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Hey everyone! I just finished working on the first PS2 portable of my own design, and wanted to share!
The video below is a brief overview and some gameplay, but below that I've also written an entire novel summarizing the build process.
(p.s. I'm planning some other cool stuff and surely you won't want to miss any of it, so feel free to sub to my channel too!)
It's taken me a span of about 3 months (with a couple breaks) from the initial planning phase to a full finished build. Quite the rollercoaster it was, full of both exhilaration and despair.
To preface, I've got years of experience with PCB design, console modding, etc. etc., so I could've gotten real fancy, but for this build I decided to go pretty barebones.
I took a lot of inspiration from older portable designs. One of my big takeaways from @Gman 's G-wii and @GingerOfOz 's original Louii design, among others, was how 3d printed button mounts were used in place of custom pcbs. It seemed like a really solid cheap solution, especially for prototyping / designing the first version of this portable.
I designed the entire case in... *cough* tinkercad *cough* which is apparently frowned upon by people on reddit (at least from the threads I was visiting to try and get info on how to do certain things lol). Needless to say, I wasn't really finding much useful information on there. Mostly people just saying "use a real CAD" or "buy this other $300 software it's way better"
But anyway, I mostly learned how to use it just by messing around on my own and actually had a pretty easy time once I got going.
My biggest feature that I really wanted to have on this portable were good L1-L2-R1-R2 buttons. Why? you may ask - because I wanted to play guitar hero on it of course
So with this in-mind, I went to work designing and prototyping a few different configurations until I was finally happy with this bad boy right here
(I did end up making some tweaks for the final version though)
I also watched a playlist of HVAC videos on youtube that helped me design the cooling for the portable. They said stay away from 90 degree angles, but if you have to use a 90 degree angle, use turning vanes. So this is what I came up with in the end that actually seemed to work very well. A sloped section leading out to a 90 degree venting stage & a 35-ish degree section with a turning vane up top.
With this setup, my Ps2 board temps mostly stay between 44-48c, with the highest peak I've gotten being around 52c after a few hours of playing, still good!)
After I was happy with the design, I printed the back half of the case on my P2S in Protopasta's "Night Before Blue" HTPLA. (also got a little ahead of myself and assembled a few things before taking photos)
After taking these photos, I instantly had an oh shit moment and realized I totally forgot to add a usb port into the design. So I whipped out the dremel and carved a whole new orifice into this thing. I also designed a bracket to hold the port in place.
Next up, I took a break from the case and started working on the power boards. For the regulators, I'm using the @Customledmods Ps2 voltage regulator board. For a BMS, I'm using one of the ol' reliable "red board" ones that is now manufactured black which I much prefer the look of. I did trim some extra ground plane from the side of the BMS, and thoroughly checked for shorts after. This was just to make it the same size as the regulator board. Definitely DO NOT do this if you don't know what you're doing as it could potentially lead to a fiery battery explosion if anything shorted.
I designed a mount for both boards and cut a custom heatsink for the regulators. The mount is printed out of HTPLA, and I figured that the initial couple heat up and cooldown cycles of the regulators would somewhat heat-treat the print to get protopasta's claim of "heat resistant up to 150C" (I later learned my heat treating hypothesis was correct, and though I had initial doubts, it indeed handles the heat as they claimed it would. Pretty impressive stuff!)
Next up, I wired in some batteries. Went with two parallel packs of 18650s wired in series for a total of 7000mAh at 8.4v. Wired in the power board and connected LEDs to each voltage rail (the voltages were measuring weird with no load connected) and all voltages read exactly what they should. yayy!!
Also tested charging using a 9v 3a center-positive DC adapter and the battery voltage increased as expected. One odd thing I did notice though, is that a couple of my newer name-brand dc adapters really don't like this thing. They go into some sort of weird protection mode and refuse to supply the BMS with sweet sweet charge juice. Though all of my older dc adapters + a couple cheap aliexpress ones work perfect and charge as they should. Checked to see if there was maybe some backfeed happening or something, but there wasn't. Assuming those couple chargers just had some sort of incompatibility with the bms and I carried on since all the other charger worked fine with no issues.
Now here's where the fun beginnnnssss!
I dropped the power boards down into their dedicated cavity, put in the heatsink+fan (w/ thermal paste & copper sheet + thermal pad on top of course, just not shown). Then I wired in the ps2 board. As you can see, I did stray a bit from the typical advanced trim to make things easier on myself since my case design had some extra room for it.
Shoutout to @Legend for pointing out the extra 3.5v voltage point that I was missing! (little yellow wire coming down near the middle of the board).
Though I don't have too many photos of it (since my phone ran out of storage and I was too lazy to fix that problem), I printed the top shell and went to town slapping that all together as well.
I did mash in slightly modified versions of the LCD and stick bezels from @Wesk 's G-wii v2 remix. Apart from making it a little more low-profile, the screen bezel was pretty much perfect since I was using the same zj050na-08c screen. I did however, make my own way of mounting it since the remixed G-wii bezel is a bit tricky to glue in from my experience. I also modified the stick rings to work better with my case thickness & ps2 sticks I was using.
I'll likely need to design a new screen bezel for any future revisions to use a different screen entirely (foreshadowing). As you'll see farther down, I had some compatibility issues with the Ps2's vga output on the zj050na-08c.
The controller ic I'm using is a board I bought off aliexpress from @ohkin86 I believe (?). I designed a mount for it and glued the board in place.
As you can see in the top of the case, I made a mounting system for the LCD driver board and speakers too, as well as for all of my buttons. As for the sticks, I'm using some ps2-style arduino joysticks I got from aliexpress since the boards were already pre-made and ready to install (less work for me lol).
IT'S AAAALLIIVVEEEE!!!!
Though unfortunately, I ran into a weird screen issue while using VGA during my testing where the video was all shifted over to the left side. I thought maybe it was a vsync/hsync issue, but everything was wired up correctly. I checked the forums and found this post - detailing the same issue I was having. It seems they might've ended up taking composite signal instead for their build. But for some reason, my driver board's composite input does not work at all. So I ended up giving up after hours of troubleshooting and dug into one of my junk bins to find this s-video to VGA board and wired it in. Works like a charm and I'm actually super happy with the video quality! Way better than taking a composite signal would have been.
ANOTHER ISSUE....
Sooo after testing the portable for a while, it was shutting down anywhere between 20-40 minutes. I dug back in to try and figure out what was going on, and long story short, the regulators were experiencing some thermal drift (not fully going into thermal shutdown tho so that's good). As they heated up, the voltage became less stable leading to the ps2 board to shut down. Since I didn't want to redo my entire case and re-shell everything, I decided to give it a good ol' nyko intercooler treatment (jk, this fix actually WORKS unlike the intercooler, but just reminds me of how those things looked on the back of 360 consoles haha).
I had a ton of spare fans lying around from wii consoles I've trimmed, so I very carefully dremeled out a hole in the back and added a mounting bracket for a cooling fan. I designed it this way so that if I ever wanted to add a lower-profile fan, I could. I just wanted to use what I already had around at the moment rather than buy something else & wait longer to finish the portable. A little bulky but honestly I don't think it looks too bad. Plus, unintended feature...but it doubles as a kickstand to hold the console upright
lmao
I do plan on fixing the issue entirely in a possible future revision / redesign if I make more of these. Maybe even just going for a standard trim / stock regs to remove the custom reg board entirely, not super sure yet which route I'll go with that.
I didn't mention it above, but I did wire in a battery indicator that shows the battery life momentarily while pressing a button (<25% = red, and >25% = green).
I got exactly 3 hrs 25 min of battery life playing NFS Most Wanted. I think this game pushes the ps2 decently hard too, so I'd assume battery life may be even better with easier running games. Overall, extremely happy with the build despite the hiccups along the way, and I've been having a ton of fun playing Guitar Hero in the palms of my hands!
But anyway, here's some final photos! And as a cherry on top, I made a case for it too!!
The video below is a brief overview and some gameplay, but below that I've also written an entire novel summarizing the build process.
(p.s. I'm planning some other cool stuff and surely you won't want to miss any of it, so feel free to sub to my channel too!)
It's taken me a span of about 3 months (with a couple breaks) from the initial planning phase to a full finished build. Quite the rollercoaster it was, full of both exhilaration and despair.
To preface, I've got years of experience with PCB design, console modding, etc. etc., so I could've gotten real fancy, but for this build I decided to go pretty barebones.
I took a lot of inspiration from older portable designs. One of my big takeaways from @Gman 's G-wii and @GingerOfOz 's original Louii design, among others, was how 3d printed button mounts were used in place of custom pcbs. It seemed like a really solid cheap solution, especially for prototyping / designing the first version of this portable.
I designed the entire case in... *cough* tinkercad *cough* which is apparently frowned upon by people on reddit (at least from the threads I was visiting to try and get info on how to do certain things lol). Needless to say, I wasn't really finding much useful information on there. Mostly people just saying "use a real CAD" or "buy this other $300 software it's way better"
But anyway, I mostly learned how to use it just by messing around on my own and actually had a pretty easy time once I got going.
My biggest feature that I really wanted to have on this portable were good L1-L2-R1-R2 buttons. Why? you may ask - because I wanted to play guitar hero on it of course
So with this in-mind, I went to work designing and prototyping a few different configurations until I was finally happy with this bad boy right here
(I did end up making some tweaks for the final version though)
I also watched a playlist of HVAC videos on youtube that helped me design the cooling for the portable. They said stay away from 90 degree angles, but if you have to use a 90 degree angle, use turning vanes. So this is what I came up with in the end that actually seemed to work very well. A sloped section leading out to a 90 degree venting stage & a 35-ish degree section with a turning vane up top.
With this setup, my Ps2 board temps mostly stay between 44-48c, with the highest peak I've gotten being around 52c after a few hours of playing, still good!)
After I was happy with the design, I printed the back half of the case on my P2S in Protopasta's "Night Before Blue" HTPLA. (also got a little ahead of myself and assembled a few things before taking photos)
After taking these photos, I instantly had an oh shit moment and realized I totally forgot to add a usb port into the design. So I whipped out the dremel and carved a whole new orifice into this thing. I also designed a bracket to hold the port in place.
Next up, I took a break from the case and started working on the power boards. For the regulators, I'm using the @Customledmods Ps2 voltage regulator board. For a BMS, I'm using one of the ol' reliable "red board" ones that is now manufactured black which I much prefer the look of. I did trim some extra ground plane from the side of the BMS, and thoroughly checked for shorts after. This was just to make it the same size as the regulator board. Definitely DO NOT do this if you don't know what you're doing as it could potentially lead to a fiery battery explosion if anything shorted.
I designed a mount for both boards and cut a custom heatsink for the regulators. The mount is printed out of HTPLA, and I figured that the initial couple heat up and cooldown cycles of the regulators would somewhat heat-treat the print to get protopasta's claim of "heat resistant up to 150C" (I later learned my heat treating hypothesis was correct, and though I had initial doubts, it indeed handles the heat as they claimed it would. Pretty impressive stuff!)
Next up, I wired in some batteries. Went with two parallel packs of 18650s wired in series for a total of 7000mAh at 8.4v. Wired in the power board and connected LEDs to each voltage rail (the voltages were measuring weird with no load connected) and all voltages read exactly what they should. yayy!!
Also tested charging using a 9v 3a center-positive DC adapter and the battery voltage increased as expected. One odd thing I did notice though, is that a couple of my newer name-brand dc adapters really don't like this thing. They go into some sort of weird protection mode and refuse to supply the BMS with sweet sweet charge juice. Though all of my older dc adapters + a couple cheap aliexpress ones work perfect and charge as they should. Checked to see if there was maybe some backfeed happening or something, but there wasn't. Assuming those couple chargers just had some sort of incompatibility with the bms and I carried on since all the other charger worked fine with no issues.
Now here's where the fun beginnnnssss!
I dropped the power boards down into their dedicated cavity, put in the heatsink+fan (w/ thermal paste & copper sheet + thermal pad on top of course, just not shown). Then I wired in the ps2 board. As you can see, I did stray a bit from the typical advanced trim to make things easier on myself since my case design had some extra room for it.
Shoutout to @Legend for pointing out the extra 3.5v voltage point that I was missing! (little yellow wire coming down near the middle of the board).
Though I don't have too many photos of it (since my phone ran out of storage and I was too lazy to fix that problem), I printed the top shell and went to town slapping that all together as well.
I did mash in slightly modified versions of the LCD and stick bezels from @Wesk 's G-wii v2 remix. Apart from making it a little more low-profile, the screen bezel was pretty much perfect since I was using the same zj050na-08c screen. I did however, make my own way of mounting it since the remixed G-wii bezel is a bit tricky to glue in from my experience. I also modified the stick rings to work better with my case thickness & ps2 sticks I was using.
I'll likely need to design a new screen bezel for any future revisions to use a different screen entirely (foreshadowing). As you'll see farther down, I had some compatibility issues with the Ps2's vga output on the zj050na-08c.
The controller ic I'm using is a board I bought off aliexpress from @ohkin86 I believe (?). I designed a mount for it and glued the board in place.
As you can see in the top of the case, I made a mounting system for the LCD driver board and speakers too, as well as for all of my buttons. As for the sticks, I'm using some ps2-style arduino joysticks I got from aliexpress since the boards were already pre-made and ready to install (less work for me lol).
IT'S AAAALLIIVVEEEE!!!!
Though unfortunately, I ran into a weird screen issue while using VGA during my testing where the video was all shifted over to the left side. I thought maybe it was a vsync/hsync issue, but everything was wired up correctly. I checked the forums and found this post - detailing the same issue I was having. It seems they might've ended up taking composite signal instead for their build. But for some reason, my driver board's composite input does not work at all. So I ended up giving up after hours of troubleshooting and dug into one of my junk bins to find this s-video to VGA board and wired it in. Works like a charm and I'm actually super happy with the video quality! Way better than taking a composite signal would have been.
ANOTHER ISSUE....
Sooo after testing the portable for a while, it was shutting down anywhere between 20-40 minutes. I dug back in to try and figure out what was going on, and long story short, the regulators were experiencing some thermal drift (not fully going into thermal shutdown tho so that's good). As they heated up, the voltage became less stable leading to the ps2 board to shut down. Since I didn't want to redo my entire case and re-shell everything, I decided to give it a good ol' nyko intercooler treatment (jk, this fix actually WORKS unlike the intercooler, but just reminds me of how those things looked on the back of 360 consoles haha).
I had a ton of spare fans lying around from wii consoles I've trimmed, so I very carefully dremeled out a hole in the back and added a mounting bracket for a cooling fan. I designed it this way so that if I ever wanted to add a lower-profile fan, I could. I just wanted to use what I already had around at the moment rather than buy something else & wait longer to finish the portable. A little bulky but honestly I don't think it looks too bad. Plus, unintended feature...but it doubles as a kickstand to hold the console upright
lmaoI do plan on fixing the issue entirely in a possible future revision / redesign if I make more of these. Maybe even just going for a standard trim / stock regs to remove the custom reg board entirely, not super sure yet which route I'll go with that.
I didn't mention it above, but I did wire in a battery indicator that shows the battery life momentarily while pressing a button (<25% = red, and >25% = green).
I got exactly 3 hrs 25 min of battery life playing NFS Most Wanted. I think this game pushes the ps2 decently hard too, so I'd assume battery life may be even better with easier running games. Overall, extremely happy with the build despite the hiccups along the way, and I've been having a ton of fun playing Guitar Hero in the palms of my hands!
But anyway, here's some final photos! And as a cherry on top, I made a case for it too!!
