[Music] hey guys welcome back to fix it Friday so this week I am very excited to be talking about installing the new pixel FX retro gem into the fat PS2 so this is the first digital to digital solution for outputting video and audio via HDMI on your PS2 um and I've been looking forward to this for a long time uh this project has been in the PIP line for quite some time I think a few years and um it's now released and uh this particular mod the Retro gem is awesome in the sense that it can be used on a number of different consoles so you can install it in the PS1 uh which I've already shown um in the Nintendo 64 uh the PS2 the fat models and the slim models um and also the Sega Dreamcast so it's a pretty versatile mod and uh to put it together succinctly what it does is it takes the digital audio and video directly from the PS2 it outputs it at up to 1440p without any noticeable input latency of any kind it has all sorts of awesome features including motion adaptive de interlacing which is really important for the PS2 and also all sorts of scan line options to give it more of a CRT look and feel so today what we're going to be doing is installing this into my uh console from early adulthood so I bought this around I think 2000 and 2001 um it's a 39,000 model and uh so I'm going to show you how to take this thing apart um install it safely and then we will give it a quick test all right let's get to it okay so I'm going to spend a little bit more time than usual on the tear down step uh for this PS2 mainly because taking apart ps2's is kind of annoying uh there's a lot of different Hardware versions and so what I'm showing you today is specific for the 39,000 series it may work on other models but um um but there again Sony made so many differences uh in Hardware so what I'm showing you here will probably not apply to other versions of the hardware um but yeah I'm I'm taking extra time on this because it's honestly rather easy to break something when taking apart a PS2 I've actually had a number of customers come to me with ps2's that they accidentally broke just because they were trying to take the thing apart and clean it so that should give you an indication of just how fragile these things are um all right so with that out of the way first step is we're going to be removing eight screws on the back here four of them on this side here are long the four over here are short so I use this little spudger tool just to make life easier um to take off the uh the little protective flaps here so you just get that under and if you twist they come right out and if you do it like that you're not going to break the plastic pegs that hold this thing in place uh you can use your fingernail but I do find that the more it's not that convenient and and people tend to break them that way um the rubber feet come off rather easily too and this I feel like is fine with your fingernail all right so we're going to go ahead and take off the top and to do that you actually lift this is the back of the console you just kind of lift that up and carefully just angle it off of the front like that and now I'm just going to rotate it and as you can see there is a flex cable right over here and this connects the power and eject uh mechanism uh people break this all the time I can't tell you how many times I've opened up a console and somebody ruined this thing so to take it off safely I use the spudger tool again I slide it under near where the flex cable is and if you just kind of like twist it like this like counterclockwise you'll lift it off of the pegs safely you won't break the flex cable you won't break the pegs that attach it here and now this thing is free and it just makes everything much easier to work on okay so the next thing we're going to do is remove a couple of screws on the top here this should allow us to flip it upside down and then remove the bottom half of the plastic so there's two here on the controller port and then there's two right here near the power switch and I think that's it I'm actually just going to remove this just to be sure you can slide this up oh yeah okay so there is one more hidden under the power switch okay so that's five screws total and they are all the same you don't have to separate them anyway okay so now if we flip this upside down the plastic lid comes straight off and now we have access to the bottom so one thing that's important to note on the 39,000 series is that the power supply and the bottom RF Shield um all of these parts are not compatible with the Retro gem so you either need one of two things you either need a donor 50,000 series PS2 motherboard um or not a motherboard sorry uh a console and you can take the shielding and the power supply from that and swap it onto here they're all pin compatible and that will allow you to work um with the gem the other option is to take um a rep PSU which is a modern power supply replacement and install that instead um in my case I have a donor 50,000 PS Su so I'm going to use the guts from that one and Transplant these working guts into that one um and that should take care of the problem all right so let me go ahead and continue taking this off okay so I think that's all the screws and I'm just going to remove the fan to which is right over here and I think the only thing that is holding the bottom RF shield into place are some plastic tabs that just keep it locked down so I'm just going to work on that right now all right right so sorry that was a little bit uh Awkward on my part there were there were three locks on the shield on mine right over here here and here so that just took a little effort um but yeah as you can see I'm not deliberately tearing down everything so I'm going to leave the DVD drive in place um I may disconnect this just for convenience because it's easy to reattach this uh this is a power and eject right here um but I'm not going to touch the the DVD drive in fact I'm going to actually reattach um at least one or two screws here just so that everything kind of can stay in place and doesn't flop around I'm also leaving the controller Port attached because this thing is a bit of a pain um well maybe from here I actually yeah you know what this is easy enough to to disconnect so you can potentially lift this up and pull that out um but yeah uh so so we're basically all set now um so let's go ahead and take a closer look at the board all right so I had a second thought about it and I think I might go ahead and show you how to take the DVD drive out just because uh board completely isolated like this is definitely easier to work on under the microscope and that's definitely how I plan to do the soldering for the uh the flex later on so let me show you this this is with the 39,000 series again this might not be applicable to the other versions so you can see you have a few Flex cables right over here so this one you lift up this latch you just pull the connector out and then this one's friction fit and so are these but you have to be careful because the glue on this little plastic um locking tab here this this can come loose um and then as a result this is not going to fit back in here so you definitely want to be very careful with these cables if you choose to do this um the official pixel FX guide it says again that this is optional but just for me I'm going to go ahead I've had experience taking these apart and putting them back together um and just for the convenience of using it under the microscope it's just better to have this thing off and then finally we're going to go ahead and remove the controller as well so you just flip this lock up and as you can see it just Falls right out at that point okay all right and then finally the entire uh top half I think we can choose to leave this on if we want to it doesn't interfere um with the rest of the installation all right so let's go from here okay so most of what we're going to be doing today is going to be located right here this is the DAC the digital analog converter for the PS2 and so we have a flex cable that is going to be positioned right about here or so and it's going to solder on to um either this chip directly or to this resistor array that is um connected to the chip so the first order of business is going to be removing a couple of components so there's two ceramic capacitors up here that need to be removed there's also a ceramic cap here and a resistor that need to be removed on the bottom um I have a gh19 revision board so if you have a different board the components you might need to pull off are going to be maybe not the same as mine so absolutely take a look at the official install documents and just see what you have to do um but yeah this applies to a gh19 revision so let's go ahead and start by removing those components so we're just going to apply solder on both sides just like that and they just come right off and I'll follow up with some braid and then just flatten them out so that they don't get in the way all right so those surface mount components are now out of the way so the next thing we're going to do is get rid of this this is the toss link so the mini HDMI is going to be located there once we're all done um there's more than one way of pulling this thing off but I think what I'm going to do is just it's these three points right here so I think what I'm going to do is just heat these up at once and then just bend the toss link and it should just come right off without too much trouble yeah that's very easy actually just heating them up and pulling and it comes right off without any damage so I could potentially resolder this back on in the future if I ever wanted to okay but knowing me I probably won't all right so now with that out of the way we're going to turn our attention over here to where the controller uh gets attached and so there's a controller Flex PCB that you have to install this is really really tiny so I'm going to do my best to show this on camera but I know I'm going to have to switch to the microscope and that's something I unfortunately have to do off camera but let's go ahead and try to get in a little bit closer and I can show you what I'm going to be doing next okay so I've switched over to my high power microscope and I um use this for filming cuz it's just much easier but in order to do the initial attachment I actually used a different microscope my binocular scope um because you have depth of field so now I'm coming in with some flux and I'm using a fine tip to just work over each of the pads and make sure that they are connected to the pins um so with this particular installation you have a couple of choices about what to do with the solder that you use so you can either use Leed solder like I'm doing here and you can mix it very thoroughly with the lead free solder that's on the PCB you can also remove all that lead free solder and replace it entirely with leaded solder or you could do a leadfree install and just use leadfree solder throughout the entire thing I personally don't care much for lead free solder and so in this case I decided it would be best just to mix them together and so yeah what you can see me doing here is just mixing them making sure that all the points are connected using plenty of flux to make sure that there aren't any Bridges between the pins and I do this here on camera but I also go back with my binocular microscope because that has depth of field and it's way easier to work with versus this thing right here um so so yeah so that's basically the process that we're going through and then afterwards you can test to make sure that there aren't any shorts between the pins and you can also take your multimeter and go side by side and make sure there aren't Bridges between pins as well and so that's what you can see me doing right here all right so now that the controller Flex PCB has been installed we're going to go ahead and proceed with installing the main Flex that goes on the Dack right here so it's essentially going to sit like this and it's going to go against these resistor arrays that gives us the RGB lines and um then there's a whole row of uh pins that needs to contact on this side and this side you'll notice that I put some capton tape on the PCB this is just to avoid any accidental shorts um between the 5volt connection which is right here and these pins over here so this just protects against any accidents uh that may or may not happen um so yeah that's essentially it the only other thing to mention is this little Crystal oscillator right here so um the problem with it is that it's actually not little at all it's rather tall um so you can um install with it still in place but it's definitely harder to do that because uh it just gets in the way of the flex so you can replace it with a lower height um modern Crystal oscillator and uh I'll have a link in the description for that that's also something that pixel FX suggests but it's not mandatory uh in my particular case I'm not going to change out the crystal mainly just because I don't have any on hand and I really don't want to wait I really can't wait to try this I've been wanting this for such a long time and uh I'm pretty sure I'll be fine with handling the installation even though it's here um but if you're you know relatively new at doing these installs I would absolutely highly recommend removing this thing and replacing it with the shorter height version uh all right so we're going to switch over to the other camera and let's get started okay so just as before I used the binocular microscope to um just tack everything down because it's way too difficult to do it with this Higher Power Scope um so everything's tacked down but not every pin was connected and so now I'm coming in with my chisel tip and you can see that I'm going up and down on each pin using plenty of flux and just a small amount of solder at the edge of the tip and you want the solder not just to make a connection from underneath but also from up above and create something that's called a fillet um so that's what I'm trying to do here um I again just like I did on the controller Flex I'm washing the solder meaning that I'm mixing the leaded solder with the leadfree solder that's currently on the board um you really have to do that thoroughly uh if you're going to go with leaded solder because um otherwise cracks conform with thermal expansion over time and your solder joints will break um but yeah as long as you mix you should be totally fine so there is one thing I do here which is a mistake so I'm going to be working on the right side of the Chip and I'm not quite so careful with my chisel tip and I accidentally desoldered one of those ceramic capacitors on the flex cable itself so if you're doing this install just be mindful when you work on this side that you don't um accidentally swipe off that cap thankfully I was able to find it and I reattached it off camera so it wasn't the biggest deal yeah you can see right there I just swiped it um but yeah it all worked out in the end okay so the next step is to take out your multimeter put it into continuity mode and start doing a bunch of tests on your work uh the reason why is that um you want to make sure that these connections are really solid before you close up the PS2 because it's really annoying to take apart the PS2 um after testing and if you find that there's a problem like a short somewhere it's really a pain in the butt to go back and um disassemble and then reassemble the console the other thing is that you want to make sure that there are no shorts between ground and any of the power rails because obviously that would create problems for you so what I'm doing right here is I'm testing between the legs of the flex cable and the tops of those resistor arays just to make sure that I have a good connection between them uh if I don't then I need to Reflow and make sure that the connection is strong and solid I think I ended up having to Reflow about two or three connections overall the next set of tests you need to do is to go from one pin to an adjacent pin and make sure there aren't any Bridges between them um so with this installation it's actually a pretty difficult one and this stuff is all very small so it's really easy for a bridge to happen and not even notice it um if there's a bridge you can just apply more flux and have a clean iron and you can Wick it away or maybe with a little bit of solder braid you can Wick it away um there are some places where there are intended to be shorts so on the left hand side of the chip there's four pins that are ground so all of those should be connected to the same thing um so that's about really the important things that you need to do here just be thorough and make sure everything is well connected okay so at this point all of the difficult stuff is really out of the way and so what we're going to be doing now is taking a wire and just attaching it to the five r regulator on the PS2 and connecting the other end to the pad that supplies 5 volts to the Retro gem um so yeah it's a really straightforward thing I ended up using a thicker gauge wire but I later found out that I could use something like 30 gauge Kar wire and that would be fine um I mean really you have plenty of options here because a thick wire is just fine you have plenty of room for something like that so um but yeah from what I've read afterwards you can use something finer gauge and it's okay okay so we're also going to go ahead and take the other end of the controller Flex PCB and attach it to the main Flex so what I do here is just add a little bead of solder onto one of the pads and then just come in with the controller flex and uh it's a little bit tricky to get it lined up exactly the way you want I think I've ended up using my hands um but uh once you get it lined up exactly the way you want then you can just tack it down and then solder in the remaining pads to get everything all the way you want okay so the soldering is almost complete and there's really only one other thing left to do which is to run a wire all the way from this pad right here pad number five all the way down to the far end of the board um right over here to this little pad right here so this is the reset lines this lets you do in-game reset just by going from here to here so once that's done there's only one little bit of soldering left to do and that is on the Retro gem itself all right so let's finish this thing up okay so the last little bit of soldering that we have to do on the Retro gem is on the board itself and basically you have to do is just set a bunch of jumpers to tell the board what it's being connected to so in this case we are connecting the gem to a PS2 and so you close jumpers c d e and J and I believe that this is true for all revisions of the PS2 it doesn't matter whether it's fat or slim or any of that kind of stuff okay so with all of that out of the way we are now ready to start testing this thing and seeing if it works so the first thing we're going to do is partially reassemble the console and we are going going to test uh analog video okay so I have the PS2 partially reconnected and we are going to just do a quick test here so you can see here this is the power supply that I got from the donor so this is a 50,000 series PS2 uh power supply um and it's might not be clear but I actually have the little plastic spacer um also in installed and that is extremely important here because um this thing has Main's voltage it has 120 AC in the United States and 220 in Europe so um if you don't have that spacer on you can very easily fry some stuff destroy your board maybe start a fire maybe kill yourself so very serious absolutely do this carefully and safely by having that plastic spacer inserted so um I've gone ahead and plugged the console into Main's voltage I also have the uh AV multi out plugged in as well and so now what we're going to do is we're just going to test the console with analog video um it should boot up and we want to see normal colors and normal behavior um I already know that there's not going to be any shorts because I already tested um for shorts on the 3.3 volt Rail and the 5vt rail and there aren't any shorts um on the primary voltages coming into the console so there shouldn't be any issues there but you know there might be issues with the pixel bu so there might be some shorted um uh components on those resistor arrays for example we don't know uh I don't think so but this is partly why we're testing on analog so let's go ahead and turn it on and have a look okay all Ah that's a relief okay so it's booting into the normal main menu and all the colors at least seem to be be there uh so this is a really good sign this means that our our console is working um there's stuff I need to test like the button combination and all that but to do that I have to actually have things plugged in via HDMI so what I'm going to do now is actually uh turn this thing off and we're going to go ahead and start assembling using the RF shield from the 50,000 series PS2 okay so here is the bottom shield from the 50,000 series PS2 that I um I took so I actually took my 30,000 shield and power supply and I actually successfully transplanted that so so if you do this you know don't feel like you're killing one PS2 to install it into another you can actually switch all that stuff onto the other PS2 and it will work just fine so I'm going to go ahead and then just do the one and only case mod and it's this one piece right here this is the shielding for the toss link uh this is the toss link that we removed much earlier so all you got to do is just bend this back and forth and um it should just come right off so it's not that complicated to do and you just got to make sure that this piece is nice and flat which it is and that's it all right so let's go ahead and start reassembling this thing okay so there actually are a few more steps that need to be followed here for um a 39,000 like this that you are using the shield from a 50,000 so the first thing is this little piece right here there used to be a little piece of metal pointed upward over here and you're supposed to just bend it flat I actually ended up accidentally breaking it off but honestly I don't particularly think that matters I don't think it's going to get in the way or do anything um so yeah it's out of the way and I shouldn't have any issues there there uh the other issue which is very important is these pins right here so this piece here has to be uh shortened so all of this plastic here has to get cut off so I'm going to go ahead and uh take care of that and I'll show you the final result all right so the console is a little bit closer to fully assembled I've got the fan back in and the power cord um which routes right underneath here um so all of that is ready to go and so now I'm going to try to put the uh The Shield the modified Shield back on so the first thing I've got to do is just take this little spacer here this needs to sit right here in that little spot and now from here hopefully we can get this thing to attach okay I think that's about right um so you can see that the flex just just comes in from here and now I just got to reassemble everything so I'm going to go ahead and do that reattach the power supply and then we will move on to the next step okay so now we're going to go ahead and get the um retro gem all set up and so first thing we've got to do is uh just take this adapter piece here and slide it into this 3D printed Mount and this in turn is going to go into the gem like so so now we've got this whole this whole set up like this and from here we're going to attach it to this Mount right here so it's going to ultimately sit something like that more or less um so what we need to do really is just thread these screws through just going to start by just threading these together this just helps keep everything stable and now with this larger Mount here we have these uh let me see if I can Shine the Light better there we go you have these little brackets for holding the nuts in place and that's two I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to pull this off but once those are in you just got to line up the screws and tighten them on the nuts no that one did not work this one is going to though you don't want to overtighten them too you'll damage the uh PCB which we definitely don't want there we go that one's in all right so I'll just do this final one off camera and uh then this thing should be almost ready to go okay so this final step drove me crazy but I think I finally have it all set up um so what I found is that uh a few extra things need to be done in order to get the Gem to sit properly here one was that I had to kind of move a few things out of the way so I flattened these guys out I had to um partially desolder this and just kind of loosen it just to push this safety cap out of the way um I also found that these pins here where the power comes in um were just a bit too high so I actually snipped them uh with my Flush Cutters so that they're you know flush with this piece of plastic and just out of extra precaution I put a piece of capton tape on the underside of the gem just to make sure that nothing makes contact that isn't supposed to um and then then over here I also found that I had to trim the sides of the optical Port just a little bit in order to get the part to fit correctly um that was not really a big deal now the final part um is that once the gem is mounted in place like this you need to use these um machine screws to lock it into place so there's one that's slightly longer that goes here there's a shorter one and that one should go here so let's go ahead and get this thing put in okay and finally this is the Wi-Fi connection here so we're going to use this for firmware updates and what have you and that is going to end up just living right over here so I just need to remove the adhesive or the paper on the adhesive of rather okay and let me just adjust this a little bit there we go and then that guy just sticks right over there on that piece of metal okay so we should be pretty much done at this point I'm going to go ahead and do the final case assembly and then I'll show you how it looks in the end and we'll do a final test on HDMI okay so everything is finally fully assembled and man I've got to say it just took me quite a while to get this thing buttoned up I um really wasn't anticipating that but it it ended up just being a couple of unexpected things that I just um really wasn't anticipating from reading the install documents but uh but yeah anyhow the um the thing I wasn't expecting is that I had to slightly uh enlarg in the spot here where the optical Port used to be because this 3D printed Mount really didn't quite fit and actually the mini HDMI would not have fit either it was just ever so slightly uh too big to fit in the original Port um so I had a cut over here and also on the top as well to make everything fit um but you know that wasn't the end of the world now that that's all done everything fits perfectly and it actually looks really clean on the outside I think that's one of the things I really love about the pixel FX installs is that everything looks really clean and it's either a no cut solution or you know very minor cutting so this was extremely minor All Things Considered um so I've gone ahead and installed my hard drive back in here I have a whole bunch of games so I'll use this to test um and then I've also got my memory card and I have this this um new open source memory card which um has a Micro SD in it so it lets me save um basically as many games as I want onto it so it's super convenient um so yeah let's go move over to the test bench and let's see how this thing performs okay so I've got the PS2 plugged in and this is my new test station that I'm using just to run various tests on any consoles that come in to my workshop um so yeah I've got um my hard drive installed here which has a full complement of games and then I've got um you know opl that I'm going to use to just demonstrate and test this so let's go ahead and give it a test and see how things look all right that's a very good sign there we go looking beautiful um this uh TV by the way it's a 42-in plasma TV I literally found it on the curb in perfect working order I didn't have to do anything to fix it but it's an older set so um bear in mind that the blacks on this are pretty bad um that's not reflective of the Retro gem that's just the fact that this is an old TV but it's very good for my purposes because it runs up to 1080P and I can do all sorts of tests with it so I'm going to go ahead and get open PS2 loader running and I'll just pick some game and then we can go through the Retro gem menu and see what it can do for us all right so we're in the main menu for opl and I'm just going to pick uh Jack and Daxter I mean there's so many good PS2 games it's really hard to just pick something here but I'm just going to try this and let's just see how it looks all right well so far so good but yeah I mean I can already tell everything is super crisp and the motion adaptive de interlacing makes a huge difference with the Retro gem because most PS2 games are 480i content and so you need a way of De interlacing that and the older way of doing this was with something called Bob De interlacing but that gives you a lot of flicker um this motion adaptive de interlacing it looks a lot better this is something that's also present in other um other devices like the Retro Tink 5x I believe has a similar kind of thing in place um but yeah I can tell you that the PS2 looks just absolutely incredible it's way better than what I was used to on the ossc which is how I was previously using this console so let me go ahead and go into the menu and actually test everything to make sure that it's working cuz I haven't actually done that yet so to do that you hit L1 R1 the right button and circle and that brings us into the main menu right here so uh this menu is basically the same as what you see on other retro gem um um you know installs on different consoles the thing I want to do is go here into system and I want to go to the debug self test and as you can see there are Hearts all across the board so the clock looks good all of the RGB lines look good everything has a heart if there is an x on this list when you do the installation that means that either a connection is missing or maybe two neighboring connections are bridged together either way something is wrong and you would also see this in the composite video test which is why I did that first um but yeah I suspected that this was going to look fine because again if composite looked bad it would have um it would have shown something here um so yeah everything is looking great um I'm not really going to go into all the features of the Retro gem because that's kind of a video of its own and that's really not the kind of videos I do I mainly focus on installations here um but you can go up to 1440p so if you go into output resolution here you can go very high up into 1440p you have all sorts of options for scan lines to give it more of a CRT effect which actually really does make the PS2 look very nice um so yeah overall I have to say that I am extremely happy with the results of this mod um it looks outstanding it makes it extremely easy to set up and connect this PS2 to any television just plug andplay basically um and so yeah that's why I really wanted to install this on my personal console all right so that's it for this week's video um if you guys like this kind of content then consider subscribing to the channel I'm going to have videos out like this um every week and of course if you have a PS2 that you want this installed in or if you have any console that needs to be repaired or modified you can always reach me directly at oneup restorations.com all right guys well thank you very much for watching and I will see you in the next [Music] one [Music]
