “U SUK” without any additional content in the actual message.
Okay, that’s fine, I guess, but then I saw some really funny messages. Apparently the previous owner played a ton of FIFA, and angered quite a few people at times. Honestly some of the messages were pretty hilarious. Others were typical, and still more just left me thinking “wait, what?”
Anyway, with having that curiosity satiated, I was confident in the system being able to do what I wanted it to do with it, and that night it came home with me.
Next up, the crazy process of modding this thing.
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