I have a working V7 mainboard with a bad lens, and working v12 lens with a bad v12 mainboard. This may sound crazy, as the v12 lens uses smaller cables, but I have a feeling it may be a possible to adapt the v12 lens to the v7 mainboard. Granted that the v12 DVD/CD unit will not fit as it should on a v7 motherboard, I am willing to leave the PS2 open if needed. I do not have the money to buy a new slim or an old used PS2. My only option right now is to find a way to connect the smaller cables of the v12 lens to the larger ports on the older v7 PS2 mainboard that I currently have. Has anyone ever attempted something like this? if so, was there success? I am also wondering if any of the voltage ratings are different on the v12 lens/DVD/CD unit versus the older PS2 Lens/DVD/CD units. For those of you who say that an HD7 lens will not work in a V7 unit, that is not true at all. If you have a DVD eject tray that goes with the HD7 lens, you can add it to the V7 board and all will read well. The lens that I had working in the V7 board was an HD7, but I overtweaked it when I wanted to do some fine tuning. It was working just fine before that, but I wanted the lens to read backup media correctly, as it had a hard time reading my swap magic disc and backups. It played all standard comerical/retail games fine though. That includes blue and black CDS, as well as silver and gold DVDs (DVD movies as well).
I don't think a slimline laser/drive could be adapter to an older PS2, but I'd be interested to see someone prove me wrong. An HD7 works just fine in a v7. That's what my system came with brand new.
I beleive that the v12 lens has a data cable with the same amount of pins as the v7 lens, but the cable itself is smaller. perhaps doing a lot of detailed soldering would do the trick, but that would not be the most fun project. I beleive that the easiest route for the soldering job would be to replace the v7 connector port on the board with a v12 connector port. The spindle motor of the v12 has 12 pins, where as the spindle motor of the v7 has 13. The snake motor on both units use only 4 pins. It actualy does not seem "too" far-fetched to say that this is a possibility. I do not have the tools for such detailed soldering work, however.
sorry to burst you guys bubble , but even if you go through all the trouble to get it hooked up (which i doubt you will or you would already know this) the ps2 itself will need to be reprogrammed also to use the different laser . there is a program to switch between the a,b,c,r type lasers in the fat ps2s but it does not cover the slim ps2s laser .
gp376 is right, the ps2 was programmed for the specific lasers it has in its drive, so you will need to change the driver to get it to work, which is not really possible.
