Reply 23080 of 27784, by Thermalwrong
I'm kind of hitting a brick wall with what I want to do with the LCDs on my laptops and advantech SBCs, I need to figure out how to modify some registers or the VGA BIOS and there are many pre-requisites to that. Thankfully yyzkevin shared the code he used to modify the C&T 65535 registers to run a TFT instead of a DSTN panel, I can try to understand that to start with.
So I tried something else instead and was surprised by my luck - I got a job lot of CD-rom drives a couple of years back and tested them all playing audio CDs.
My favourite looking one of the lot, a Goldstar 8X speed (GCD-R580B) was busted though and didn't want to read discs. I thought it was a laser problem.
Taking it apart, I cleaned up some flux on the PCB and reseated the connectors on the drive's mainboard. It still didn't work but I ran it with the top off to see what it was doing and the disc wasn't spinning, so I gave it some manual assistance just span it round a couple of times.
Put another disc in and now it's reading and playing audio CDs! 😁 Gave it a clean and put it all back together, I should put this into a build or something, should probably test if it can read data CDs first but it's playing this CD-r audio alongside properly mastered ones so it's probably okay.
Cleaned off the dirt from the drive and had to use melamine foam on some bits to clean off some bad marks. Looks great now though.