GUIDE PS2 Tool The Basics

Most boards back together:

 

Yeah - you can sort of see why they bundled the whole lot together as one package instead of what they did with PSone.....selling loads of separate bits!

 

One strange thing with the TOOL light on the facade. Prior to taking the unit to pieces it used to remain constantly orange. Now, having rebuilt it from scratch the light is now constantly green. I wonder what that signifies? I made absolutely sure the dipswitch settings were not changed. Something may have been lose within the unit.

 

Handy pictures Parris! now I know where to hit my temperamental dvd drive for it to work properly lol tho ill have to open this monster up again to really get it fixed soon.. as for the lights : mine has always been blue and green (no idea what orange should stand for)

 

Some more info on the Celeron 566 model inners, here is a picture I took of mine:



The actual card seems to be a NuDAQ PCI-815VE, nothing looks modified by sony even all the bios options are available and not locked in any way.
The official specs of this card:

Socket 370 Celeron / PentiumIII (FCPGA type)
300MHz~1GHz
Memory168 pin DIMM PC100/PC133　
Up to maximum 512MB
FSB133MHz/100MHz/66MHz

More info found on this (translated) japanese site:

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ja&u=http://www.jds.co.jp/product/pci815ve.html&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=1&ct=result&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dpci815ve%26hl%3Den%26rls%3DGGLJ,GGLJ:2006-23,GGLJ:en

So looks like an easy upgrade, will test a PIII 733 in the next few days to see what happens.

Some better pictures of the card can be seen in a thread of another forum were some guy is not sure what he has:
http://www.virtual-hideout.net/forums/viewtopic.php?p=9130&sid=058329d88dd0be74663507cfc6de026e

 

Card is upgradeable. Nothing special I noticed abot it. The biggest problem I had was finding one. When I was looking it had been a few years since I had to look for a backplane cpu board. I thought it was upgradeable to 1Ghz but at the time that was real costly

 

I have created a 53 step guide to completely disassembling the PS2 Tool (clearly the T10000 so it may vary from machine to machine) in PowerPoint. It runs in at almost 15Mb of information. Anyone here got any ideas on what is the best way of making this available perminantly on here? I don't have an FTP site and can't guarantee my PC will be on, so would prefer to plonk it on the net somewhere and leave it for others to download at their convenience.

Any thoughts?

 

If you would like I can print the powerpoint into a pdf file. would probly make it easier for people to read.

 

Thanks MacWest! I can send it to you if you wish? You can act as my proof reader. It's been a bit weird putting it together as I know what I mean, hopefully others will understand too.

I would like Assembler to add it as a sticky and keep it in the PS section, but that's up to Kev.

 

Sounds good. Go ahead and send it to me.

 

with respect to Parris for a lot of the pictures and open chat always

 

Let's have it I'll need it the coming weeks to do some upgrades and fix the dvd player!

 

Im game for it aswell! (Oops, that reads so very wrong!)

 

Seconded! :clap:

And why not put the disassembly guide up on the wiki? I know I want a copy, since I'm going to have tear my own unit down to fix the USB at some point.

 

About the leds on the front (quoting from the Tool_faq.pdf):

 

Ok guys lets continue here uncle & parris can you post the links to the docs?

Ontopic: the CPU bracket on the PCI815 looks like its clued on, if this is the case then it will be very hard to replace/upgrade the CPU (probably a gift from sony as the original card should be easly upgradable) anyway now that the CPU is a pain for now i'll first check the easy upgrade = memory.
Will try to get a 256MB/133 chip tonight or tomorrow to test.

 

Did the memory upgrade Kingston 256MB/PC133, and it worked without any problems! so all of you waiting to see if I would break my PSTOOL no worries an go ahead




Next will be the CPU, guess that will be fine as well.. tho first I have to figure out how to remove that damn bracket :/

 

I am in a rush, but before UJ or anyone hands out the guide can they please wait! I bought another unit, it arrived today and I have a couple of amendments! It's nothing major, but I don't want anyone making a mistake. Please wait for the amendments which I will do tomorrow!

Looks like my original unit has been messed with internally and the new unit from Matt was not opened so I got a better understanding of Sony's intended set up and not the messing around the last owner did.

;-)

 

Great to hear you have the same model as mine now as you are the hardware specialist maybe you can shed some light on the pci cpu bracket as I usually tend to break things that I can't get removed lol I know very well what I am doing but I sadly have two shakey left hands.. so i'll wait for your insight/feedback before i continue

 

I sadly have an entirely different PCI card. I was hoping I'd get the same as you, but no, it's the same as my earlier version.

I'm still looking at the photographs but I noticed very little difference internally between the T10k and T10kH units.

On an off topic note. I've just managed to run a retail disc on my newer units.... happy as a pig in shit! Thanks to everyone for pointing out I missed "cd" from the command line. I've had a frustrating couple of hours trying to figure it out. All I am saying is "wood for the trees".

Tomb Raider Angel of Darkness booted into German!