PS2 Gets The Ginger Portable Treatment

The first thing we notice about this portable PS2 is that the plastic looks like a consumer-grade shell, not a 3D printed case. It comes from [GingerOfOz], who has lots of portable conversions under his belt, so we are not surprised this looks like a genuine Sony device. When you are as experienced as he, details like plastic texture, and button selection, are solved problems, but shouldn’t be taken for granted by us mortals.

Of course, this isn’t just pretty, and if it weren’t functional, we wouldn’t be talking about it. The system plays nearly all PS2 titles from USB memory. The notable exceptions are the ones that refuse to load without a Dualshock controller. Rude. If you’re wondering if it plays games at full speed, yes. It achieves authentic speed because it uses a PS2 slim motherboard which gets cut down by a Dremel. Custom PCBs provide the rest of the hardware, like volume buttons and battery charging. There is no optical drive since they are power hogs, so your cinematic cut scenes may lag, and load times are a little longer.

Modern mobile phones are one of the most powerful gaming systems ever built, but there is something about purpose-built portable gaming hardware that just feels right. You know?

Thank you for the tip, [Sven].

14 thoughts on “PS2 Gets The Ginger Portable Treatment

    1. …. You are on hackaday … Not on like “don’t do it it seems pretty hard there are easier ways.com”
      Dude definitely knows about emulators and does it precisely because it’s hard. Everyone over on bitbuild are amazing engineers and hackers who use these projects to learn more about the hardware they love.

      Emulators are possible because some idiot decided to find out how the instructions for these consoles work and I’m sure his friends probably said “why are you doing this ps2s are ubiquitous”

      I guess what I’m getting at is, yes there are simpler ways to reach a goal but most times it’s about learning not playing PS2 on your phone.

    1. If it follows the usual track that these do, its driven by a composite video signal tapped out of whatever traces were going to the AV port on the back of the PS2 before it was literally hacked apart.

      1. I’m not sure for this specific implementation, but the ps2 also natively has component and analog rgb so it’d just be a matter of finding a small screen with those inputs.

    2. The other answers are wrong. It’s not composite. It uses VGA. The H and V sync pins are not accessable through the connector, but are generated and accessable through solder able points on the board. More details are in Gman’s PS2 trimming guide.

  1. Lol, at 46 seconds and check his search history (not suggestions, his history)

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    how does no one else like mario like i do
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