Last night the 99 crapped out in the middle of Tokyo Olympiad. Now it will open and close the drawer but will only display H0 and not play.

Any ideas? I was having grip ring slip issues with this title during side breaks (CAV). The code seems to indicate it may be related but it doesn’t even try to mount the disc anymore.

I haven’t been inside yet, I was just hoping to have an idea of what to look for when I get a chance to open it.

H0 Spindle overcurrent detection

Makes me wonder if it was a power cap or something with circuit breaker?

I know that when a grip ring goes bad it can cause all kinds of mayhem for the player, could be the spindle is slipping and "over-revving" trying to get the disc up to speed.

Did you try another LD?

I would definitively clean the ring first and see if anything changes.

Well, I powered it down for a while and it still will only report H0 on power up. I unplugged it and we’ll see about later tonight.

My suspicion is that there is a dead short in the motor and I’m up the creak for a while. Maybe I shouldn’t have let it play a CAV movie when I wasn’t in the room and I knew the discs were slipping on this movie’s labels for some reason.

Hi again.

Well I came home tonight and plugged the player in and it had forgotten its code on restart. This doesn't surprise me as I'm pretty sure there is no storage on this thing. Anyway, I tried to play a CD and it set H0 again.

I took it downstairs to the tinker room and opened it up. When it mounts the CD you hear the whine of the motor controller but it doesn't move one degree. If you push the disc you can get it to read the TOC and attempt to play but it can never hit the required RPM. One time it set P0. I don't know what that is, but its probably because I was pushing the disc.

I'm wondering if there is too much friction in the spindle bearing (causing the higher current code) and how to determine what "too much" is. To me it feels like too much when I spin it by hand. I'd assume this would spin very freely since it has no PMs, right?

Tomorrow I'm going to take apart some other players and see how smooth their spindle bearings are by comparison.

I watch a lot of LDs guys.

Wish you the best on finding the issue. I'm very interested in seeing what the problem would be for the sake of building a knowledge base of issues and solutions.