Hi guys, I'm currently bidding on Yahoo Japan Auctions on a DTL-T10000 PlayStation 2 development TOOL. I am not sure whether it is the 'H' revision or not, as the seller just wrote that it is a "DTL-10000". It is going for 15K yen and is sold as "junk". The pictures show that the unit can receive power and has some life because the LEDs come on, but nothing else about its condition is known. Yes, I am taking a rather large risk of ending up with a dud, but the conditions for importing a TOOL has not been so favourable, until only recently. I didn't find a similar thread, so I'm here to ask for tips, like things that I should check for upon receiving it. Or things to never do. I haven't found out whether it's really possible to replace its HDD units. I am intending to use the TOOL for debugging retail games (under OPL), as well as for debugging the difficult stuff like the SMAP driver (not doable via retails because the network connection will be unusable). But I would rather not use the original HDDs if possible, as they might die under the extensive programming sessions that I am prone to having. D: If the HDD units are replaceable, are they generic ATA disks? I hope that they aren't like the PSX's HDD unit, which has the Sony-customized firmware. Other than that, is the PCMCIA HDD unit required? I read that the original DTL-T10000 doesn't seem to support the PCMCIA HDD unit, so does this mean that the DTL-H20400 was not used for game development? What was it used for then? :/ If it's actually required for developing software, then I should try to get more hardware before I ship everything back. Thank you all!
Welcome to the club! First, all of those are sold as junk anyway so I suggest you to use the buy it now option before someone else does... HDDs in the TOOL are completely generic disks, atleast in the T-10k units (as opposed to T15k units). The Tool you're bidding on is the 2nd version with a different SBC and faster CPU (Celeron 533MHz iirc instead of Pentium 233MHz), it also has a little sticker below the PCMCIA port so it's likely to be a H unit. You can use the retail PCMCIA HDD unit with it if you can't find the DTL model, they are identical. Some games support the HDD to store data or to load music tracks, so the DTL-H20400 was used by that time I guess. I'm sure we have a few Tool tips thread around already like the first sticky one, check its first page To make it short, unscrew the little metal plate on the back, plug a monitor, a ps/2 keyboard and a TV set using the PS2 regular A/V cable and watch it boot.
The tool uses a customized version of X86 linux, the partition standard is MBR so any HDD clone tool that supports linux or raw cloning can make a backup of the main HDD. The second HDD should be a second copy of linux that you can use to repair the first unless the kit has a dvd emulator, if it does the second drive may have protos or other goodies but can only be backed up by a sector by sector copy.
Thanks guys! The reason why I am not using the "buy it now" option is because 5K yen is actually quite a fair bit of money for me. The cost of this TOOL is already slightly more than 50% of my army monthly allowance, which is why reducing the costs in anyway possible is important for me. Yes, I know. A true collector should not be limited by costs and space, but I do not have such luxury. But... I think that I will be fine. It's already nearly time for the auction to end and I've seen this TOOL on YAJ for a long time already. Even the other two units that the seller had have already been sold. *** Am I wrong to say that there was never a way to reinstall the OS onto the HDDs, in the event that they both get wiped/replaced? Even for the official developers? Just wondering, because I want to know what my options (preferably a clean installation method, if there was one) are for getting the software onto replacement disks, other than performing sector-by-sector copies of the originals. It was mentioned in several other threads (other than this one) that the 2nd HDD was for restoring the first, but nobody wrote whether Sony ever had a solution for developers who had both HDDs trashed up. And wow, you guys are amazing. I didn't know that it was possible to differentiate the H revision from the original, just by looking at it externally. Thanks! I'll continue looking for the already-posted information within the TOOL threads. If the information I seek was already somewhere in one of them, I'll keep looking whenever my time permits. *** I've won the auction. Now to wait for the TOOL to arrive.
If both drives are wiped then you need a dump from a matching tool. There are eight possible base configurations depending on the X86 card, the H kit, and the DVD Emulator,
You're right, official developers weren't supposed to open the Tool to replace the hdds. Cloning the hdd is the easiest way, a member was working on a way to do clean installs, look here: http://www.assemblergames.com/forum...-Software-Hardware-Update-amp-Rebuild-Project In case the 1st hdd wasn't working anymore, thus rendering the Tool useless, the only solution was to send the unit back to Sony as far as the available docs go. Here's the manual for your Tool SBC, if you ever need it: http://lorezan.free.fr/ps2/PCI-815VE-MAL.pdf horstens, yes there are dumps available, mine are RedHat 5.2 wich were running on the older SBC.
if there's a need for it, i can provide you a clean dump of either model of the TOOL, i own both the 533mhz (DTL-T10000HJ) and the 233mhz (DTL-T10000) ones (though i dont think it makes a difference really, aside the fact that the 233mhz one is and older version of redhat ) either way, there's few things i suggest you check when it arrives before attempting to power it on. (these are based on what happened to both mine when i bought them) 1) the cpu. In mine the CPU had jumped out of it's socket during shipping and resulting in bent pins and othr fun stuff. The cpu and the heatsink were hanging in the case on the fan's cord. i suppose im not the only one who has this happened, as the cpu is self-locking, and there's no locking mechanism on it whatsoever. the socket is holding the cpu in place from it's pins only. 2) dust. if the previous owner hasnt been taking care of it, it's recommented that you give it a good cleaning. The thing heats up A LOT as is already, being full of dust surely doesnt increase it's lifespan. IIRC the power supply of the tools is a little special, so clean it up instead of frying it and yes. if it does work, do an image out of both HDD's, label them properly and put them somewhere where they stay safe. I have no idea how easy/hard it is to restore a drive image of a different unit into another, though it is possible.
I would assume for a stock control perspective they ordered (for example) 2000 hard drives with the operating installed rather than 1000 hard drives with the operating system and 1000 blank hard drives. It might have even been cheaper for them if they hit a value break discount.
The TOOL has arrived. It come in its original box, and everything feels a bit too new to be used. Even the PS/2 ports were covered by some black material and showed no signs of corrosion. Unfortunately, while unscrewing the metal panels, the screws securing the ports to the chassis followed through and came off. As a result, the serial port has sunk into the unit, which means that I will probably have to disassemble it someday to fix that. :/ At least, the VGA connector had one screw that stayed in place, so I was able to connect my monitor to it. The unit appears to be a DTL-T10000H J, with ROM v3.00 flashed in it. It came, set in the WS and CD/DVD mode. When I switched it on, there was a disc in it, with "8/16" written on it. It contains a copy of Dokupon The World (SLPM-65750). It has a 10MB ELF (probably full of debug information) as the main executable, which has a date stamp of 2004/08/16. I don't know anything about this game, like when it was released. As I am not going to assume that I will ever get a chance to disassemble it, I've reseted the root account's password... but the HDD seems to be devoid of anything interesting. There are no other user accounts, and the root account doesn't seem to have any old commands recorded, so the HDD was either erased or wasn't used, I suppose? I haven't determined whether this TOOL has the DTL-T14000 emulator board installed, but there wasn't a snsys folder in the /usr/local folder.
What serial port are you talking about here, the one on the right of the SBC VGA port? You just have to remove one of the side panels and the back panel, look at the disassembly guide in one of the sticky thread. Dokapon was released in November 2004 according to http://www.gamefaqs.com/ps2/924180-dokapon-the-world/data No, the hdd is fine, developers were supposed to control the Tool remotely, not messing around with the Linux install. Your Tool doesn't have the emulator board, I saw the auction pictures.
Yes, it's the serial port that is next to the SBC board. I'll perform a disassembly whenever I can allocate sufficient time for the entire process, and will take that as an opportunity to clone and to replace its HDD with an expandable one. By the way, there is a S-video port on the TOOL for video input, but I don't remember that retail consoles ever had a similar interface. I do not remember anything in the PS2 SDK ever mentioning the use of the S-video port either. Do you have any idea what it was for? My unit's PCMCIA card slot can't seem to be ejected. I pressed down on the eject button, but yet the dummy card doesn't seem to even move. Is it actually some sort of cover that should be first removed instead? I'm afraid of applying force to this thing because it feels fragile. EDIT: I've opened it, but the guide didn't clearly explain that the cover should be slided open first (probably no wiggling of the case was even required)... and so I cracked the two retaining arms that are at the side of the case. :/ Finally, I noticed that the PSU inside has an input of 100V-240V. Has anyone tried connecting it to the 240V mains? I could try that, but there has to be a reason why Sony didn't write "100V-240V" on the chassis, right? EDIT 2: Nevermind, I've removed the dummy card. It needed to be just lifed out of the slot. Alright, so the copy I have is fairly close to the release. Thank you. I saw you mention this in several threads here. So the TOOL is nothing more than a fanciful TEST/debugstation unit, with a PC connected to it just for providing remote access? Well, this seems to be a waste of hardware potential, once again. :/ I gave it some thought, and it also explains why the SDK setup disc never had dsnetm in it. Thank you. No wonder you didn't mention it in your earlier post. I noticed later on that there was only one non-Intel board in the system, so that confirms the fact that it does not have the emulator installed.
Sony love Linux but game developers love Windows. It also means you can have cheap PC's for coding and compiling and then share a tool between multiple developers for actually running it.
Quoted from the newsgroups: Sony released the Eyetoy later in the PS2 life, but it was something they experimented with early on. I cracked a good number of those retaining arms, I wouldn't worry about it too much, I mean it's old plastic, sometimes the panels are completely wrecked during shipping... I'm in Europe so, yes, 240V works fine. Well, if you put it that way...but still, you have more memory to play with, you can plug a hdd on the PS2 side directly on the SIF card for stuff, you still have the i.link port, a dedicated PS2 VGA output, also it's noisy And what smf wrote, developers could use dsedb/dsidb from a Linux client or Codewarrior and/or Snsys Target Manager from a Windows machine.
I guess so. But it still felt bad because the unit looks nearly unused. :/ (on the bright side, I think that the trained Sony guys would have broken a few of them too, since the plastic is soooo thin) The copy of the Dokapon game that I have appears to be a development copy. It boots to a menu (after asking about enabling multitap support) with all sort of options that I don't think that a retail copy would have, like a sound test option. The screen appears to have things like memory usage displayed on it. I've tried to dump information on the TOOL's hardware with PS2Ident, and it seems like the boot ROM while in WS mode appears to be similar to the contents of the OLDROM file (it does have some other files that aren't present in that image, like the EE kernel). Its CDVDFSV and CDVDMAN module pairs lack all functions that are used by the OSD and PS2LOGO modules, and do not have any functions for NVRAM management. It does not have the sceCdMV function either, so the MECHACON's version cannot be determined that way. I found that there is a way to start homebrew on the TOOL, without needing to provide a replacement for the missing "rom0:EELOADCNF" file (which is also mainboard-specific... lol): Just reset the IOP with "rom0:UDNL" alone, after disabling all EE debugger functions and setting the IOP to run in test mode. When UDNL runs, the modules from rom0:OLDROM will be loaded instead of the newer ones from the flash ROM. However, all the mainboard-specific (basically, undocumented) modules must strictly not be used because they will either be missing or expect a newer IOP kernel. For example, some of the SIO2 stuff like MCMAN will cause MODLOAD to fault during loading. Thank you for being my guide to the wonderful and strange world of the PS2 TOOL.
Supposedly the PS1 GPU started life as part of a video editing box that could do realtime object wrapping etc (a cheap home version of a 80's quantel) called System G. Which would likely have had something similar that captured a video signal and put it into VRAM so it could be texture mapped and output. http://www.giantbomb.com/profile/mo...ies-at-sony-the-making-of-the-sony-pla/71709/ Unfortunately nothing really states whether what ended up in the PS1 actually bears any relationship to the System G hardware though.
Omg bro, miss out on this thread that you are acquiring the TOOL. Do post pictures and perhaps the disassembly pictures as well. It could serve as a useful reference on disassembly in the future, pointing out the two retaining arm without cracking/damaging them. I truly wonder how much is the shipping for the unit, it must be costly I imagine.
@kyo86sg: thanks. I've mentioned something about that in here: http://www.assemblergames.com/forum...mbly-guide-VII&p=748393&viewfull=1#post748393. I didn't take a nice photograph of it lying flat in the right position for removing the casing, so I cannot do up a nice diagram for supplimenting the TOOL disassembly guide.... yet. The shipping wasn't too bad, although it was the most expensive PlayStation 2 console shipment that I've ever had: 6852 yen (86 SGD). This includes the domestic shipping. I would also like to upload some photographs here, but my usual image host (imageshack) had a change in their ToS and so I still don't have a place to upload photographs to. :/ Yes, I could just upload them to this forum, but I don't really like that idea because some forums have slow servers (not this one, but take PSX-scene's server as an example) and there is usually a rather conservative storage limit. When I upload photographs, I love providing people with high-resolution ones that are linked to via small thumbnails. That was why I found that imageshack was perfect... until they changed their ToS. I think that perhaps, the most interesting part of this haul is the Dokapon master disc. The TOOL unit appears to have nothing different from the other DTL-T10000H J units around here, although this one seems to have extremely little wear. It was shipped in its original SONY development TOOL box and packaging, along with its user manual and accessories (controller, A/V cable and 100V AC cord). The TOOL was originally addressed to Asmik Ace Entertainment. As unclejun mentioned, it can work off the 230V mains here despite SONY printing "100V AC" on its back. The PSU within it appears to be a regular ATX PSU, but it can automatically detect the input voltage without the need for a selector switch. The SBC HDD is connected via an 80-line IDE cable, while the disk that is connected to the AIF is connected with an older 40-line cable. Both are Seagate ST340810A HDDs that are VERY quiet. There is also an empty (but covered up) bay beneath the two HDDs for a 3rd one, presumably for the DTL-T14000 emulator card's HDD.
