PlayStation 2 Gets A Seamless Media Center Makeover

July 1, 2022 by Lewin Day 13 Comments

We often see Raspberry Pi boards of various flavors stuck inside vintage computers and the like. [El Gato Guiri] has instead installed one inside a PlayStation 2 Slim, and rather artfully at that. The result is a tidy little media center device.

Pretty tidy, right? All those ports work! Okay, not the memory card slots. But everything else!

The PlayStation 2 was gutted, with a Raspberry Pi 3B installed inside. The original ports on the back, including the USB and Ethernet port, were then wired up to the Pi to make them fully functional. A slot was then cut into the back to allow the HDMI port to be hooked up. The front USB ports work, too, and the optical drive was removed to make way for a 2 TB Toshiba external drive. Adapters are used to make the controller ports work, as well. Finally, a Noctua fan was installed atop the Pi to make sure it never gets too hot.

Whether it’s for watching movies or playing emulated games with the PS2 controllers, the little media center build is sure to do well.

We’ve seen Raspberry Pis stuck in everything from laptops to monitors, as well as plenty of retro hardware too. When a piece of hardware is dead and gone, a Raspberry Pi can be a great way to breathe new life into an attractive old case!

PS5 Goes On Slim-Fast

June 20, 2022 by Matthew Carlson 28 Comments

For the past few decades, most console makers have first come out with a large flagship model, and then a few years later, released a smaller, more compact slim edition. Not content to wait for it, [Matt] at DIY Perks made his own PS5 Slim, and the results are awe-inspiring.

Generally, slim editions are made by lowering the TDP of the chip under the hood. A lower power draw means less cooling is needed, a smaller power supply can be used, and a design that is overall easier to manage. Unfortunately, [Matt] had none of these benefits and instead had to contend with the full 180 W that the AMD CPU inside the PlayStation can draw.

Taking apart the console left him with the main board that was quite thick as it had heat pipes on both sides. His first thought was water cooling as it can rapidly move the heat needed, but even with right-angle fittings, it didn’t fit within the ambitious thickness goal he had set for himself of less than 2 cm (about 3/4″). To do that, [Matt] had to fabricate a copper water block from three sheets of copper. The first one connects to the motherboard via standoffs and has cut-outs for various connectors and parts. The middle layer has a channel through which water can flow, and the last layer seals it together.

With the three layers together, he soldered them in a toaster oven repurposed as a reflow oven. Cleverly, he used silicone grease to prevent solder from getting into areas he didn’t want, like the fins in the CPU block. Luckily, the grease dissolved in alcohol, and after flushing the chamber, he had a solid copper, water-tight, custom loop. However, on his road to glory, [Matt] ran into a snag. He accidentally covered the intake vent on the radiator, and the PS5 overheated, killing it. With a fried mainboard and a project almost on the cusp of completion, he resorted to using the PS5 he had received for B-roll.

Last-minute motherboard swap aside, the final project is gorgeous. The polished exterior and sheer thinness of it are striking. [Matt] has already disguised his PS5 before and after this, we’re not quite sure where he could possibly take it next. But we’re excited to find out.

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Raspberry Pi Pico Replaces PlayStation Memory Card

June 13, 2022 by Tom Nardi 16 Comments

It’s almost hard to believe these days, what with modern game consoles packing terabytes of internal storage, but there was a time when the totality of your gaming career would be stored on an external memory card that held just a few megabytes of save data. Of course, before that you had to write down a sequence of random letters and numbers to pick up where you left off, but that’s a story for another day.

While the memory card concept might be quaint to the modern gamer, its modular nature does provide the hacker with some interesting avenues to explore. For example, take a look at the very impressive PicoMemcard project from [Daniele Giuliani]. Hardware wise, it doesn’t get much simpler than this. You just take the PCB from a cheap (or dead) PlayStation memory card, and solder seven jumpers to the edge connector contacts so you can plug them into the Pico. Then you’ve just got to upload the firmware to the Pico, and you’re done. Continue reading “Raspberry Pi Pico Replaces PlayStation Memory Card” →

PSP Turned Robot Remote With Custom Software

May 24, 2022 by Tom Nardi 2 Comments

There’s no question that Sony’s PlayStation Portable (PSP) was an impressive piece of hardware when it was released in 2004, but for all its technical wizardry, it wasn’t able to shake Nintendo’s vice-like grip on the handheld market. Perhaps that explains why we still see so many nostalgia-fueled hacks for Nintendo’s Game Boy and Dual Screen (DS) systems, while PSP hacks tend to be few and far between.

But looking at projects like this one that turn the PSP into a capable robot controller (video, embedded below) we can’t help but wonder if the community has been missing out. Thanks to an open source software development kit for the system, [iketsj] was able to write a WiFi controller program that can be run on any PSP with a homebrew-compatible firmware.

The other side of the equation is a simple robot powered by an ESP8266. To take control of the bot, the user connects their handheld to the WiFi network being offered by the MCU and fires up the controller application from the main menu. It’s all very slick, and the fact that you don’t need to make any modifications to the PSP’s hardware is a huge plus. From the video after the break we get the impression that the remote software is pretty simplistic in its current form, but we imagine the only really limitations are how good you are at writing C code for what by today’s standards would be considered a fairly resource constrained system. We’d love to see that widescreen display lit up and showing live first-person video from the bot’s perspective.

Many of the PSP hack’s we’ve seen over the years have been about repurposing the hardware, or in some cases, replacing the system’s internals with something raspberry flavored. Those projects have certainly been interesting in their own ways, but we really like the idea of being able to push a largely stock system into a new role just by writing some custom code for it.

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PlayStation 4 Controller Gets A USB-C Upgrade

March 1, 2022 by Lewin Day 22 Comments

Micro USB was once the connector of choice for applications where USB-A was too big, but now USB-C has come to dominate all. It’s becoming standard across the board for many peripherals, and [Ian] recently decided that he wanted to upgrade his PS4 controller to the newer standard. Hacking ensued.

The hack consists of a small breakout board that enables a USB-C connector to be fitted into the PS4 controller in place of the original micro USB port. [Ian] explains what needs to be done to complete the mod, which first involves disassembling the controller carefully to avoid damage. The original microUSB breakout board can then be removed, and fitted with one of a selection of replacement boards available on Github to suit various revisions of PS4 controller. A little filing is then required to allow the new connector to fit in the controller case, and [Ian] notes that using an 0.8mm thick PCB is key to enabling the new breakout board to fit inside the shell.

It’s a neat hack that makes charging PS4 controllers way easier in the modern environment without having to keep legacy micro USB cables around. We’ve actually seen similar hacks done to iPhones, too, among other hardware. Video after the break.

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PS2 Memory Card ISO Loader Offers Classic Gaming Bliss

February 15, 2022 by Tom Nardi 30 Comments

It used to be that to play a console game, you just had to plug in a cartridge or put a CD/DVD in the optical drive. But these days, with modern titles ballooning up to as much as 100 GB, you’ve got no choice but to store them on the system’s internal hard disk drive. While that can lead to some uncomfortable data management decisions, at least it means you don’t have to get up off the couch to switch games anymore.

Which is precisely why the MC2SIO project for the PlayStation 2 is so exciting. As [Tito] explains in his latest
Macho Nacho Productions video, this simple adapter lets you connect an SD card up to the console’s Memory Card slots and use that to hold ISOs of your favorite games. With the appropriate homebrew software loaded up, your PS2 becomes a veritable jukebox of classic games.

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Turning The PS4 Into A Useful Linux Machine

February 10, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 22 Comments

When the PlayStation 3 first launched, one of its most lauded features was its ability to officially run full Linux distributions. This was of course famously and permanently borked by Sony with a software update after a few years, presumably since the console was priced too low to make a profit and Sony didn’t want to indirectly fund server farms made out of relatively inexpensive hardware. Of course a decision like this to keep Linux off a computer system is only going to embolden Linux users to put it on those same systems, and in that same vein this project turns a more modern Playstation 4 into a Kubernetes cluster with the help of the infamous OS.

The Playstation 4’s hardware is a little dated by modern desktop standards but it is still quite capable as a general-purpose computer provided you know the unofficial, unsupported methods of installing Psxitarch Linux on one. This is a distribution based on Arch and built specifically for the PS4, but to get it to run the docker images that [Zhekun Hu] wanted to use some tinkering with the kernel needed to be done. With some help from the Gentoo community a custom kernel was eventually compiled, and after spending some time in what [Zhekun Hu] describes as “Linux Kernel Options Hell” eventually a working configuration was found.

The current cluster is composed of two PS4s running this custom software and runs a number of services including Nginx, Calico, Prometheus, and Grafana. For those with unused PlayStation 4s laying around this might be an option to put them back to work, but it should also be a cautionary tale about the hassles of configuring a Linux kernel from scratch. It can still be done on almost any machine, though, as we saw recently using a 386 and a floppy disk.