Playstation 2 Portable - First ever portable

[Ragdim]

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This thread is no longer being updated (and this project never completed), but it's still relevant to those who wish to install a compact flash card (the idea being that CF cards are much smaller than a HDD, less prone to damage, and use less battery juice) in a portable PS2. Feel free to use the noobish design concepts posted here (never had legal rights to them to begin with). Good luck!

P.S - I'll sell my 32GB transcend CF card and IDE -> CF adapter (wires are soldered onto it) to anyone that wants them for $25. Email ixandius@gmail.com
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I started a thread over at the MBB forums for this project, but I figured I'd expand over to here as well to get the help of both communities. More or less what I'm trying to do is build a riced out "handheld" PS2 that uses a HDD with HDLoader on it and that retains the 2nd player port as well as the ability to be plugged into a t.v. It will also have a battery (obviously), the option to be powered off a wall outlet, and hopefully the ability to charge the battery while being plugged into said wall outlet. As far as I can tell it's a pretty tall order, especially considering I have more or less no experience when it comes to this stuff, but I'll manage. This is the link to the other thread, and here is a picture I shopped together to give you a general idea of what this will look like in the end:



Anyways, being that I'm making a portable PS2, I want to minimize its size as much as possible, and that means using a slim PS2 and then figuring out a way to make a HDD work with it. I'm aware of 4 such methods, those being HD Connect, HD Combo, HDPro, and openloader. I want the games to be local, so that eliminates openloader already. The guy behind HDpro seems rather shady, and the product itself didn't seem very good, so that's another no. That leaves me with the connect and combo. Connect is basically a barebones chip that you solder a few ribbons to your mobo with and then you can use a sata drive with your PS2 (you have to find a power source for the drive). HD Combo is like a luxury version of connect since it comes with it's own power brick and housing for the drive, but it only natively supports IDE drives.

With that being said, I would have already ordered the HD Connect hands down due to the lower cost and native support for SATA drives, but I'd like to know if anyone here has had experience with the connect, and if so how well does it work? Other than that, do you guys think using a 3.5 HDD in a portable will pose any problems due to moving around? I expect to be stationary most of the time when playing on it, but I'd appreciate some input all the same. Thanks.

 

[Zero]

We were discussing something similar in another thread, but anyway as far as I know as long as you have a compatible slim mobo, you can solder directly on to the board to get IDE, without paying for any of those products. The one that does SATA more than likely is just using an IDE to SATA converter, which you can probably buy yourself for cheaper. Although the install for the commercial products looks a lot easier, so if you have the money and aren't comfortable soldering to the IDE points they'll work too.

Now, if your focus is getting it as small as possible on your mobo revision, I would consider adding a CF slot instead. This is simply because CF is compatible with IDE, and using CF cards for games would make it significantly smaller vs using an HDD, as well as use a lot less power. If you want to make it even smaller, you could use a newer slim PS2, but then you're limited to USB and the compatibility issues that brings.

Here's the other thread I mentioned: viewtopic.php?f=36&t=8361

 

[zeturi]

Midgar is where it's at.

 

[Ragdim]

We were discussing something similar in another thread, but anyway as far as I know as long as you have a compatible slim mobo, you can solder directly on to the board to get IDE, without paying for any of those products. The one that does SATA more than likely is just using an IDE to SATA converter, which you can probably buy yourself for cheaper. Although the install for the commercial products looks a lot easier, so if you have the money and aren't comfortable soldering to the IDE points they'll work too.

Seems reasonable that you could do that, but I'd need a step by step guide soldering it to the board. Wouldn't happen to know of any, would you?

Now, if your focus is getting it as small as possible on your mobo revision, I would consider adding a CF slot instead. This is simply because CF is compatible with IDE, and using CF cards for games would make it significantly smaller vs using an HDD, as well as use a lot less power. If you want to make it even smaller, you could use a newer slim PS2, but then you're limited to USB and the compatibility issues that brings.

My focus is getting it as small as possible without sacrificing features, and that includes not compromising the compatibility/speed of the HDD. I would imagine if CF is compatible with IDE like you say, there should be no difference between the games that could be played; the problem is CF is 2-3x slower than IDE to my knowledge. Of course, the HDD is already playing the games better than what a CD would, so it might not matter as much. Point and case though is that I'm a complete novice, and it doesn't seem that this is ground that has been covered before, so I'll probably just stick to the beaten trail and use a HDD.

It would be very tempting, though, just for the fact of reduced power consumption/size/risk of movement messing up the r/w head of the HDD (which I still don't know how big of a problem that will be).

 

[skygunner58203]

Well, don't give up on it. I, too, am a novice at this. the only portable i've ever made was a PSOne portable that I gave to my eight y/o brother for his birthday. My current project is building a GCp for less than 150 bucks. As long as all i need are batteries, i can beat my goal by ten bucks. So keep at it, its the only way to learn.

 

[Kyosho]

Other than that, do you guys think using a 3.5 HDD in a portable will pose any problems due to moving around?

Yeah it's going to be extremely fricken heavy. Why use a 3.5" drive rather than a 2.5? Also, while it's entirely possible you could damage the HDD by moving it around and stuff, it's unlikely. Unless you drop the entire thing while it's running. And if that happens, well, you've probably broken more than just the hard drive.

I'm speaking as some one who has used a hard drive in a project. Plus, you know, laptops and all.

 

[Ragdim]

I would imagine if CF is compatible with IDE like you say, there should be no difference between the games that could be played; the problem is CF is 2-3x slower than IDE to my knowledge. Of course, the HDD is already playing the games better than what a CD would, so it might not matter as much.

I actually just took a look online to see how fast USB 1.0 was, and it only had a throughput of about 1.5 Mbps. I then looked around on newegg for some CF cards and found this. With this being twice as fast as I originally thought, and then you consider that people can run games off of 1.5 Mbps usb sticks already (albeit crappy), this could actually be a feasible replacement for a HDD. I have to admit that this is very expensive, but I'll make a deal. If I can be convinced that this is at least halfway feasible, and there is someone here with the technical know-how that wants to guide me in doing this, I'd be willing to be a guinea pig and try it out.

That would mean specific instructions on what to solder and how to test this; I'm obviously not going to blame you if it doesn't work. If you're interested, send me a message. Would be good to know what the actual data throughput is for the PS2, so if anyone knows feel free (I doubt it's higher than the 90/60 r/w speed of the CF card I linked). In the mean time, I'm gonna continue my normal research and see if there's anything on soldering an IDE drive directly to a slim PS2 like zero suggested.

 

[Zero]

Here are some diagrams I found, but keep in mind the points look kinda small, so be careful when soldering:

As for the CF slot, here's a pinout I found quickly on Google, I'm sure there is a better one out there. They also sell pretty small and cheap CF to IDE adapters online if you'd prefer to go that route.

 

[Ragdim]

Here are some diagrams I found, but keep in mind the points look kinda small, so be careful when soldering:

That's fine, I might be able to pull it off after some practice. I'm assuming that's a 700xx slim PS2 mobo pictured there since they were the only slims with the IDE points still in tact, right?

Also, I noticed pins 28, 32, 34, and 39 were missing, so I did a bit of searching and found out what they did. I can understand why pins 28 and 39 weren't used since they are for detecting master/slave drives, and pin 32 is supposedly not really used for anything to begin with, but what about 34? According to what I have read, it detects an 80 pin ATA/IDE cable, the kind of cable needed for any UDMA mode above mode 2. Now if I'm not mistaken, this would mean the PS2 doesn't throughput data from a game any faster than 33 MB/s since that's how fast mode 2 is, and thus I wouldn't need a CF card with read/write speeds any faster than that. Am I correct in saying so?

As for the CF slot, here's a pinout I found quickly on Google, I'm sure there is a better one out there. They also sell pretty small and cheap CF to IDE adapters online if you'd prefer to go that route.

I'll most likely buy this since it would eliminate an extra chance for me to make a mistake in the wiring. As well as that, I'll pick up this CF card within the next few days, just gotta clear some things up here first before I do. Thanks for the pinout btw. I'm trying my best to learn as I go, just gotta bear with me as I can be slow picking up on some things.

 

[Ragdim]

I went out on a limb and ordered those parts. I'll try to get my hands on an IDE ribbon cable to use for wiring, needa look up a guide on how to split the wires apart. I'll most likely stick a paper clip into a spare power supply I have and use the floppy power connector from that for power, and connect the adapter with CF card into my fat PS2's network adapter to test this out.

I really would like to know the data throughput for an average PS2 game, it's a Sega to find out (maybe I'm not using the right search terms). Anywho, parts should be in early next week.

My biggest concern is the UDMA modes and the PS2, I'm not sure exactly how that would work. We'll find out.

 

[Ragdim]

Just a slight update here. I came across something interesting while googling "PS2 HDD DMA". I got a result for the HDLoader wiki, and upon looking at it, I found this section: "0.7c - fix for Suikoden V, patches for 48bit HDDs (up to 2 Terabytes), DMA modes (UDMA/MDMA) and DVD9 fix to allow dual layer games to be played were added,". The question is, how many UDMA modes exactly? We'll find out (if this even works).

 

[Ragdim]

Figured I'd fill you guys in since it's gonna be 5+ days until I can post any kind of results here. I received the FC+Adapter on tuesday (woohoo ^^), but I've been super busy, and as it turns out I need to pick up another soldering iron (picked this one up over on amazon since it has a built in flash light), so that'll be 5-8 days on shipping. In the mean time, I got my hands on a 70012 slim and checked out the solder points.

My. God. I'm gonna need to freshen up, lol. It's no biggy, this is supposed to be fun and a learning experience. I'm pretty sure the traces on the mobo are covered with something so you can't really solder to those, correct? If so, that would make my life a HECK of a lot easier here (I'm pretty sure this is the case, I don't see how anyone could do this otherwise, these points are so much smaller than in the pictures).

Also, I got an answer to my question about the data throughput of a normal PS2 game over at psxscene from a gentleman by the name SP193; your average game runs slower than MDMA mode 0, so 4.2 MB/s or less. Much slower than I had anticipated, and as SP193 pointed out, this can cause issues with certain games if you are running them faster than they are intended to run (should be a limited number of games according to SP193).

Time to learn how to solder really freaking small...

 

[bud]

Well if the traces are bigger than the points, you can scratch off the solder mask and make the connection there. Just be sure to tin the exposed trace first, flux is really helpful when doing this.

 

[Zero]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure they removed the points in future revisions, which kinda sucks because those would in theory be able to be cut down smaller.

Anyway, good luck with this, I'm looking forward to seeing how it turns out.

 

[Ragdim]

Well if the traces are bigger than the points, you can scratch off the solder mask and make the connection there. Just be sure to tin the exposed trace first, flux is really helpful when doing this.

They're not, that's why I was hoping they're covered. Good to know the technical term is solder mask btw.

 

[Ragdim]

Been a while since my last post on here (or indeed any updates on the project itself). I've been caught up with studying and the holidays, but I just wanted you guys to know I haven't abandoned this project. I'm also here with a few questions. First and foremost, JB weld: does it expand when it dries? Reason I ask is that I've heard it's pretty strong, and that is a property I'm looking for in order to hold my wires in place. The contact points are so small that the wires could break off almost effortlessly.

Second, is there an easier way to go about wire management? I have one side of the motherboard completely finished, but it's a mish-mash of wires crisscrossing over each other. I was thinking perhaps of making like a plastic tablet for the other side with the wires pre-glued onto it so they're already in position and everything, and some cut out holes for where I'm soldering at.

Lastly, I have certain wires cut at different lengths going from my mobo to my CF card adapter. The biggest difference in wire length might be half an inch to an inch, and I'm wondering if this will screw up data transfer at all. Thoughts?

As a slight update, I originally had 22 AWG wire that I had bought from radio shack (much too big), so I reallocated some 26 AWG wire from a telephone line to my project, but even that is too much. Even the solder I picked up is pretty large, so I'd say I have about a 50/50 chance of this working due to the shoddy soldering. Might be out of a $20 mobo, but good practice I suppose, lol.

P.S - Happy near year!

 

[Abyss]

JB weld doesn't expand to my knowledge. JB Quick dries much faster, but is slightly less strong. If you want to save quite a bit of time, it should work just as well to hold wires in place.

 

[bud]

Don't use JB weld to secure wires. I'm almost certain it has flecks of steel in it which would make it conductive. It'd be better for you to use normal epoxy. Hot glue work work too, but it wouldn't be as strong or as resistant to heat as epoxy would.

 

[ShockSlayer]

Don't use JB weld to secure wires. I'm almost certain it has flecks of steel in it which would make it conductive. It'd be better for you to use normal epoxy. Hot glue work work too, but it wouldn't be as strong or as resistant to heat as epoxy would.

http://jbweld.net/faq.php
^Claims it's not conductive, but it does have iron filings in it. I'm sure there are better alternatives, though. Epoxy's da bomb.

Also, whatever epoxy Ashen uses is really really good for wires soldered to contacts, I don't remember if he's ever mentioned the brand or not. Loctite plastic epoxy.

SS

 

[Ragdim]

Don't use JB weld to secure wires. I'm almost certain it has flecks of steel in it which would make it conductive. It'd be better for you to use normal epoxy. Hot glue work work too, but it wouldn't be as strong or as resistant to heat as epoxy would.

http://jbweld.net/faq.php
^Claims it's not conductive, but it does have iron filings in it. I'm sure there are better alternatives, though. Epoxy's da bomb.

Also, whatever epoxy Ashen uses is really really good for wires soldered to contacts, I don't remember if he's ever mentioned the brand or not. Loctite plastic epoxy.

SS

It's funny because a thread you made with a similar question garnered positive responses, and had thus made me decide to go with JB weld. I'll take your word for it, though.

I just need figure out what effect having different length wires will have on data transfer to the CF card as I'm not having any luck with googling it.