Worklog PSYu - a PSone portable

[fibbef]

Hey guys. My current project is a PSone portable I've been building off and on for about 2 years. Lots of pics to get where I am today (100+ of this project on my photobucket) and I wanted to share my progress up until now with you.

Wii U style case. 5" widescreen which I'll switch to 4:3 and hide the black sidebars. This started as a build for a compo on the Bacteria forums in 2014, so ignore the signs in the pics.

Used melted ABS plastic (my favorite filler) to strengthen the case and cement the controller parts in.

Not being careful with ABS filler = warped plastic. I actually had to rebuild 90% of the case. Used some plexiglass to help me mount the disk drive.

Wasn't lying about rebuilding the case. Front half was too warped so I cut out all but the border and replaced it with plexiglass. Also had to cut up a second controller.

Trying to protect the disk drive and mem card slot while priming. I'll let you know how that worked out...

Did some board trimming to fit into the case more easily. Never had to do this for any of my earlier projects, but it was just excess ground, so I felt pretty safe. Oh yeah, Doom was hosting his annual Ghosts of Portables Past event last month. That's what the new sign is for.

Lots of hot glue.

The project as it stands today. Closed, but not quite completed.

Initial testing said all is well. FF Origins loaded pretty quickly. Further testing said that the disk drive is going out. I guess all that masking tape while painting wasn't enough. Tried loading Tony Hawk 1 and it sat at the PS logo. I fried 2 PSone boards during this project, so I know I have at least one spare drive. Unfortunately that means I'll have to literally cut the bad one out of the case. In the meantime, I've got a handy portable memory card manager.

Back view. Disk cover is being held on with rare earth magnets, which don't do a terribly good job, mostly because the magnets on the case-side are buried under a layer of plexiglass.

Oh, and for those curious about the name PSYu, it's a play on Wii U/PS U. ユ is the Japanese katakana character for 'yu', which I think looks good in the PS2-style font. I admit it's a bit cheesy, but...

Edit: Relinked all the broken images. I'm not 100% sure which pics I originally posted, but I tried my best to post the same ones as before based on the commentary.

 

[Noah]

Wow, looks great so far! Can't wait to see where it goes from here!

 

[Ampz]

This is such an amazing portable, so much creativity and being resourceful makes me
really admire this worklog and how far you've come.

 

[cheese]

Love it, but

katakana

*shudders* hiragana took me too long, not looking forward to learning katakana ._.

 

[fibbef]

Thanks for the feedback!

Wow, looks great so far! Can't wait to see where it goes from here!

Honestly, it's going to look how it does now. I just need to replace the drive and fix the magnets so the cover actually stays in place.

Love it, but

*shudders* hiragana took me too long, not looking forward to learning katakana ._.

Are you learning for school or for fun? I actually liked katakana a lot more because every time I saw it, I knew it was most likely the Japanese spelling of an English word. I took 2 years of Japanese in college but forgot most of it.

 

[cheese]

Are you learning for school or for fun?

Fun, my college doesn't offer it as a course (though I wish they did). My main issue is getting distracted with school and other projects, since I'm not super pressured to get good grades or anything on it, and then I get back to it basically at square one again

 

[fibbef]

My suggestion for Japanese (or any other language for that matter) is to start learning sentence structure, worry about vocabulary later. But I've forgotten most of my Japanese so I may not be the best one to take advice from when it comes to learning languages.

Tore apart the electronics and ripped out the disk drive.

Mounted a new drive (hot glue of course) and pieced things together enough to see how well it worked. Loaded up THPS about as quickly as I would expect from a PSone.

A couple of final internal shots before closing up again.

All closed up. Notice the disk cover in the back of the picture? I need to figure out the best way to fix the magnet situation before I have this project 100% completed.

 

[Herma]

This project is pretty awesome! I was looking to see if you had explained the ユ part of PSユ, you did. I was gonna comment that I saw what you did there.

When I was typing ユ at first 湯 came up.

Your portable is now the PShotwater.

Love it, but

*shudders* hiragana took me too long, not looking forward to learning katakana ._.

でもかなは簡単すぎるｗｗ。
漢字のほうがかなより難しくて、大変だよ。
日本の文法はあまり難しくないんだけど、英語と全く違う。

 

[cheese]

でもかなは簡単すぎるｗｗ。
漢字のほうがかなより難しくて、大変だよ。

shoosh I'm slow, it's probably gonna be quite a while before I'm even slightly competent .-.

日本の文法はあまり難しくないんだけど、英語と全く違う。

Grammar was actually the first thing I studied, it was pretty easy, just a little confusing at first

 

[fibbef]

Thanks Herma! BTW stole your hotwater comment for my sig.

We only started learning some kanji toward the end of my second year of Japanese but I didn't pick up on it too well. Now when I try reading hiragana, as soon as I hit any amount of kanji my brain goes to static.

Small update on the actual project: drilled holes in the case where the magnets are embedded. Would be too much of a hassle to dig the magnets out, so I just superglued more magnets over them. Disk cover now clings like leggings to a Starbucks patron.