Sony Playstation 2 Slim Debugging Station DTL-H70011S

Just picked this up at the swap meet today! Looks like somebody cut part of the label off where the barcode was. Really happy to find this. It works perfectly!

 

Does anybody know if these are more rare than the fat debug ps2 units? It doesn't have the TEST logo on the top of the console. I have seen the slim units with the logo online before. Obviously those are more desirable. But, still I think it's pretty cool as a PS2 collector.

 

Tails of finding rare consoles at a swap meet is a classic troll, coupled with a single picture of a console that looks like a retail unit doesn't really add anything. But an "S" at the end means it is for use at shows, so it would be a retail case.

Slim tests haven't shown up as often, whether they are rarer is hard to tell. Most development kit that ever turns up has been stolen, some of it comes through liquidation auctions where the manufacturers failed to contact the administrators in time (if they ask for them back then they get them returned).

The older the hardware is the more it will have been moved around and the more likely it is to have gone missing. The slims are likely to only be used at companies that started developing games late and are less likely to have gone bankrupt or lost track of the hardware.

The people who look after the "S" tests that look like retails are likely the marketing department, while the people who look after the ones with test written on them are going to be the QA department (or the development department). In my experience the later is more likely to go walkabout.

The real rarity is the PS1 debug that is based on the PS2 hardware, but can't run PS2 games. Assembler mentions it here https://www.assemblergames.com/forums/showthread.php?7223-The-many-unusual-types-of-TEST-ps2

 

It's probably just broken. Why would they design a PS2 Debugstation console that can only play PlayStation games?

Instead, the rarer ones should be the DTL-H101xx and DTL-H301xx units that have actual MagicGate capabilities.

There are three photographs. It looks legit, but is only legit if it functions as a Debugstation set.

 

It might be broken, although I'd hope that assembler wouldn't have made that mistake. There were some late psone games aimed at the budget market, maybe they wanted you to test them on PS2 hardware for compatibility but offered them at a reduced cost as you would be aiming at a cheaper market. I think they could save money by not supporting DVD disks, like they dropped DVD video playback for the same reason (at the time DVD video player licensing was a % of the selling price).

The rumoured flood of psone debugs in ten years time hasn't happened yet either..... http://forum.digitpress.com/forum/showthread.php?75010-Playstation-Debug-Systems

Who were those aimed at?

You're right, I only saw one earlier... I blame imgur. My guess is the label had something on it that identified the legal owner and that is why it was removed. I've seen ps1 debug's with permanent marker and asset stickers and (as long as they are real) then it really adds to it.

 

Why would I lie about finding this? It's not the first debug ps2 I've found at a swap meet. It's not even the rarest console I have found. I just wanted some more info. I'm at the swap meets 3-4 times a week

 

I don't know why people lie, but it's happened before. Why did you bother telling us that is where you found it?

 

Because I was excited and thought it was a cool find. Are you upset? I'm not trying to troll anybody. I just thought some people on here would think it was cool.

 

A PlayStation 2 will have partial hardware and software emulation, of a PlayStation console. Therefore, for PlayStation mode to exist, the PlayStation 2 console must have all of its main components. Since it's not possible to actually cut out parts from one, it has to be capable of playing PlayStation 2 games too. The laser itself has the DVD and CD photodiodes, so it should be able to read DVDs too unless they changed the whole thing and possibly changed the MECHACON too (Which in that case, brings us back to the point where nobody actually took a look at this unit).

As for DVD video playback, they never actually removed support for it in the hardware because it was always supported in software.
For these Debustation consoles they deliberately locked out DVD video disc reading within the MECHACON (DVD players cannot be decrypted, and hence the DVD video disc sector reading function is also locked permanently). It has been speculated why they did this, and it was also discussed that it was possibly done to avoid all relevant licensing costs (as you have mentioned).

Haha. You've already mentioned why such a thing wouldn't happen (It's property of SCE).

Most likely, developers of software that support the HDD (and which can be booted directly from the HDD too). It can support the HDD OSD and can boot stuff from it.
Or maybe even developers of PSBBN DLCs.

Also, there was the TDB startup card for providing lightweight debugging facilities with them, so they might have also been created to offer better facilities for detecting and locating issues that occur only on retail-like hardware.

The funny thing is, that guy left the serial number intact. Although the serial number can be extracted from the console ID too, so it's not possible to eliminate...
Isn't that bar code about the product number and the console's serial number?

 

As in those days the license fee you paid was a percentage of what the hardware sold for, then I'm not sure there is much need for speculation. A few years later it came down to a fixed price per player.

 

Either a different mechacon, different bios or both could have been used to lock out PS2 games. It would only have been necessary to allow cdr for booting ps1 games but lock out master discs for booting ps2 games. It's possible the drive had stopped being able to read DVD discs and could only read CDs, although you could test that by loading one of the PS2 games that came on CD. I agree it can only be cleared up by actually looking at the unit. Assembler was unclear whether the original sticker said PSX ONLY, or whether someone had graded it as such.

In those days the license fee you paid was a percentage of what the hardware sold for, I'm not sure there is much need for speculation.

Only Sony can know who owns it from the serial number and they (at least used to) try to recover them all whether they'd been bought at a bankruptcy auction or not, so the serial number is not that important. "Property of ABC games" written on it would make it harder to sell in a shop.

 

You don't have concrete evidence that avoiding license fees was the cause. Why did they have to totally ban DVD player KELF decryption, when they could have simply just not include a DVD player (Which they did too)?

Originally, the unit did not support MagicGate KELF decryption too. Neither is it clear why they had to come up with a special MECHACON that did not support KELF decryption, for both the TOOL and Debugstation.

I think that it was because there's a global weakness here with the existence of a fully region-free console. A Debugstation console would be region-free, which might allow the owner to install DVD players of any region.... which would cause the console to become a region-free DVD player. Something which SONY would have probably tried to avoid.

But the whole barcode wouldn't have to be removed.

 

They were probably worried that if they allowed you to install the retail DVD player on the TEST then they'd likely get sued for trying to avoid paying the licensing fee. I don't have concrete evidence, but it seems the most likely. I'm not up to speed on KELF decryption, but I would have thought they could make it so that a Japanese debug can only decrypt the Japanese DVD player if they had wanted to.

I suspect a combination of where any writing/really sticky label was and how easy it was to remove just the incriminating evidence. Maybe removing only half a bar code looked wrong to his eyes, or the guy was just stupid. If you always assume people are stupid then you end up becoming too cynical, so I try to go for the most likely after assuming they aren't just stupid.

 

Why not a combination of both? Then they can avoid getting sued for accidentally creating a region-free player and also so that they wouldn't need to deal with licensing fees.

An Oceania Debugstation (DTL-H30102) will report its MagicGate region as 0x01 (USA), as with the US set (DTL-H30101).
It might be possible that some of these MECHACONs share the same firmware across regions, making it impossible for them to know what their actual regions are.

 

I assume for retail consoles they don't. Oceania is region 4 (along with new Zealand and Australia) and supposedly PAL (I'm not sure why it's MagicGate region would be USA).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_region_code

Surely the reason there are more model numbers for PS2 retail consoles than there were for PS1 consoles is because there are different models for each DVD region (and the MECHACON firmware is likely to be the major difference between each one). Has anyone ever dumped one?

 

Precisely why this is weird, as this is unlike the MECHACON from retail sets. The region codes that I'm talking are the MagicGate region codes, which aren't directly related to CSS.
This trend seems to have continued to the DTL-H50000 series; I have a dump from a DTL-H50002, and it reported its MG region as 0x01 again. I have no idea if it went on, even through the design of the final Debugstation model (DTL-H90000 series).

Other than that, they've also made official releases in more territories this time, with actual customizations for some of them. For example, we have the Korea (05), Hong Kong/Singapore (06) and Taiwan (07) sets, but they share the same MagicGate region (0x04 - Asia).

The PlayStation 2 has region-locking for DVD video playback in software (specifically, the DVD player itself), which has nothing to do with the MECHACON. If the DVD video player is compromised, then it's possible to get it to play discs from any region.

There's currently no known way to dump a PlayStation 2 MECHACON's firmware.

 

I thought you couldn't normally install the wrong DVD player though because of different kelf encryption. Does it just rely on the PS2 disc authentication succeeding on the update disc? So you could run the update purely from ulaunchelf on an unmodded console? Or is the DVD player itself region agnostic and it just reads the DVD region from the PS2 itself?

 

That's right, the DVD player executable is normally protected and region-locked by MagicGate, but I used the word "compromized" here. If one was to decrypt it (The PS2 can do that for you, if you asked it to) and patch the CSS region-locking code, then it would become a region-free DVD player that could be launched without the use of MagicGate.

The point here is that the CSS region-locking has nothing to do with the MECHACON itself.

 

I never knew you could do that!

 

So you think that the reason the TEST units don't have DVD playback is because Sony was worried that developers would compromise the DVD player and they were also confident that the same couldn't be done on a retail console?

DeCSS was launched before the PlayStation 2, so I'm not entirely sure why they were so worried (they blocked RGB output after someone hooked up a PS2 to an RGB capture and pirated a DVD that way).