Funny how news spreads so fast. Following the demo of a pstwo with hdd hacked on, someone has a kit for the hack, along with a nice new case and a removable slot in the bottom. http://www.hdcombo.com/cgi-bin/hdcombo/site.pl?page=images I'm hoping to get one of these for a review. BTW, the mod is not for the faint of heart, but the kit seems to make it more easy. They haven't posted the diagram for the some 40 +/- points you'll have to do.
Just for the record, it only works in V12 and V13 sytems (if i'm not mistaken). So if you have any of those units, it seems to be a great device. Specially with all those homebrew appz avaiable (HD Loader, SMS, PGen , uLaunchElf, ... ) Anyway, the IDE soldering point was totally removed in V14 and V15 boards, making these units to work only with HDD connected through the USB port ( very slow.... ).
Just for the record... that looks like a pain in the ass... The engineer in me wants one, just to play around with it. The gamer in me'll just go out and get a PS2 with the expansion bay. I'll probably try it out if it's cheep enough...
Hmmm it looks very easy to do... ...Just one thing is the HDD selfbooting now? ...From what I could gather it is providing you have a .elf on your mem card, have I read this correctly?
I'd like one, but I'm not quite confident enough in my soldering skills. I also don't have a very sharp iron tip (generic Radio Shack iron) or money to replace my PSTwo should I screw it up. It's a fairly nice looking kit, though. It doesn't appear to add much dead weight to the unit.
fairly easy if you screw it up taemos, the pstwo waranty sticker doesnt have to be pilled off at all to open it up .
no need for anything assembler, just unscrew and pull the top cover towards you and then open it like a book, the sticker will be atacked to both of the plastic covers, then just take the pcb out and go to work.
I have a modded PS2,DMS3 chip and I have the elf on the memory card. I have to hold down triangle to boot up the HDD.
Why don't you use the DEV2 mode (putting the elf in the HDD) instead of DEV1 (elf in the mc) ? DEV2 in DMS3 and DMS4 is booted by holding down START. I have a Matrix Infinity modded PS2. I put DMS HDD Explorer 1.31, that is a ELF Launcher app, as my boot.elf in the HDD (Hold down L1 when booting). I used DEV1 mode some time ago, but it used too much space on the MC. As soon as DEV2 mode was avaiable in the Matrix Infinity, i put everything on the HDD and boot it from there. When it loads it show a menu with other appz i installed in the HDD: - HD Loader 0.7c - Flashback - Rick Dangerous - Geotron 0.5 - Beats of Rage - myPS2 0.5 - SMS 1.5 - Pgen - Wonder-Station 0.1 - uLaunchElf 3.41r - Codebreaker - DMS HDD Dump Tool - DMS Format Tool
So how many wires are required to solder the HDD kit to the board? Do you need a modchip? Man, I'm gonna have to read up this stuff, and by the looks of it, its a lot.
For all your questions, read this very good review: http://www.ps2hd.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4954
