Playstation 2 Portable - First ever portable

I'm sure there's a point with the length where the latency would be too much and it wouldn't work. I've used different lengths of wire on a cart slot relocation to have the connector at an angle, and that worked. It's the same principle, basically, so I don't see why it would have any effect unless all of the wires are extremely long. I would assume it wasn't an issue because the data signals are independent of each other. I'm not claiming that as fact, it's just the explanation I've come up with.
 
I just got an old laptop screen from an HP and I'm wondering how I find out whether it's usable with a PS2? Also got an old, broken HP 7250 printer (one of those white ones) from my sister. Any cool projects that could be done with that?
 
You could do what I usually do and salvage parts from it. If it's like any of the printers I've broken down, it should be full of motors, LEDs, and tact switches.

You could take one of the motors and an LED and make a simple flashlight
 
So I burned one of the things pictured below clean out of existence (all that's left behind is a dark residue and the 2 contact points). I'm guessing that it's a fuse or something, idk really, but can anyone here say whether it's purchasable?

I'll probably pick up 3 just because the other two look slightly damaged as well (I was soldering the contact point for 18 and had the soldering iron a little too close in case anyone is wondering how this happened, lol).

If I can get these little guys replaced, I'll have this finished up in like 2 days and can actually test this out... it has dragged on for so long as is.

Edit: It would help if I told you guys I had a fat ps2 laying about. I could probably check to see if there's similar looking shiz on it that I might be able to swap out, but I wouldn't know for sure anyways whether it'd work.
 
Update: Managed to find a picture of the V12's fuse locations, and it doesn't look like my little guys here are one of 'em. ; /

Guess I'll pick up another V12 and debo the pieces I need offa that (I guess it's not all that likely you'll find an obscure part like this at your local radioshack anyway).
 
It looks to me like those little things you've circled are resistors. Looks like the opposite side of the CPU/GPU? Probably pretty important, but you should be able to replace them easily with normal resistors. Test the remaining ones with a multimeter in resistance mode.
 
You have to actually remove a resistor from the board in order to test it's resistance. On the board you will get a much different reading.
 
Ashen said:
It looks to me like those little things you've circled are resistors. Looks like the opposite side of the CPU/GPU? Probably pretty important, but you should be able to replace them easily with normal resistors. Test the remaining ones with a multimeter in resistance mode.
Click to expand...
hailrazer said:
You have to actually remove a resistor from the board in order to test it's resistance. On the board you will get a much different reading.
Click to expand...
Spot on. Measured it off the board (but not before destroying another one in the process) and got a reading of 9.95k.

I'm not sure when I'll be picking up another mobo/resistors, so I've taken to working on my case design again. Something's been bugging me for a while now, though; namely the back of the case and the idea of putting printed stickers on it.


The problem is the stickers will wrinkle up and not fit properly on the case surface with all the curves it has. To deal with this, I was thinking of doing something similar to what is done with decals on cars/bikes.

Generally, a stretchable vinyl decal will be pulled over the curved surface of the car/bike, the exposed side of the sticker being wetted down before being pressed onto the curved surface, and any creases being worked out.


What I'm hoping is that the image won't be affected *too* much since the curves aren't extreme, but I'll need to find a place that deals with custom stickers like this (haven't found any yet).

Anywho, that's my idea on how to do this... perhaps someone knows of a better way to go about this, though, and wouldn't mind sharing?


Here's the partially done design just to give you an idea of things. The curves you see stretch on all axis; x, y, z.
fngsbl.jpg
 
Quick update: finally got some time, so I went down to radioshack and got some 10k 5% resistors (1/4 watt); gonna work on getting this done within the next few days and the results (or lack thereof) posted.
 
Looks like I goofed up again. I was soldering the resistors on the other night and was gonna finish up the last 2-3 wires when I pretty much destroyed the 2 contact pads for the middle resistor... Nothing but a black mark where they once were - tried scraping away any rosin that might've been on there, but there's simply nothing to solder to. 20-30 hours and I don't even get to test it... Dang.

Anywho, I'ma start looking for some 7xxx PS2's, msg me if you've got one you'd like to sell (paypal). In the mean time, I'll be working on a way to pre-position the wires with super glue or something so they are flat against the board and I don't have to hold them with my shaky hands, lol (have a work holder, but the claws were too big to fit between the mesh of wires I had).
 
Been a while since my last post. I've gotten back to working on this project again, and I've got an update on things.

First update is I've successfully soldered the CF adapter without breaking my PS2 this time (confirmed this by turning on the PS2 and playing a bit of KH2). The second update is I haven't gotten the PS2 to recognize the CF card as a HDD (the PS2 still starts up and everything, so that's a good indicator there aren't any bridges/shorts).

Here's a quick recap on what I did the first time:

  • -shorted the PSU green/black wire with paper clip
    -set CF adapter to 3.3V, external power source, and Master setting
    -hooked up berg connector from PSU to CF adapter
    -hooked up computer PSU to power strip
    -hooked up PS2 to powerstrip
    -hooked up AV from TV to PS2
    -turned on power strip (CF adapter LEDs are now lit red (activity light) and yellow (slave light))
    -flipped PS2 power switch
    -still red and yellow lights on CF adapter
    -open HDloader and get a message: couldn't detect hard disk drive

Since then, I've tried powering on the PS2 before the PSU, 5V/slave setting, and resetting to see if it would work, but nada. I'm about to go do a few things and then come back to this, but hopefully one of you has an insight into this problem.

The next step I'll probably take is to test my other CF card on the PSU and see if the master lights up at all, and then repartition/format the CF card (doubt this would do anything). If this doesn't work, I'll probably desolder the card, test it on my comp, and then resolder to try again (gonna avoid this at all cost since that's like 12 hours of soldering down the drain, lol)

Could also check the HDLoader site and see what that says, or try to contact a dev. All in all, I have my doubts about all this, so some insight would greatly help.

Here's the CF adapter I have (pictures show different LED lights than mine): SYBA SD-CF-IDE-DI IDE to Compact Flash Adapter

Edit: the key point that should be addressed is why the green light (master) isn't turning on. I feel finding out what's going on there is the best shot at fixing this since PS2 hard drives should be set as master.
 
I'm not entirely sure why it doesn't want to be set to master, but apparently some cards can ignore the setting. Not sure if this is what's causing the problem here, but I'd try a couple other cards (ideally different brands) and see if maybe that's it.

Also, you'd probably have better luck formatting it as a PS2 HDD using Winhiip, because I know HDLoader can be iffy with formatting.
 
Preface: this was originally several posts, but I decided to conjoin them into 1.


Trying a different card could certainly be a possibility (in fact, I haven't actually checked the LED's to see if the master light came on when inside my comp). As for the formatting, that was done with winhiip to begin with. I'll try some things out and post an update here soonish.

Update: I put my spare CF adapter (without the CF card) onto the PSU berg, but only the activity light lit up.

I then put my CF card into the adapter and plopped it into my comp -- the master light still didn't light up from the time I booted to the time I was forced to set a different boot device (having it as master makes it number 1 in the HDD boot order).

After that point, I began to defrag my CF card and was about to repartition it (this might've been useless now that I look back on it) when I realized something glaringly obvious; I've had the special V12 HDLoader0.8c.elf on my computer, but I don't think I ever bothered to install it. /facepalm

I'm going to go do that now (been forever so don't expect a post right away). I have 2 different versions apparently, so I'll need to see which one is to be used. Wish me luck!

Update 2: I just finished translating some german (turns out the V12 0.8c installation is german), and I'm still getting the same error as before. I get the feeling the .elf doesn't have anything to do with not being able to see the HDD, but I'll go ahead and install this to see if it fixes anything.

Update 3: It's as I thought; changing the .elf didn't have any effect on the HDD being recognized. At this point, the only options I see are to pick up a cheap CF (no money currently) or to try and contact the HDLoader devs to see what they think of all this. I can try to resolder everything, but I'll hold off on that for a week at the very least.

If anyone has any other troubleshooting tips, I'm all ears. This is a pain mostly because we're not even sure if it works to begin with, but if enough time passes and nothing pops up, I'll go ahead and solder a IDE connector on and test a regular HDD to see if the connections are good.

Update 4: I found out why the HDD wasn't being detected last night -- one of the wires had come undone (must've occurred no sooner than I had set things up to test). Unfortunately I'm having a new issue now where HDLoader wants to format the drive and then comes up with a fatal error during formatting

I managed to get the patched HDL provided in this thread by northbear to "format", but when I went to install a game via disc drive, it said the game was too large (my CF is 32GB). I've also tried out OPL, but it didn't detect the Resident Evil 4 iso which I installed via winhiip.

In any case, this is a very, very good sign I believe, and it brings us a heck of a lot closer to CF being a possibility. I'll be looking into getting someone to make a specially patched HDL for me since I have no clue how that's done.

Should the HDL patch fail (assuming someone is nice enough to do it for me), I'll redo the wiring and *possibly* install an IDE connector so a regular HDD can be tested for troubleshooting purposes (last resort).

I'll do my own searching as always (later in the day or tomorrow), but feel free to drop a line.

Update 5: I went back to test things and still no luck. I noticed that northbear's HDL v12 patch only formatted 13GB out of 32GB, and it did it in the toxicos format -- winhiip also detected partition errors and said something about a checksum, but when I clicked to correct it winhiip crashed.

I reformatted the card in both toxicos and HDL 28 bit formats with winhiip and put a game on the CF card, but nothing changed: HDL 0.8c and 0.8c v12 want to reformat while northbear's reformats but doesn't actually work; OPL doesn't detect any games.
 
I went ahead and cut all the wires to the board, leaving little nubs that were sticking up (for voltage testing/easy soldering later on).

After that, I tested the voltages while the PS2 was on and sitting in the browser, but my meter is a little wacky (the readings were jumping around in the MV range without the pins even touching, and they read 0.02 mv when put together).

I seemed to get solid readings when I put my pins on the edge ground and wire nubs to test, but I'd like to ask if someone would be kind enough to test their 700xx and post the results for comparison's sake (didn't find anything on psxscene).

Here are my results (the question marks are wires which were accidentally knocked off when removing the CF adapter and are currently "blocked off"):
x29zd0.jpg
 
This project is going to be put on the back-burner (again) for about a month while I seek a job for moniez and all that good stuff.

I believe I might've screwed myself out of another board as well: I superglued some of the nubs on the board, but accidentally dropped the board, and thus knocked a few nubs out of place. The board still functions, though, and will be useful for other purposes.

In any case, it'd be really awesome if someone could test their 700xx slim IDE contacts and post the results here, and this would surely benefit others as well -- I've not had luck finding this information (if it even exists).
 
It's been 3 months now, and I just thought I'd post an update on what's going on. I've decided not to continue with this project, and there's a few reasons why; between college/work (and getting an xperia play), my level of interest/energy to work on this project has vanished. The noobish design concepts I posted are up for grabs (not as if I had any legal right over them), and of course feel free to leave off where this threaded ended in attempting to create a CF mod.

With that, I bid you guys farewell!

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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