Lightning's FINAL PlayStation 2 Portable design

[Lightning]

Okay, cards on the table, I bollocked up my board, and subsequently kicked myself in same. But I wouldn't be the scientist I like to think I am (picturing myself swanning about in a lab coat with Bunsen burners the only visible source of illumination) if I didn't turn this into an opportunity, because I've ordered and fast shipped a new PS2 motherboard, but this time with a slightly more DIY twist to the HDD, as suggested by @AKuHAK.

I'm using this board as the SATA interface:

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/UESH-Hot ... 18400_6150

Basically I'm just going to solder my 30awg kynar to the points (I forgot about my l33t modchip skillz), label each wire with tape and felt tip, test the connection with the pins still in, then remove them, clean the holes, push each numbered wire up through it's corresponding hole, lay the board flat, pull the wires tight (they having been pre secured with JB weld), secure the board (also probably with JB weld), and solder each wire at length. Kynar is brilliant for that, if you heat it and agitate it with the tip of a soldering iron with a bit of solder on the end, and flux on the hole, you get a perfect connection at perfect length. Then all you do is either wriggle or cut the wires off at board level and that's it.

Anyway on the subject of soldering the HDD points, and the opportunity I mentioned above, the opportunity is RESEARCH!! and I've already formulated a theory;

I took out the heat gun and cleaned a fair bit of the ICs off the board, then came to a bit of a wondering; Could I simply remove the resistors on the board to make it easier to solder the points?

Surely the only reason the HDD mod works is because you provide the 19 otherwise grounded signals with a path of less resistance to follow and subsequently communicate with a drive, so if I had my system patched to boot FMCB from said HDD, is there any reason I couldn't do this?

Actually by the same reasoning, and in the case that this won't work without the resistors, couldn't I just get a bunch of through hole resistors (I know the values) and solder them to ground on the converter board? Thereby making the soldering easier and preserving the electrical characteristics of the board?

Debate in the comments below!!

 

[AKuHAK]

Wow! sounds cool, unfortunately i doesn't have so advanced hardware skills and cannot comment if it will be working or not (but why not?). If you need I can provide OPL version which will work with second HDD

As about obsolete DVD drive motor - I have one without it. It works just fine but some OFFICIAL programs will fail in some points. But not all and not everywhere. Of course opl will work flawessly.

 

[Lightning]

@AKuHAK Truly? You actually have one that's had the motor driver IC removed and continues to work? Well that makes me very confident, I can't wait to try it. Also, I get the impression that you might be a developer of sorts, is that correct?

In other news I got my screen today, the driver board is actually smaller than even I thought, 70 x 49mm in fact, and indeed runs from a very modest 5 volts (TBH I was a tad sceptical).

The screen works well, and looks like it will be compatible with my direct LCD mod, but one issue I need to address is the programming of the driver board. Whenever it isn't actively decoding an HDMI signal it goes into a sort of sleep mode and stops powering the LCD. I'll need to spend some time mucking about in the settings, and if that fails find a way to fake an HDMI signal..

 

[AKuHAK]

Can you provide some lcd screen picture examples? Just to be sure that it is possible via rgb24

 

[Lightning]

Rest assured I will definitely post photos of the picture quality on screen once I get it hooked up, I really just need to make the board for the 50 pin LCD port, and get it printed of course.

I have also been looking at a service manual for a PSONE (that's the slim one) and noticed that it too outputs in 24 bit RGB, before going through it's compression chip of course, so this mod should in theory be compatible with it as well. The only problem is the native resolution of the system, which is something like 320x240 in the worst case, so until some kind of up scaler comes along for it, a GSM for PSONE if you will, the screen size vs active area would be an issue.

Anyway I don't know a timeline for when I'll have the screen hooked up, but my new motherboard should be in tomorrow, and a bunch of the other parts are not far behind, so my next update should be pretty big, albeit a bit of a catch up lol

 

[Lightning]

Like a Bolt from the Blue, it's time for.. an update

So I got my HDD adapter today, and as you can see I was ready to go, I've had these soldered on for about a week and a half lol

Once I had the board it didn't take long to get all the pins desoldered, cleaned the holes, and then fed the wires through their respective spots

I covered both with JB weld, but I didn't get a photo of the top one, I was to excited lol

Anyway after I got the board situated how I wanted and hot glued for temporary stability until final JB welding. I used some header pins and a bit of desolder braid to connect the SATA port

To my tremendous relief the interface functions, and the SSD is being read by OPL, it even boots games!!... Only it just kind of hangs at a black screen after flashing Purple and Green a few times.. So a bit of troubleshooting is definitely in order it seems

Anyway as was somewhat implied above, I have not been idle since my last post, I have accomplished a fair bit on the board as a whole.

Firstly, I got the Motor IC off and trimmed the board so that it's basically a perfect rectangle (relatively speaking)

As you can see as well, I got the fan posts attached

So that was the top of the board, now on to the bottom. I have a length of black ribbon cable relocating the MC0 and USB to elsewhere on the board. I haven'y yet decided where to put them. I have the LCD driver board mounted with a screw post and glued elsewhere. The ziff socket is in a great loacation for when I'm ready to relocate the points above board. Its being powered by a small 7805 regulator tied directly to the 8.5 volt power-in

There is also the addition of the power regulator, already configured to 8.6 volts, and the solid state power switch, both are direct soldered to ground on the board

The next steps will be (now that I have the SSD installed and can move forward) to mount the LCD module above the board so that I can get the dimensions for the 24-bit RGB board, and finally design and fabricate the bloody thing!! I guess I should mention that my heat sink also came in, its not really worth photographing until I get it trimmed though. The battery mounts will probably be the most immediate thing I do, it'll be pretty handy when I wont have to keep plugging it in.

On a final note, this OPL thing is slightly troubling, I'd really appreciate any support I can get on the matter.

Until next time my friends

 

[AKuHAK]

Great work! As about OPL I noticed some problems with Sata mod - probably cause mine is badly soldered. First: all my disks are in read-only mode i don't know why. You need to disable all additional options: VMC and so on. And you have to install games by attaching sata hdd directly to your computer - network installation will not work.
Next error: (I don't have one but Armorant had) - SSD disks doesn't fully supports ATA-5 specifications so it cannot operate at maximum speed (UDMA-4). You need to decrease disk speed at some of MDMA modes. Yeah such an interesting fact: SSD disks are slower than simple disks
And finally - maybe you just select some OPL incompatible game (there are some games that are incompatible)?
Or maybe you start game in some different video mode which is not supported by your tv?

You can test your mod with uLaunchELF. If you are able to create partition and copy something inside it - thats means that everything is working.

 

[gman]

Your wiring and method is so clean, almost makes it look easy. Just wondering but why didn't you go with a 79000 ps2? I'm assuming its because of the hard drive but I am not really up to date on ps2 software mods.

 

[Lightning]

Well the direct LCD mod is officially dead. @Armorant sent me a link to someone's post from about 2006, which explained that the idea has indeed been thought of, but dismissed because of the high potential for damage to the GS chip. To my mind, it's not worth the trouble, especially when I remember the overarching goal of the project, which is to build a PS2p.

Anyway with that in mind I think I will go with a VGA to HDMI converter, so if anyone knows of a super tiny one, let me know!!

@AKuHAK
Thanks for the info on the HDD mod. I can confirm that read/write is working through uLaunch, so it's probably got something to do with the ATA controller speed, I'll need to look into how to change those things.

@gman
You are right, it has to do with the hard drive. Actually it's funny you mention the 79001, in my reverse engineering thread for same, I believe I may have been getting very close to a full speed loading method for it, but unfortunately the method, provided it actually works, would have required a lot of development, and it only would have worked for the 79001, so not really a viable project.

 

[Aurelio]

Since the PS2 support component (YPbPr) output you could use a Wii2HDMI, which is basically a component to HDMI converter and it's really cheap. The quality isn't perfect, but it's not that bad

 

[Lightning]

I've used component to HDMI converters, and found them quite lacking. My screen is 800x600, which is a VGA resolution, and although, as I've said in other threads, VGA is subject to interference, but as long as I keep the transmission distance short, and shield the wires as much as possible, the losses will be negligible.

In other slightly more elating news, MDMA is the way to go!!! I got my SSD games working!!! HUGE thanks to @AKuHAK for letting me know about those modes. They seem to be having a problem saving the setting though, I have to select it manually every time and hit test to play the game. But even that is better than a black screen

 

[AKuHAK]

@Lighting Oh! that means that your hdd is really read-only. If you will try to copy with uLaunchELF help some large file, for example, from your usb stick into hdd you will see that resulting file will be smaller than 200kb. Unfortunately all hdd drivers operates at udma-4 speed so they failed. As I know it is better not to use SSD but use some SD card adapter cause you didnt notice any difference in speed (or maybe it will be it even faster) but SD cards are much more cheaper and easier to manipulate.

 

[Lightning]

So I did a little digging, and found that I am not bound by the 200kb restriction, also my +OPL partition was 0mb for some reason, so I'm using winhiip to create it from my PC, I'm making it 128mb

 

[Lightning]

This thing just keeps getting weirder. Some of the primary partitions created by winhiip, including +OPL will sometimes show as "0KB free", and show none of the folders inside them. I also tried to transfer my cover art, about 5MB, on the occasions that it shows the partitions properly, it'll start transferring the files at about 200KB/s, then just stop. I have to reboot it because the system effectively freezes, but the next time I get the partitions to load, about 10-15 of them actually made it over, and when I boot up OPL it displays them for their respective games. Which brings me to OPL.. When I boot a game with UDMA0-4 I get green, magenta, green, magenta, black... then I reset. When I boot one in MDMA0-2 I get spring green, and then it just hangs. Very rarely however, when I boot one in MDMA0, I get green, magenta, green, magenta, then it works perfectly.

I haven't yet experimented with compatibility modes, TBH I don't really understand them, but first I need to figure out how to make it boot games successfully.

 

[Lightning]

Well so much for FINAL lol, I guess the design process is to intrinsically organic for a rigid structure. Anyway after exhaustive experimentation and no applicable results, I have resolved to go with the SD card solution. I bought this adapter: http://s.aliexpress.com/NfEZzEFR , and I'll actually be able to use my existing wires and JB weld structure.

Its a shame about the SSD, but I did get it on sale, and now my PC will have some new high speed storage to play with.

The advantage now is that I'll be able to locate the SD card port to the outside of the case, so swapping them will be easy, and now that I have all the extra space inside, perhaps I can think about adding a second device... Those odroid chips looked pretty cool

 

[Lightning]

If my worklog had a nickname, it would be Backtrack..

The direct LCD mod is back on, sort of. Actually it's my original vision for the mod, which was to be able to encode that 24 bit parallel RGB into a high bandwidth digital signal. So with that, I present the preliminary stage of the PS2-24bit-RGB-to-DVI board:

I probably need to condense the name a bit, its a bit of mouthful. The board functions as a replacement for the CXM40005 chip. This is the chip at the heart of the board: http://www.chrontel.com/index.php/produ ... vi-encoder

I need a more detailed datasheet from the manufacturer, but I feel like they only give you those after you buy the chip. Anyway I need to work out the RGB line configuration (it's not in order), and get the rest of the pins sorted. It takes 3.3 and 1.8 volts, both of which can be taken from rather generous sources on the PS2 board. Also need a QFN-88 10x10mm footprint for diptrace, the one in the picture is 12x12mm.

This sub project holds a lot of promise, it'll keep me busy for weeks!!

 

[Diminuendo]

would this "PS2-24bit-RGB-to-DVI board" work for other 480p RGB consoles like the gamecube? or 240p RBG?

 

[Lightning]

At this stage I can't even say for sure that it'll work for the PS2, but any compatibility it has with other consoles will depend on how their graphics controllers output visual data

 

[Lightning]

Slight upgrade, I just figured out the digital audio data pins, so my converter board will be HDMI, not just DVI

New name posiblility: PS2nativeHDMI

 

[Lightning]

New rendering of progress on the board. Dip Trace is amazing!! Compared to Eagle it's a breath of fresh, intuitive air.

I managed to make a custom 10x10 pattern for the QFN-88, and shaped the board according to my own requirements. Added a 5 volt pad for the HDMI hot plug detect, and arranged the power pads in pleasingly descending order of potential difference.

I contacted the manufacturer and requested more detailed pinout information, so hopefully they'll get back to me first thing tomorrow. I also need to add a number of pull up resistors to some of the pins, which will require a bit of research..

More to come soon