Hi I'm Ginger, and this is the PS2 Eclipse.
But you can't be here yet. You need to head back to 2018 to see where this all began.
This tale begins with a spur of the moment purchase of a ps2 setup off of eBay. I was hot
off the heels of my first portable wii disaster, and was considering making the ps2 my next victim.
I'd never owned or even played a ps2 but it had a few games i was interested in.
When the console arrived I did a bit of research into the process and then, like all good hobbyists,
put the project on a shelf. For three years before seeing it again and deciding that I
should really just do something with it. Now that the awkward guilt of an unfinished project has
set in the first step here is to get this ps2 motherboard shrunk down as much as possible
this means violence as this board isn't going to get any smaller without cutting parts of it off
i would still like to keep this board alive though so i need to figure out what's actually
safe to cut and just like in all things the easiest way to figure something out
just let someone smarter than you figure it out first in this instance that person is g-man a
long-time portablizer who back in 2017 declared a ruthless war against the secrets of the ps2 and
came out of that conflict as the clear victor from his efforts came the definitive ps2 trimming guide
a document which covers trim lines and wiring points on certain ps2 slim models so now that
i'm armed with this knowledge a ps2 motherboard a dremel and the necessary safety equipment it's
time to actually cut this big guy up now i'm a pretty seasoned veteran of the console trimming
sport i've built 50 portable wiis in just two years and i've dominated the coming in second
place category in many of the portable building contests i've entered so trimming this piece of
cake yeah i botched the trim the dremel bounced hit this thing and the board doesn't boot anymore
blood for the blood god so back and i went with a new ps2 board but this time the cutting
process went smoothly leaving me with this board that still boots after being trimmed
with this success it's time to begin work on the housing of the system
even though the ps2 board is trimmed it's still the largest thing i'll have to design around
so i picked a screen with similar dimensions to help decide the shape of the overall case
i actually started a design that uses this screen last year
so i tracked down those cad files and decided to use them as a base point for this project
from there i've worked to select components that fit inside the rough shell and slowly fleshed out
the inside while doing periodic test prints to make sure i'm still on the right track once i had
a design i was happy with i fired up my printer and tried to do the final print the front half
turned out great but these grips on the back make it so i can't get a print that leaves both sides
of this piece looking clean since my own printer isn't up to the task i've gone ahead and ordered
the back from a company with a fancy enough printer to do it justice while working on the case
i also adapted some open source designs from gman into five custom circuit boards i'll break these
down pretty quickly as i understand that this part isn't super interesting for most people
with time starting now this board houses the ps2 controller emulator this board has some controller
buttons and all the necessary circuitry to handle converting the raw sound signals from the ps2 and
audible sound through speakers or a headphone jack these boards have a few more peripherals for the
ps2 controller headphone jack and extra buttons for controlling other assemblies in the portable
and this final board handles the storage for ps2 games as well as usbc fast charging and all
these boards are manufactured by pcbway who's been generous enough to be the sponsor of today's video
pcb way is a great circuit board manufacturer whose products i've used for several years
their boards are high quality price as low as 5 bucks for 10 boards and come in many different
colors so you can almost always get your boards to match the rest of your project and i know that
for many of you custom circuit boards might be a bit outside your interest range but how would you
feel about getting something 3d printed maybe even in all clear i've been trying to find a place that
can do good transparent prints at a reasonable price for years and pcbway has finally delivered
if you've got a project that you'd love to have in clear or even just something dumb like a prop for
a dnd game then plug your stl file into their 3d printing page and place an order with these
settings so thanks again to pcbway for sponsoring this video and manufacturing all of these great
boards for me oh ah not this though this is just the board from a ps2 memory card but it's
an important memory card as this is what allows the system to run games without the disk drive
on this memory card is a program called free mcboot which allows homebrew programs to be run
on a ps2 including ones that let you run games off of the usb drive rather than the disk drive
i've gotten a lot of what i'll call constructive feedback on my portables that run games from usb
rather than the disk drive so i'll quickly explain why i have to do this
the first reason is because this entire portable is smaller than a disk let alone a disk drive
and i think i'd prefer to supersize my fast food orders rather than my portables the second reason
is that a disk drive uses up a lot of power like as much power as a ps2 motherboard does on its own
the goal here is to make a system that's as small and efficient as possible and a disk
drive will do nothing but hold you up in those regards which is why you won't find any modern
portables that accommodate them last ingredient to this ps2 soup is the ps2 pms a gman board i
bought which handles all the voltage regulation and charging stuff needed for the system to run
i've got to let my soup simmer for a while so i'll take this time while i wait to do
a paint job i've decided to paint it completely black because i don't own any black portables
and i can only get these ps vita buttons in black in order to prep the case for painting
i'll first wet sand the outside of the shell with rough sandpaper and then move to smoother
and smoother grits to make the finish as clean as possible once it's completely even i'll hit
it with a coat of primer followed by a couple coats of metallic black paint and finally a
smearing of clear coat to help keep the paint from fading away with this color scheme in mind
i've decided to name the project the ps2 eclipse because that sounds edgy and cool much like myself
so with everything all laid out i went ahead and proceeded with a final assembly
this process went perfectly there were zero issues i did not have to troubleshoot various dumb
things for days and at the end of all that not troubleshooting i finally have a working system
it's time to close it up and show off what it can do and who could have guessed it plays ps2 games
although it turns out there's no mario games for the ps2 so
the portable actually plays these ps2 games at full speed because that's the whole point of
using the original motherboard in here there's no emulation here only perfect compatibility
and the screams of the damned i've started a playthrough of kingdom hearts on here and this
game sucks but the portable is doing a great job of running it the audio system in the portable is
fantastic with full digital audio the two speakers on the front and the headphone jack on the bottom
the bottom also has buttons for controlling the volume and the settings of the screen
moving to the back of the portable we've got two air vents to prevent it from melting into
a pile of goo as well as two thicker grips to help make the console more comfortable to hold
on the top there's an led to indicate the battery level of the system as well as a usb-c port
for charging and data transfer by plugging the portable into my pc i can use it as the world's
most over engineered usb drive or i can just add new games in homebrew to the internal memory
there's a variety of homebrew softwares i've been experimenting with including
emulators for other consoles so once i played through all 4000 ps2 games i can rest assured
knowing that the portable can still play super mario world
and lastly the portable gets about two and a half hours of battery life which isn't anything crazy
but it's enough time to work through most of the bizarre plot of super monkey ball
now this all looks great but is the project really perfect yes you [ __ ] never speak to me again but
if there were a few things that could be critiqued then i guess i would start with the loading times
usb loading is the most convenient method because of how simple it is literally just four wires but
it does come at the cost of slower load times and occasional jittery cutscenes this is just because
the ps2 uses usb 1.1 which is a usb protocol that's older than i am i'm not bothered too much
as i've never experienced the normal load times on most of these games and i'm the kind of guy
to skip any cutscene i can but the slowdowns can be particularly brutal on some titles
an issue that's bugged me quite a bit more is the fact that the controller doesn't get recognized on
quite a few games it's not a permanent issue as i'm sure someone will eventually take the
time to figure out why this happens and release a fix for the code for now though if there are
any of your favorite ps2 games that you haven't seen featured yet it's probably because trying
to play it resulted in a screen that looks like this and one minor thing i'll address
the switch joysticks as they are notorious for drifting i'm well aware of the issues
that these sticks have but i honestly have yet to wear out the sticks on any of my portables
and even if it happened i'd much rather open it up to swap out the joysticks once every six months
rather than trying to design a portable around these beasts and finally to answer the question
i'm sure many of you have commented without watching the entire video how much to buy one of
these from me one million dollars this is because i'm tired of taking commissions on portables
i've done 50 of them in just two years and while i'm thankful for the opportunity i've had to do
this for a living building that many portables to order is just miserable so starting now i'm
going to try to make the switch to making a living off of doing videos over new projects rather than
being a portable producing robot i will probably still do some sales on some portables for a bit
but these will be ones that i choose the theme and design of myself and only put up for sale once
they're completed if you'd like more information on what the portable buying process is like then
feel free to check out my website gingerofmods.com which covers the process in detail
there's also a page on there that will point you to resources to help you get started on
your own portable projects if you'd like to support me my content endeavors then thank you
the best way to do that is just by subscribing because that helps get my videos in front of
more eyes and draws the interest of potential sponsors and if you're rich then i've also
got a patreon with the discord server where i post updates and ideas about upcoming projects
and i think that's all i've got my next project is going to center around the gamecube i've got a few
ideas it should be really cool once it's finished thanks for watching i'll see you again soon
um yeah looks like art to me