In today’s news about DIY console building and modding, an enthusiast recently posted the fruit of their labour on GitHub: a custom PlayStation 2 (PS2) gaming handheld, built from the ground up.
Before you start lambasting the effort, allow us to point out the main points. Firstly, the PlayStation 2 handheld was made from scratch and runs on original Sony chips. This is not running on an emulation engine.
Second, tschicki, the modder’s name, says they reverse-engineered the handheld’s board from a PS2 mainboard, recycling and salvaging six ICs from SCPH-7900x and SCPH-9000x mainboards. In total, they took around four years to get a working model; they started the project back in 2022.
Perhaps the only part of the PlayStation 2 tschicki isn’t retaining is the use of the DVDs, for obvious reasons. With no optical drive, they’re running OS via a PS2 homebrew through a custom boot ROM, which then loads up games through OPL or HDDL. That said, games are stored on an SD card, through a custom “uSD2PSX” card.
As for the rest of the PlayStation 2 handheld, tschicki also custom-made the console’s 5-inch display, which is an LCD panel with a resolution of 480×800 pixels. For the joysticks and the rest of the buttons, it’s clear that they are using analog sticks similar to those on the Nintendo Switch. Oh, and if it wasn’t already obvious, they’ve opted for the asymmetrical Xbox controller layout, rather than the symmetrical layout of the Dual Sense.
Again, tschicki has released the public files available on Github, but be warned: this is far from an easy build, with the creator warning that if you attempt to build it, the modder will require strong electronics, soldering, troubleshooting, and programming skills.
And as we alluded to at the start of this report, there are plenty of projects where modders have created portable versions of older consoles. One modder made a portable PS4 handheld, while another modder shrunk the original PS1’s PCB even further from its original size.
(Source: Github, Videocardz)
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