D-Lite's mod chip

[SignOfZeta]

Well I installed it. Kinda took a while. Seems to work perfectly. I only have one US HuCard, but all the Japanese stuff still works. I did have some glitchery with Sapphire, but I think the Arcade Card just wasn't seated correctly. I remember having graphical weirdness with that game before.

/HPIM1135.jpg

/HPIM1124.jpg

[nat]

Yeah Sapphire will have graphical garbage if the Arcade Card isn't seated right.

[Turbo D]

Wow, those are some thick ass wires you used! lol. Maybe thats the problem.

[SignOfZeta]

That's 20 gauge, as oposed to D-Lite's recomended 22 gauge. Neither are "thick", in my opinion, and neither are going to cause problems due to their size.

I should clarify that I only had that problem once. I'm certain it was just that the HuCard wasn't seated right.

[PCEngineHell]

Yea,the gauge is fine. Id rather use something along the lines of  a stripped 40 wire ata cable because its easier to work with though. Over all looks really nice. Good job

[termis]

Holy shit, just looking at that starts giving me nightmares of soldering all those damn little wires when I modded my Duo & CoreGrafx.

My soldering skills aren't all that great, so it took awhile to get all those little sunnavoabitches to stay on tight and not pop loose.  And using the IC chip requires even MORE soldering & wires than using the straight 8PDT switch!

[SignOfZeta]

Yeah, but the extra wires are a snap to run.

[Ceti Alpha]

Dang! Nice job Zeta.

[Seldane]

Wow, can you even close the thing up after that? Why did you install it like that?

[SignOfZeta]

What do you mean, "like that"?

Yes, its closed up just fine. Its going to be a bit tougher when I do this to my OG PC Engine though.

[spenoza]

Welp, for the PCE, use thinner, shorter wires 

[Seldane]

"Like that" = not particularly tidy. Looks like wires could come off rather easily. Especially when you close it up.

I would suggest placing the chip onto the board next to the connector and solder short wires to it, like this:

/ps2ec6.jpg

[D-Lite]

Nice works SoZ.  Glad it works nicely for ya.

Couple notes:
- I use the thin wrapping wire you can buy.  I believe it's 30 gauge.
- I may have done the supplying this time, but please remember it's Ben Moran's (grahf) PCB design.  I can only take credit for carrying the torch

[Game-Tech.US]

/ps2ec6.jpg

FM-77 what is that in your pic?

[Seldane]

PS2 modchip installation...Xeno PS. It's a cheap clone of a much more expensive chip, but it works well, so I always use it.

[SignOfZeta]

It may not be very tidy, but I assure you there is no way in hell those wires are coming off. The power wire maybe, but not the ones at the chip, the switch, or the HuCard slot. They are the strongest welds on this Duo right now.

BTW, thanks for the vote for this PS2 mode chip. I've been shopping around for one lately and don't know what to get. Am I going to be able to load games from an HD with this? I need auto detection of all media and also all region DVD support.

[Seldane]

Xeno PS is great. It's a clone of Matrix Infinity (the best chip on the market) and it has the exact same features as it. I've installed this in all my PS2s, and my friend's systems. It's very reliable and of high quality.

And yeah, it does everything you wanted (auto detects all media and completely ignores DVD movie region protection, it also supports pirated DVD movies). Including more (feature list here). It even lets your console output VGA, so you can connect it to a monitor or HDTV for full 480p support. But you'll need a seperate VGA cable for that, of course.

What PS2 model do you have? Slim or phat? In any case, you can load games off a hard drive with a slim model but you're going to need to use an external USB drive with USB Advance. Compatibility is rather low for that, though.

If you have a phat PS2, you'll be able to play pretty much anything off a standard IDE drive with HD Loader. It's awesome. I use it almost exclusively.

http://sksapps.com/index.php?page=hd.html

Get all the HD Loader and USB Advance files here.

[SignOfZeta]

I have an original PS2. Fat. Very fat. Very ugly. I hate this machine, but I love many of the games on it.

So where is the best place to actually buy one of these?

[Seldane]

Modchips are becoming somewhat hard to come by now that Divineo (previously the world's biggest retailer) has stopped selling them, but this store has some expensive chips, no clones...

http://www.modchip.ca/store/home.php?cat=268

I've bought from them personally. A very very professional and serious business (they even called me from across the globe just to ask me something).