Pretty self explanatory. A thread for posting any and all love for PlayStation 2.
I was cleaning up mine a minute ago, scrubbing some of the weird marks that have occurred over time with a magic eraser and generally wiping it down and cleaning the dust away, and it occurred to me that my PS2 setup is not at all "typical" what one would normally think of in retrospect. I've got quite a lot of modern aftermarket stuff going on for it that one would never remember from their childhoods, and I thought it was amusing enough to start this thread.
The heart of the setup is of course a good old fat PS2. Nothing technically "special" about it, just an old piece of crap I got off Ebay about a year ago, never taken it apart, and I'm terrified of the mountain of dust I'm likely to find within. But she's still kicking for now and still reads discs, and that's all that really matters. The console itself is not noteworthy, though it's covered in stupid stickers I've put all over it.
Where it really gets interesting is basically everything else connected to it, minus the power cable, which is just the generic factory one that came with it. It's running an HDMI adapter rather than RGB cables, though for the games I've played, it's not really a "night and day" difference, but it does make visuals a little nicer, I guess. Really just allows it to plug into more modern devices that don't have RGB at all, just HDMI as has been the standard forever and ever now.
The controllers that I use for it are also not typical, instead being el cheapo third parties I love for their form factor, even if they're incredibly fragile and generally not well made (quality control varies a LOT on them). One thing I do love about them is the L2 and R2 buttons are shaped rather like an Xbox 360 controller that the whole thing generally emulates the form factor of (even the Analog button is a fake menu button), and what's great is inside the controller, they're normally just hooked by very thin metal tab things that are supposed to provide resistance, and make the buttons push back outward, further mimicking Xbox triggers, but kind of shittier and not great to use - if you take the controller apart and put it back together, you can just leave them unhooked so they sit right up against the pads inside, and so the trigger press is super light like that of any other button, plus the shape of the buttons themselves makes them very ergonomic, and generally, this is incredibly conducive to things like drag racing in Need For Speed, making really precise shifts, or things like rapidly switching weapons in GTA. Not the world's greatest controller at all, and I acknowledge that, but they're just what I use anyway. They're super cheap.
And then on top of it all, even the memory cards I use are not quite normal for what one might think back on and remember, because they're third party 64MB cards, which I have a bunch of for some reason (only a few are shown here). Even the one in the PS2 itself is actually one of those 64MB cards, despite appearing to be a PS1 memory card - that's just the shell, but it's been internally swapped for the guts of one of the upgraded third party cards, and is not at all what it appears to be.
Not that the monitor or the sound bar are necessarily part of the PS2, but one probably doesn't remember using these as a kid back in the day. Besides the HDMI adapter, the games look a lot better than they ever did back in the day just from playing on a modern screen, and because of the sound bar, the sounds of the games themselves are super clear, and you hear some noises you wouldn't normally without a headset. Sometimes it kind of drives me crazy, hearing some noise in the background I never remembered before, and it's because the sound bar is putting out a noise much clearer than I ever would have heard it on a normal screen and would never have noticed. The fuck is that noise?
I was cleaning up mine a minute ago, scrubbing some of the weird marks that have occurred over time with a magic eraser and generally wiping it down and cleaning the dust away, and it occurred to me that my PS2 setup is not at all "typical" what one would normally think of in retrospect. I've got quite a lot of modern aftermarket stuff going on for it that one would never remember from their childhoods, and I thought it was amusing enough to start this thread.
The heart of the setup is of course a good old fat PS2. Nothing technically "special" about it, just an old piece of crap I got off Ebay about a year ago, never taken it apart, and I'm terrified of the mountain of dust I'm likely to find within. But she's still kicking for now and still reads discs, and that's all that really matters. The console itself is not noteworthy, though it's covered in stupid stickers I've put all over it.
Where it really gets interesting is basically everything else connected to it, minus the power cable, which is just the generic factory one that came with it. It's running an HDMI adapter rather than RGB cables, though for the games I've played, it's not really a "night and day" difference, but it does make visuals a little nicer, I guess. Really just allows it to plug into more modern devices that don't have RGB at all, just HDMI as has been the standard forever and ever now.
The controllers that I use for it are also not typical, instead being el cheapo third parties I love for their form factor, even if they're incredibly fragile and generally not well made (quality control varies a LOT on them). One thing I do love about them is the L2 and R2 buttons are shaped rather like an Xbox 360 controller that the whole thing generally emulates the form factor of (even the Analog button is a fake menu button), and what's great is inside the controller, they're normally just hooked by very thin metal tab things that are supposed to provide resistance, and make the buttons push back outward, further mimicking Xbox triggers, but kind of shittier and not great to use - if you take the controller apart and put it back together, you can just leave them unhooked so they sit right up against the pads inside, and so the trigger press is super light like that of any other button, plus the shape of the buttons themselves makes them very ergonomic, and generally, this is incredibly conducive to things like drag racing in Need For Speed, making really precise shifts, or things like rapidly switching weapons in GTA. Not the world's greatest controller at all, and I acknowledge that, but they're just what I use anyway. They're super cheap.
And then on top of it all, even the memory cards I use are not quite normal for what one might think back on and remember, because they're third party 64MB cards, which I have a bunch of for some reason (only a few are shown here). Even the one in the PS2 itself is actually one of those 64MB cards, despite appearing to be a PS1 memory card - that's just the shell, but it's been internally swapped for the guts of one of the upgraded third party cards, and is not at all what it appears to be.
Not that the monitor or the sound bar are necessarily part of the PS2, but one probably doesn't remember using these as a kid back in the day. Besides the HDMI adapter, the games look a lot better than they ever did back in the day just from playing on a modern screen, and because of the sound bar, the sounds of the games themselves are super clear, and you hear some noises you wouldn't normally without a headset. Sometimes it kind of drives me crazy, hearing some noise in the background I never remembered before, and it's because the sound bar is putting out a noise much clearer than I ever would have heard it on a normal screen and would never have noticed. The fuck is that noise?
