PlayStation power supply

January 15, 2007 10:38 PM

Help me fit an NZ power supply to an American PlayStation

My American fiancee has brought her PlayStation to NZ with the hope of playing all her old games here. We, stupidly, plugged it into the power without accounting for the differences in voltage. Zap!

As best I can tell, the PlayStation's internal power supply has been fried, but the rest is fine. My online research suggests that we can avoid the voltage issues by just buying an NZ PlayStation, cannibalizing the power supply, and plugging it into the American PlayStation (this is my preferred solution because all the games are NTSC, and modded NZ PlayStations are idiosyncratic about displaying colour apparently).

Is this possible? The American PlayStation is model SCPH-9001, if that's important. Is this difficult? I'm hoping I can just get the part, plug it in, and go nuts, but please disabuse me of the scheme if it's a bad idea for some reason. Alternatives also willingly considered!

posted by Paragon to technology (4 comments total)

If you can find technical specs for the internal power supply, you should be able to work out what voltage it has and if it's compatible. I suspect it would be, but don't take my word for it!
posted by tomble at 12:16 AM on January 16, 2007

Cool, where would I find the technical specs, and what should I be looking for in them?
posted by Paragon at 11:38 AM on January 16, 2007

As you're not getting a lot replies I hope you won't me providing a slightly off topic one. It doesn't answer your original question but there are replacement power supplies here which appear to do what you need. Strangely enough they are able to deal with NZ and US power - so if the two of you ever moved back to states you could still use it there.

BTW my extremely unsophisticated, eight years old, Sony TV set automatically detects a NTSC input and and adjusts itself so that that picture looks fine. Just wondered whether yours would do similar and you don't realise that ? (Second thoughts - maybe it's the NZ PS that would have the problem the NTSC rather than the video output device ?)
posted by southof40 at 5:58 PM on January 16, 2007

Alternatives certainly considered! I'll look into it, although the PSUs you link to are for the PlayStation 2 rather than the original. Thanks!

My TV can handle NTSC fine,it is the NZ PS modded to play American games that supposedly has issues with colour (it needs something known as a colour board as well?).

The final alternative would be to shell out for a modded PS2 (like this), but I am poor and so am treating that as a last resort.
posted by Paragon at 6:37 PM on January 16, 2007