[garypen]

Hi,

I just tried upgrading my firmware using one of the firmware hacks on this site and the power died halfway through. I now get a corrupt screen when I switch the system on. I can't reset the system using the stop button and power-on and generally the player looks to be bust.

Is there anyway I can bring this player back to life or is it completely dead??

Thanks for any advice/suggestions.

Gary

[dinderi]

garypen, I'm afraid your player is dead now. But if you folow this instruction you can recover a dead player using mobile phone serial cable. Ofcourse you do not have to make a specific plug as it is showen on instruction. Solderin a serial cable to proper points on a printed shallow is the very good idea too.
You could find more informations about cellural phone serial cabels' on this drawing And here you can finde usefull site with "Cell phones connectors pinouts listing".
Follow the instruction and the resurection of your player will come truth...

[garypen]

I suspected it might be a big problem. Ok thx, I'll think about whether I have time to indulge in a bit of electronics or whether it might be simpler to just go and buy a different player.

Why can't DVD manufacturers just have a backup firmware copy in ROM like modern PCs do?? It would add practically nothing to the cost and would be very useful for all users.

[dinderi]

garypen wrote:

Why can't DVD manufacturers just have a backup firmware copy in ROM like modern PCs do?? It would add practically nothing to the cost and would be very useful for all users.

garypen, We ask ourselfs about such problems every day, he he Garypen, If you find buying new player as "easier" way, send us this dead one. We earn some good money with it. The point is, that if you buy new one you woud have to upgrade it again, to use a full range of great abbilities that Gufiak unblocked and upgreated to this Firmware. Try to recover your player, it is not so difficult, many laymen did that. And look here in few days/weeks time. Gufiak makes some new great firmware for our players again, and will release it soon.

[garypen]

Ah, it's not that I'm worried about doing the work - I'm not a layman, I'm a kernel engineer and very used to messing around with hardware.

You are right, I should fix it. I'm just a bit short of time at the moment.

Ok, I'll let you know how it goes if I find time to fix it.

Gary

[dinderi]

Yes! This is the way we all should think. Good luck, mate.

[garypen]

I've just spent a frustrating 3 hours trying to get my machine running again and I haven't made any progress. I've had to overcome a lot of challenges, though so maybe I've made a mistake. I'll say what I've done in case there's something obvious that someone more experienced can spot.

1. I can't buy a serial mobile phone cable. Everywhere I tried, they only stock USB cables. So I went to my local electronic components shop and got the bits I needed to make a custom cable. I bought:
a 9 pin connector to talk to my laptop
4 core cable
4 pin power supply connector

I then looked up the spec. for RS232 9pin adapters and figured out which pins were ground, transmit and receive. I couldn't spot which pin carried 3.3v so I was a bit stymied at this point.

I got out my multimeter, fired up my laptop and started checking the charges of the various pins against pin 5 (ground). I figured out that pin 4 might be a good choice, although it seemed that it was putting out 5v. I figured that might not matter and pressed ahead.

After I soldered up the cable, I downloaded the software onto my laptop. Chose a firmware file to upgrade and then disassembled my DVD player ready to hook it up and fix it.

Then I hit a second problem. The board is a MT1389FE board, but it doesn't have the 4 pin cluster marked as rx, tx, gd, ... That was a bit of a puzzler. However, from the diagram on the website I deduced it must be somewhere near the video output and since there was only one 4 pin cluster and it was next to the video output I guessed this must be it. However, I couldn't tell which was ground. On the rear of the board, the pins are numbered 1 to 4 and so I assumed 1 was ground.

Ok, now I hooked everything up, turned on the DVD, started the software and it produced 3 lines of output and then stopped. It never incremented the progress bar which stayed on 0% and never shifted. I repeated the process many time and I could never get it to work. I tried different pinout combinations in case I had made a mistake and still couldn't get it to work. I checked the board voltage with my multimeter and saw that there is 3V between what I think is ground and what I think is the 3V pin, so it looks like my guess was right.

The three lines of log output looked like:

LOG: Start to upgrade
LOG: Unrecognised flash (or something like this)
LOG: Check & Backup

At this point in the process, it stopped. Nothing more ever happened.

(I can't give you exact output as the battery on my laptop has died and I'm typing this on another machine, I can send exact output as a follow up if it's useful to anyone.)

Any more suggestions or ideas as to what I'm doing wrong??

You can see that I'm trying, but I'm a bit stumped at the moment.

Thanks,

Gary

[gufiak]

Well, probably you've killed your player. We were talking about phone cables because these cables has voltage converters. Typical RS232 interface uses +/- 12V on data lines. Such situation is on PCs. If you are lucky, your laptop uses +/- 5V on data lines so processor is not killed. If you had problems with finding serial mobile cable you should ask us because USB cable also could be used. We have also photos with described pins on pioneer PCB. So next time ask before you do something what is not described here.

BTW, photos you can find in this topic: http://forum.pioneerdivx.net/tematy18/47.htm

[garypen]

I checked the voltage before I connected the cable and it was +/-5V. Even I'm not that reckless!!

I've been checking the player and it is still reading 3V across the pins which I think are the ground and 3.3V pins, so maybe it's still ok??

Looks like the photos at your link confirmed my guess that CP4001 was the right connection.

My question now is:

- Will my cable work with 5V, or do I need to get a different cable??

Gary

[dinderi]

garypen, I'm not such good in electronics as Gufiak is, but I suggest, if you can make your cellular phone USB cable to work back again, as it was before you rebuilt it (I mean, to be exactly the same as new one), do that. Than, install the driver on your laptop, that was surly added to the cable (small cd-rom). The driver is emulating RS232 port on USB. Now you can use USB cable with your laptop, the same way as it would be RS232 cellular phone serial cable.

[garypen]

I didn't have a phone USB cable. I bought components to make my own serial cable, which is part of the problem because it doesn't provide 3V power, but 5V power.

Still, that's a surprise to me that it would cause a problem, because 5V is very close to 3V.

Anyway, I've examined the diagrams that gufiak referred to and I was trying to run the program with the correct pinouts, so it doesn't appear to be working. It always tells me that it's "Unknown Flash Memory" and then hangs.

Thanks for all the help, I'll wait a while and see if any more suggestions come in - but it looks buying a new player might be the only way forward at this point. I'll buy one with a "remote hack" this time.

Gary

[dinderi]

So, Gary wait for Gufiak's visit. Maybe he knows some reasons of that problem.

P.S. Any way, If you buy some new player, still suggest not to throwing away this dead one.

[gufiak]

1. 5V is too much to connect, but probably shouldn't damage processor.
2. Processor could work but interface could be damaged.
3. Use phone cable or build cable on MAX232.

[garypen]

Good new and thanks to everyone who helped me.

My machine lives again!!

The cable that I bought (for about 5 euros) from a guy on ebay arrived today and I was quick to get out my soldering iron and laptop. It was quite fiddly and took me three or four tries to be able to hold the connectors in place long enough for the upgrade to work, but I got there in the end.

So, I have a player and it's clearly running different firmware (as the boot screen is different and it seems to behave slightly differently when discs are inserted). However, it still won't play region 2 discs, which is annoying as I the reason I started messing around with it in the first place was so I could remove the region locking.

How do I work out which firmware is installed and how do I enable multi-region play on the player??

Thanks for any more help or tips,

Gary

[lechu]

What version do you have now? To check it press HOME MENU, then go to Initial settings->Options, and don't press ENTER, also DISPLAY. You should see version on your display.
If it is Gufiak's mod, press small ENTER (near numeric keyboard) until player restarts. And now your player is region free.