Are there News about replacement Laser for white desktop MA Modell ?

[Jehuty]

Hello Forum,

in the past i could replace the laser from my CX20 and 20F Grey Tower Modells with lasers from Technics SL505 CD Player.
Meanwhile one of my CX20 got a Wizard from GDemu which runs fine.

Now i got an white FM Towns MA. First the laser could read some of my CD´s. Playig around with the laser poti i could manage that it could read different CD-R. But on the last try, i turned the poti a little bit back, somethingwent wrong and now the laser seems to be blown away.

So - are there any news where to get or rip off one replacement laser ?

I also wrote to GDemu if it is possible to adapt the Wizard to a MA Modell. Hoping for a positiv answer.

[Cyothevile]

Deunan is working on it. So leave him alone. Towns internal CD ROM drive connector is very similar to the towers. However they mixed 12V, 5V and GND lines together like they did with the hard drive connector.

There appears to be two different desktop CD ROM drives. One is the single speed and another is the two speed.

The circuitry on board appear to be technics type MCU and DSP. I think the best line of effort if you want a laser is to roll the dice and buy old technics CD player.


Alternatively you can  use SCSI BOOT by captain yamakawa for the time being.

I bet your motor is burned out and not your laser. Is yours a 2 speed or single speed drive?  I know the Pentium I have has the motor burn-out which happens to two speed drives a LOT.

What I'm saying is your laser could be OK but motor could just be burned out.

[Jehuty]

Yes i got answer from Deunan that he is working on an ODE for the desktop modells.

And you lost your bet, the motor is ok. The laser has no light at all.
When i spin the cd sometimes the motor does spin up for short.
It is definitely the laser.

I already used the scsicd driver from captain Ys since i play around with my first cx modell.
First with the boot FD 1.1 and 2.1, later with FD Boot. Great piece of software, but it doesn´t work for all games.
I managed to get some more games to run with his patches and changing the Towns files with different versions.
But there are still many games that won´t work with external drive.
and the problem with cdda. I already asked here if it would be possible to mix the Audio In permanently like it is possible in TownsOS2.1

[Cyothevile]

You must have the single speed drive. I've actually never seen that laser die. There is a first for everything. I know the laser for the tower is extraordinarily hard to get but you can find them.

MX and Pentium definitely have the two speed drive. I guess MA has the single speed. I think also EA type has 2 speed drive and mine has trouble for burned media but read pressed discs fine.

You can ask him if you can become beta tester for his prototype since your desktop laser seem bad. He might let you use one on condition you test a lot of images to see if they boot and run. A few tower testers did that and got to revive their computers.

But back to your question. I haven't seen any laser replacement unless someone wants to start buying random technics CD players and rip lasers out and pray. The thought has crossed my mind though.

My laser could be good in my Pentium. I actually don't know because the motor is shit. It rotates maybe half a turn and laser can't even get table of contents from CD rom.

If there is any photos of this laser I could search around some technics service manuals to see if some of the pickups are similar.