Absolute long shot. Say someone had a PS2 Devkit that booted once and then never again. Is there a perfect tear down and maintenance guide like this with lots of text and pictures that people have had success with before?
My PS2 slim still works (I played Teken Tag Tournament last weekend). Am I lucky? Anyone know the MTBF?
On the other hand, I don't think I've had a DS2 controller last me more than a couple of years, even with light use. I use My dual-shock 1 controllers for any game that is compatible with it, and they are still going strong.
I've seen a few posters ask already, so I figured I'd answer what the PS2 analog button's function was.
The button switches between two modes of the analog joysticks, either to behave with their normal functionality, or to simply be a digital input (so just round all movement to either up/down/left/right). For PS2 games, you typically wouldn't want to do this. Instead, the functionality exists because the PS2 was backwards compatible with PS1 titles. The original PS1 controller didn't have analog sticks at all, just the D-Pad for navigation. After a few years (and the success of Nintendo's N64 analog controller) Sony released a revised version of the controller that included two joysticks, which their controllers still mimic to this day. However, those PS1 games released prior to the analog controller wouldn't always behave correctly if you tried to use an analog input scheme, so Sony added a mode to allow the Joysticks to function the same as the D-Pad, in case players preferred it.
Other fun fact, the analog controller was not the same as their more famous Dualshock controller. There was a short-lived PS1 Dual Analog controller which just added the joysticks. It only lasted a few months before Sony replaced it with one that supported rumble functionality (also after being inspired by the N64), this was the Dualshock.
Does anyone know the best way to get a reliably working PS2 nowadays? I happen to have a bunch of old PS2 games and would love to have a reliable PS2 to be able to use them with. But buying online seems fairly fraught - how do you have any guarantee you get a reliable device? And they seem to be fairly expensive now.
(I couldn't read the article because the site was currently down for me, so apologies if this comment is off-topic, but hopefully relevant!)
Try a gaming store that offers a guarantee? I don't know where you are, but here in the UK, second-hand stores such as Cash Converters are full of PS2s, fat and slim. Dedicated second-hand entertainment stores like CEX will test consoles before buying them off people, and claim to offer a several-months guarantee.
He said in the comments on the post that he valued the parts, units, and his time at about 100 bucks, and put them up for 150, which no one would pay. This was back in 2022ish.
> Unfortunately, nobody wanted to buy these even for a cost that would cover all the expenses spent on this project. On the bright side, I have learned a lot, plus, I have a cool PS2 to play with
I'm not sure if the OP is here, but the other obvious way to cover costs here is to create Youtube videos of the restoration process. I love these (as do lots of other people).
One of my favourites is a power-tool repair technician in Ireland:
> Some controllers are originally painted with a rubber-like cover that, unfortunately, degrades with time and becomes a sticky gooey. I usually deal with it with the help of Methanol. It nicely removes it.
I have some products like that and I despise them. Maybe I should try methanol.
Wonder why they used HDDs and not a CompactFlash card - CF under the hood is IDE in a different form factor, there's passive adapters to IDE, and you can get them new up to 256GB. Or you go with CFast, a SATA adapter or just a straight SATA SSD and then a SATA to IDE adapter. Far more durable than any HDD will ever be.
They're fine for data storage, but CF card controllers for large capacity(16GB and above) had issues with severe stuttering and performance issues in random reads/writes causing OS to become unresponsive for seconds at a time if not BSoDing - no, they were not instantaneous for everything just by being flash based. There were also some problems in some SSDs that the SSDs sometimes take much longer than HDDs to complete its own firmware bootup process, so much so that BIOS might consider the disk broken. Could be those reasons.
Or it could be just that HDDs are still more economical than SSDs. About ~2x cheaper for 2.5" 1TB as of now.
I'm pretty sure that was my old "FHDB Noobie Package" that was installed to the drive using HDD Raw Copy. That thing has had almost 48k downloads. Fun times.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 35.5 ms ] threadhttps://archive.is/vxjmQ
15 hours later, it still is suffering the hug of death.
On the other hand, I don't think I've had a DS2 controller last me more than a couple of years, even with light use. I use My dual-shock 1 controllers for any game that is compatible with it, and they are still going strong.
The button switches between two modes of the analog joysticks, either to behave with their normal functionality, or to simply be a digital input (so just round all movement to either up/down/left/right). For PS2 games, you typically wouldn't want to do this. Instead, the functionality exists because the PS2 was backwards compatible with PS1 titles. The original PS1 controller didn't have analog sticks at all, just the D-Pad for navigation. After a few years (and the success of Nintendo's N64 analog controller) Sony released a revised version of the controller that included two joysticks, which their controllers still mimic to this day. However, those PS1 games released prior to the analog controller wouldn't always behave correctly if you tried to use an analog input scheme, so Sony added a mode to allow the Joysticks to function the same as the D-Pad, in case players preferred it.
Other fun fact, the analog controller was not the same as their more famous Dualshock controller. There was a short-lived PS1 Dual Analog controller which just added the joysticks. It only lasted a few months before Sony replaced it with one that supported rumble functionality (also after being inspired by the N64), this was the Dualshock.
(I couldn't read the article because the site was currently down for me, so apologies if this comment is off-topic, but hopefully relevant!)
Makes me wonder how expensive these were to make.
I'm not sure if the OP is here, but the other obvious way to cover costs here is to create Youtube videos of the restoration process. I love these (as do lots of other people).
One of my favourites is a power-tool repair technician in Ireland:
https://www.youtube.com/@deandohertygreaser
I have some products like that and I despise them. Maybe I should try methanol.
Or it could be just that HDDs are still more economical than SSDs. About ~2x cheaper for 2.5" 1TB as of now.