New Receiver Disagrees with Car

[aspir]

So I bought a new stereo (CD/MP3 player) from some Japanese company called Legacy. It's a decent stereo, but there are some things that it doesn't seem to like about my car (1995 Corolla). First, the friend who i had install it tried to get around using a wiring harness by manually testing each of the wires to see what they did and splicing the new stereo into the system. For some reason, there were three extra wires leftover. Let's just call them wires A, B, and C. If you touch wires A and B together, the outside front parking lights come on. Touch C and B together and pretty blue sparks fly out and a fuse pops. At least, that's what happened the first time.

We replaced the fuse under the hood and now when you touch C and B together, the interal lights come on (you know, the ones that illumniate the dashboard and all the climate control controls, etc when the headlights are on). It also dims the clock, as it should. Here's the strange part: when holding these two wires together, the internal lights come ON when the headlights are OFF, and the internal lights turn OFF when the headlights are ON. Backwards, no? This means that, while driving at night, I cannot tell how fast I am going or how much gas I have left. Not fun.

What I would like to know is if anyone has access to a wiring diagram of some sort that's not in some over-priced book from a second-rate, shady-looking website. I'm sure there are complete wiring diagrams for the dashboard of my car floating around there somewhere, I just can't find any. Or if no one has a diagram, then any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Ah yes, one more thing. It seems that the factory radio had a clock battery or SOMETHING in it to keep a current running in there when the car was off so it preserved radio stations and settings. That means that the car doesn't seem to have a wire (that we could find with our voltage meter, anyway) that has a constant current running through it to plug into the new radio so it keeps its settings. This means that every time I turn on the car, all my radio presets are wiped and it loses its current position on my CD. Now THAT is a pain in the ass. Any suggestions for how to get a constant current to the radio without drilling crazy holes from the dashboard to the battery?

[phantastic1]

save yourself the trouble...spend 10 bux and buy the harness....do it the right way and you wont have to worry about it down the road especially whenever you decide to get a different receiver.

[aspir]

I'd love to do that, but the wires in the car have already had their connectors removed. It wouldn't be possible to get them back into a harness. That would be an insane amount of work if it were even possible. Have I really been screwed over, here?

[phantastic1]

not really....i dont know if they make it for your car...but autozone sold the connector that's suppose to go to the factory unit for my 94 accord. if you cant find it at a parts store....run to a local junk yard that lets you pull your own parts....and just cut the harness out the car. just make sure u leave yourself enough room to work with....dont cut it too short.

if you could also post the color of the wires....that would help i.d. what they are for if you are still wanting to run the wires directly to the unit's wires