Back in the day, I may have had a modchipped PS2. I wanted to add a PS2 to my collection that has the ability to boot from additional media as well as DVDs. Kind of blows my mind that you can buy them on Amazon these days… let’s take the top off and see how it looks in there.
So far, so good! A lot of dust but no nasty surprises. Let’s put the top back on, then flip it over and remove the bottom part of the shell as well as the controller sockets.
The board looks good – near mint, actually! The PSU also checks out: no bulging caps, corrosion or other nastiness.
We’re going to be doing two things to this PS2: adding a modchip, and then adding a Retro GEM for native HDMI out. Here’s the modchip:
We need to do some fiddly fine soldering now. You can check the steps here for the overview. Here are some in-progress shots:
That’s three wires on the pins on the left there. Not too difficult if you have a fine soldering tip, a microscope, a steady hand, and patience.
There’s more, but it’s nowhere near as bad as that first chip shot. It does get a bit unwieldy though.
Once the chip is in, we very professionally reassemble the unit and test it out with completely legit copies of games. Honest.
We’ll be testing the initial work using an OSSC to handle the composite video, then feed out via HDMI to my PC’s capture card.
As you can see, the totally legit copy of MGS2 works! Now for the GEM.
Here’s a before and after of the CXM4000R chip that handles the video out.
Note the Kapton tape under the flex, to stop the pads from the removed components shorting out. (A couple of resistors? caps? one of each? are removed as part of the install.)
Not my best wire work, but you know what? I don’t care. It works. Let’s take a look at the GEM itself. Gorgeous bit of kit:
Let’s get that GEM flex routed properly and then get the bottom part of the shell back on.
Time for a self-test on the GEM to see what we get…
Yay! All of the modchip functions work as planned. Success!
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