Modder creates portable PlayStation 2 masterpiece for retro gaming glory

If there’s one thing we love, it’s watching New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick staring in disbelief at a reporter after being asked a stupid question. And if there is a second thing we love is a good old school retro game mod. We’ll have plenty of chances to see an annoyed Belichick answer questions in the coming weeks, but for the latter a huge hat tip goes to GingerOfOz for his PS2 Eclipse project.

What exactly is the Eclipse PS2? It’s a new console. Wait, it’s a old woman console, and in particular the legendary Sony PlayStation 2, but in new digs. Yes, you’re going to want to buy this thing with your hard earned money, and no, it’s not for sale. But depending on your skills and desires, you can create one yourself, just like GingerOfOz did.

For those unfamiliar with the ambitious modder, he makes a living selling custom handheld gaming systems. He’s also pretty tired of work, having built 50 of them over the past two years, so he’s turning to videos about neat and interesting projects. And boy, he delivers with his first video in almost a year. Check it out …

What he did was take a real PlayStation 2 motherboard and then shrink it down to a size better suited to a handheld designed in the vein of a Nintendo Switch console, with a screen in the middle and controllers. on both sides. Turns out, someone else took the legwork out of exactly where it’s safe to physically slice and slice a PS2 card while maintaining functionality, and they followed their plan.

Anyway, GingerOfOz destroyed his board on the first try, the result of Dremel slipping too much and scratching one of the tokens. Whoops! His next attempt was successful, however, and then it was a matter of inserting it into a custom case and getting all the necessary parts to work as intended.

The result is one hell of an impressive project. It has working controllers with buttons swapped out from a PlayStation Vita, a built-in speaker that it says sounds great, a headphone jack, and even a battery life indicator. To that end, it says it works for about 2.5 hours per charge. When it runs out of juice, it can recharge it via USB-C.

Based on a real PS2 motherboard, GingerOfOz can skip the emulation route and run a catalog of some 4000 PS2 games with the same performance as the original console. Or almost, in some cases, the USB connection powering the games can make cut scenes nervous. But they do work and are displayed on a 5 inch screen with 480p resolution (4: 3 aspect ratio) in all their retro glory.

It was a labor of love that took a long time from conception to completion, and he’s understandably “a little exhausted right now.” We’re glad he finished the project, as this is one of the best retro gaming mods we’ve ever seen. Well done, GingerOfOz!

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