I’ve slowly been working on doing a bunch of upgrades to my console video game space. In some cases it involves elaborate changes to how things work with a particular system. I upgraded my PS2 to run from a hard drive, for example. I’ve modified my PS Mini to run more than just the base set of ROMS. I have an extra Wii I plan to try to jailbreak as well. I’ve looked into getting an Everdrive style cartridge for my N64, though those are kind of weirdly expensive.
Not everything is about playing more games though, sometimes it’s just a quality-of-life upgrade.
Like running everything over HDMI. This was somewhat born from necessity. Maybe a year or less ago, I upgraded the TV in the basement. I had been using a decent but somewhat aging RCA TV for a while. We go to a lot of Estate Sales in the area, and at one, I picked up a really nice Sony for pretty cheap. It’s slightly larger than the RCA, has a nice picture, and has more inputs. Except a lot of those inputs are HDMI. I don’t think it has any Component hookups at all, though I do think it has Composite. Over the last few months, I’ve been buying all of these cables, along with a small HDMI switch, because, I ran out of ports.
As the set up is now, I have:
A standard X-Box 360.
A modded PS2.
A modded PS Mini
A normal Dreamcast, I may or may not look into modding this
A normal N64, which I may get an Everdrive cart for
A normal SNES, which I still need to get an HDMI cable for
A normal Wii, my original Wii, the CD drive doesn’t work in it though.
I’m tempted to get a second HDMI switch, but if the Wii hacking works out I won’t need it. I can skip the SNES cable. I’ve got a Sega Genesis I wouldn’t mind connecting though. Also, with more hookups I could bring the PS3 down from the upstairs TV if I wanted to. I’m also considering getting one of those updated Atari consoles that run the old carts as well as ROMs, though I have plenty of Atari carts already.
I’m not finished getting things updated, but as far as cables go, I’m pretty close,
I always kind of debate on whether project posts like this should go here or on Blogging Intensifies. On one hand, it’s a Video Game related post and project. On the other hand, It’s also kind of an electronics and technology-based project. This one, ended up here.
One of my “on the list” projects has been to upgrade some of my old consoles. Two specifically, at least initially, are the PS2, and the Wii. The Playstation 2 was always a favorite of mine, though considering how much it sold it was probably a lot of people’s favorite. I played mine the most during my time at college. I always liked to joke about how I had put 100+ hours each mastering Grand Theft Auto 3, Final Fantasy X, and Metal Gear Solid 2, then upgraded all of those for another 100+ hours each mastering GTA Vice City, Final Fantasy X-2, and Metal Gear Solid 3.
I have, somehow, ended up with several Wiis. Though my original Wii had the CD drive go out on it. Funny enough, I also have several fat PS2s, though I have only have ever really used my original one. Having spares means screw-ups are more acceptable.
Anyway, the first of these upgrade projects I have decided to do is my PS2. The plan for the PS2 was to add a Hard Drive to it and load games that way. A hard drive has the benefit of, being less prone to failure (see also, the Wii’s CD drive) and being faster for loading games. I did some research on this and came across this video:
Which I decided to go with. A friend of mine suggested a slightly altered route, modding an official PS2 drive adapter to take a SATA drive, but I decided to just go with a 3rd party one built for a SATA drive. The main difference is the 3rd party ones, don’t have a network adapter. I really have, no real interest in putting my PS2 online. If I change my mind, I can always swap it out later. These devices are pretty cheap. I expected to pay a lot because the only comparable I have is when I have priced out Dreamcast network adaptors, which are super hard to find and and always go for a LOT.
Too bad there isn’t a cheap 3rd party option there.
There are some drive compatibility lists, but I have a bunch of old smaller drives floating around, so I decided to just wing it and hope for the best on that front. So the upfront cost was just the 3rd party SATA hook-up and the memory card with the loader on it.
I will probably also eventually pick up another larger memory card later, for save games.
Buying the stuff was the easy part.
Getting it working was a bit trickier. There aren’t really any instructions for any of this included, so a lot of it comes down to looking for guides online, which are often inconsistent with each other, sometimes old and outdated, sometimes referencing different overall techniques, which are not always cross-compatible. The first step was making sure the drive would work. I decided to use one of the spare PS2s and not my original, for a few reasons. One, my original is model 30001, and both of the others are model 50001. The Amazon page for the drive adaptor I used, implied the included memory card loader would not work for a 30001 model (it was wrong, more later). I also figure if I break something, it may as well be one of the spares.
Now, a little history on these spares. A while back, I tried to set up a way to play PS2 games on a PS2 and maybe do some streaming. I didn’t manage to accomplish this because each of the three gave me different trouble, though I forget exactly what that trouble was. One I believe doesn’t power on at all, I want to say one didn’t output video. The PS2 I chose to do my testing, it turns out, the front panel doesn’t work. It didn’t recognize the memory card or the controller. So that PS2 was not going to work for this.
These two spare PS2s, I bought them something like 15 years ago from a garage sale, I want to say $10 for the pair. I remember the seller said her son had had them when he was deployed over in Iraq or Afghanistan or something. One of them, on the top, has “Don’t touch or die” written on it. I could always paint this up or get a decal or something, but for now, I didn’t want to use that one, so I just used my OG 30001 model PS2.
Also, the other spare is still slightly buried in a tote, and I didn’t want to dig it out.
Fortunately, the Amazon listing was wrong, the loader worked fine. I poked around in the menu and managed to format the drive.
Now it was time to load some games.
Which ended up being the hard part.
There are several options for loading games, I don’t entirely get the difference beyond, “PS2 uses a screwy Hard Drive Format.”. I decided to start with Winhiip, which was the first one I came across as a suggestion, even though it is apparently considered “out of date”. All of these processes are basically “out of date”, and presumably worked at some point for someone. My thoughts were, this is a 20-year-old console, how out of date could it be, and this one lets me bulk load ISOs. I loaded a subset, of games, then hooked everything up to make sure it was working. A few short minutes later, I was in a game, running off the hard drive, everything was working fine.
I pulled the drive back out to finish loading everything else. The loading was a little slow because I was loading the ISO files from one PC, off of a network share on another PC.
With everything loaded, I went through the process of getting artwork for everything and loading it to a USB drive, then hooked everything back up.
Except, now it was not working. The drive did not even show up at all. I returned it to my PC and it didn’t show up there at all either. A lot of these drives I have lying around are old and second-hand, and generally too small to be really useful. They are slightly prone to failure. After some frustration, I gave up and started over with a fresh drive. This time I used HDL Dump instead of Winhiip, because it’s supposed to be more reliable. I noticed it adds a bit more data to each entry as well. The downside is, It only works, one ISO at a time. I found a bulk loader someone had made, but for some reason, the drive doesn’t show in the bulk loader scan.
I also connected my USB SATA adapter to the remote PC directly to avoid the slowness added by the network transfer. It also had a lot more free hard drive space to dump a pile of ISO files into. After several days of running one game at a time, I finally had everything loaded… Again…
This time, it loads up just fine in the PS2, except for one oversight on my part. HDL Dump had this box where you could fill in a name. Sometimes it automatically filled in, others it did not. I mostly just, ignored it. Which means many of the games have meaningless names now on the PS2. There is a mechanism to edit and update it natively, thankfully, but I don’t know which game is what without actually loading it up. Which means loading the game, waiting through several opening bumpers, making a note, resetting the PS2, then entering the name with a tedious on-screen keyboard. I strongly recommend filling int he name box on the PC as the games are loaded.
Very strongly.
I also have all these art assets downloaded to add but it’s not clear where they go because the system seems to have several different launchers and I can’t decipher which one uses them. Frankly, a list of names works just fine for now, I’m not even sure just how much I’m going to use this whole set up in the long term. I do want to explore options again for doing video capture again, I think part of my issue before is that I was using some really old capture devices and composite video. I really need to just invest in something that takes Component and/or HDMI input.
Another device I’ve been wanting to get for a while was a Game Boy Card ripper. There are a few varieties of these, but I went with the Benn Venn Joey Jr. The key feature here, is the ability to copy off Saved files. I can get ROMs anywhere, what I really want is to preserve my old Save Files. This device does Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advanced titles.
The most important title worked right off the bat. My original Pokemon Blue is not preserved forever with my original Charizard. There are ways to get these OG Gen 1 Pokemon into modern games I really want to look into next.
Despite that so far I have had hit and miss luck getting things to work, I already wish I had one for the SNES, though those seem to be considerably more expensive. N64 would be nice as well, I’m less worried about my NES carts, most of them don’t really use battery based saves, and I can beat Zelda 1 again in a few hours.
The Benn Venn device is pretty slick. You insert the cartridge, then plug it into a USB Port, and it just shows up like it’s a flash drive. The results have been weirdly hit and miss. Maybe half of my games copied off and the save files loaded no problems. The other half either didn’t get a working save or didn’t even get a working ROM. Two I really care about that did not work that I want to troubleshoot through are Final Fantasy Legend 1, and Zelda Oracle of Ages. The weird thing is, Oracle of Seasons worked just fine.
I even tried some other ROMs of the same game with the save files and no luck yet.
Once the copies are done though, the device still has some fun uses. For one, it lets me dump photos off of my Game Boy Camera. I always have been looking a bit into ways to “hack” the GB Camera with lenses and such, but getting the files off is one important key need. I also want to see if I can write a program that will upscale the files cleanly as they are very tiny images.
I also want to try out what happens when I try to copy TO a cart. It may go immediately nowhere. I don’t have a blank ROM cart, which I will probably get eventually, but I want to try copying to a cart. I have two carts to test. One, I own an extra Pokemon Blue. Maybe I can hack a full Pokedex into the cart. I also have a bootleg Pokemon Emerald, which feels maybe more likely to work.
Either way, something I want to look into is hacking these save files a bit. I want to get my Charizard into my copy of Ultra Moon. I want to add in all the missing Pokemon from Blue. Though maybe not straight add them, try to transplant from a Red save to a Blue save maybe. Maybe these ideas will go nowhere but trying to make it work is like half the fun.
So, I’ve been pretty heavy on the programming push lately, but it’s not all I’ve been up to. So, back around the start of the pandemic, I started work making a PiGrrl handheld emulator device. PiGrrl is basically a Game Boy Clone that runs with a Raspberry Pi at it’s core. I ordered a bunch of parts and a case, I already had a Pi (I have several), and then the Pandemic caused my parts to take forever to arrive. Plus I probably spent more on it than I really should have.
Then I got a little bored and it sat for a bit, but I did eventually solder everything together, and it didn’t quite work, so I did some corrections and got bored of it for a few months again, then eventually, I got it working. Sort of, some emulators work, others don’t even launch, I am sure it’s a software issue a this point.
So, after a bit more trouble shooting, I got a little bonus at work like I occasionally do, so I just ordered a Retroid Pocket 3. A nice pre built solution that’s configured and well, just works. I mostly play gaming on PC, but for consoles, most of my playing in the last 20 years has been on handhelds. I am pretty sure I actually played and finished almost every DS game I have bought (including GBA), and the completion rate for my 3DS games is also very high. The point is, my follow through rate for hand held games is staggeringly high compared to PC and traditional Consoles. I mean, I bought my PS3 and it came with The Last of Us, which I was excited for, and I still have yet to play it even once.
Anyway, the Retroid Pocket is essentially an Android device with a controller and case wrapped around it to make it look like a PSP or a Switch. I considered the Retroid Pocket 2+ but I wanted the wider screen, so I went with the Retroid Pocket 3. So far, my experience with it has been pretty excellent.
There is a bit of trickiness in tracking down the BIOS files needed but there are guides and resources out there. Anything older than say, the SNES/Genesis era plays flawlessly with ease. Which is pretty expected, since it’s all basic 2D gaming at that point. I’ve had a lot of luck running PS1 and PSP titles as well.
Nintendo 64 games are a little touchy but there are some settings that I believe I can adjust to make it work better. Right now everything has screwy transparency. There are options for some more powerful systems but I’ve not had luck yet getting things like PS2 working. I’ve played several WiiWare games but the Wii itself has the motion controls which don’t translate super well to a handheld device’s controls.
Overall, I am extremely happy with this purchase, it’s really invigorated my interest in older games and gaming again.
In a little over a day, the 3DS eShop is closing for good. I thought this had already happened around 9 months ago, but at that point they just removed the ability to add funds directly on the device. Funds can still be added through the website, though it’s a bit of a hassle and it has to be done with certain denominations instead of exact values.
I guess I am a bit spoiled by PC gaming, it seems really annoying that the shop is just, closing. I mean, I’ve had the same Steam account for 18+ years. The copy of Half Life I have on Steam predates that too. Nintendo has always had this weird relationship with accounts. They used to use those obtuse Friend Codes, which were different on a cart by cart basis even.
I mean, ideally, games I purchased on my Wii would work on the DS or 3DS or the Switch, but that’s not the case at all.
The 3DS holds a special place for me, it’s kind of the last “console” device I really used regularly. I guess I have my Retroid handheld now, but it’s technically different. I still have games I want to play on this device though, I’ve even replaced the battery, and bought a spare for the future. I also replaced the power board in it shortly after I first got the thing because it got wet and shorted things out. There still a single dead pixel on the screen where it got water on the screen, though that water dried up over a month or so.
Nintendo doesn’t really ever discount first party games though, so I’m fine with eventually tracking down physical carts for a lot of these games. Back when they removed the ability to pay on the device, I collected up a few digital titles that were on sale. This round, I picked up a few more marked down games. Capcom had a sale on the Phoenix Wright games for almost nothing, so I threw some money at those. I also decided to go ahead and get Pokemon Crystal, though it wasn’t marked down. I have Silver and Pokemon Yellow on there, but I’ve not played Crystal ever in any form, and it’s the “3rd game” which usually means it’s the better one.
For my final round of 3DS digital games, I picked up:
Phoenix Wright Spirit of Justice
Phoenix Wright Dual Destinies
Phoenix Wright Apollo Justice
Gurumin 3D – An interesting looking 3D platform game
Pokemon Dream Radar – A 3DS exclusive game where you can catch a few legendary Pokemon
80s Overdrive – A Retro style racing game in the vein of Outrun
The End of the 3DS eShop
In a little over a day, the 3DS eShop is closing for good. I thought this had already happened around 9 months ago, but at that point they just removed the ability to add funds directly on the device. Funds can still be added through the website, though it’s a bit of a hassle and it has to be done with certain denominations instead of exact values.
I guess I am a bit spoiled by PC gaming, it seems really annoying that the shop is just, closing. I mean, I’ve had the same Steam account for 18+ years. The copy of Half Life I have on Steam predates that too. Nintendo has always had this weird relationship with accounts. They used to use those obtuse Friend Codes, which were different on a cart by cart basis even.
I mean, ideally, games I purchased on my Wii would work on the DS or 3DS or the Switch, but that’s not the case at all.
The 3DS holds a special place for me, it’s kind of the last “console” device I really used regularly. I guess I have my Retroid handheld now, but it’s technically different. I still have games I want to play on this device though, I’ve even replaced the battery, and bought a spare for the future. I also replaced the power board in it shortly after I first got the thing because it got wet and shorted things out. There still a single dead pixel on the screen where it got water on the screen, though that water dried up over a month or so.
Nintendo doesn’t really ever discount first party games though, so I’m fine with eventually tracking down physical carts for a lot of these games. Back when they removed the ability to pay on the device, I collected up a few digital titles that were on sale. This round, I picked up a few more marked down games. Capcom had a sale on the Phoenix Wright games for almost nothing, so I threw some money at those. I also decided to go ahead and get Pokemon Crystal, though it wasn’t marked down. I have Silver and Pokemon Yellow on there, but I’ve not played Crystal ever in any form, and it’s the “3rd game” which usually means it’s the better one.
For my final round of 3DS digital games, I picked up: