My sister's birthday was back in May and for her birthday I was going to put a modchip in her PS2 so she could ... back her games up and play them without fear of messing up the real copy - yeah, that's it.
Well, I got the chip Tuesday, finally got around to putting it in, and had a hell of a time opening the case to begin with. I finally got it open, installed the chip, and put it all back together. In the process of putting it back together I pinched the controller / memory card ribbon cable. I realized I had it pinched when the stupid thing wouldn't close. So I straightened the ribbon cable only to find that the ribbon cable came out of its connector. I tried to put it back in but it seemed as if the clip just wouldn't keep the ribbon cable in. I tried to get it to stay in but I ended up just wedging something in there to keep the clip down. I put it all back together (again), took it to the living room, hooked it up, and put in a real PS2 game - came up just fine. Then I tried one of the co..., er backup games that I have and it gave me what they refer to as the RSOD (red screen of death). It wouldn't boot the backup one. I also tried to use a controller and sure enough - it didn't work (because of that loose ribbon cable I assumed).
Along with the chip comes a diagnostic LED board. It's basically a little board that you can hook up that turns LEDs red for bad connections and green for good connections. The only problem is that the board needed a 9v battery connected to it with a special connector (that I did not have). It was about midnight and I had to get to bed. I decided I'd get what I needed at radio shack the next day (Wednesday).
There was one connector that I had a little difficulty connecting when I put it together and the directions warn that problems can arise if you don't have a good ground connection so I figured these two things would be the first things I verified on Wednesday before using the LED board. I just hoped it worked.
-=Wednesday=-I picked up the connector and the 9v adapter from radio shack just in case I needed to run the LED diagnostic board.
I rechecked the potential problem connection and checked continuity of all the wires with a multimeter - they all checked out good. I also soldered the ground connection to a ground point. I put it back together and tested it again - still didn't work. I was pissed. What I did find during all this was that I didn't have the controller / memory card ribbon cable all the way into the connector. I put it all the way in and it clipped down (and held) with no problems anymore. Hey, at least one issue fixed.
Anyway, it was time for the LED board since I still could not boot a backup game. I opened the packages for the connector to the board and the connector to the battery only to find out that both had male connectors - no way to put them together. So I had to solder wires between the two to create a make-shift connector thing. Anyway, I finally got
*that* put together and hooked the battery up. One of the LEDs lit up but no others. I wasn't sure if that was correct so just as I was about to disconnect the battery I realized that the LED that was lit was smoking and
then realized that it wasn't really an LED at all but rather a resistor or diode that was burning up / in flames. So the LED board was toast. Great - I had a non-working PS2 and no LED diagnostic board. Now what? Well, I was installing the DMS4 EZI Lite which is made from the DMS4 (regular) so I decided to look to see if I could just solder the points thinking that the little push-on clip things weren't working right and the only way it would work right was if I actually soldered it. I wasn't looking forward to it since that meant about 2 more hours of work but it was about all I had left to try. So I was looking through the installation instructions to see a picture to see if I could actually solder it when I came across the troubleshooting section of the booklet. One of the Q/A's was that with the chip in, when trying to boot a backup / import game it would go to the RSOD. The answer was that in default, from the dealer configuration the bios wasn't programmed to boot copied / import games and in order to do that you would have to install a 3rd party bios flash. I did some searching and found a 3rd party flash called ToxicBios with the current revision being 1.3. I burned the CD, popped it in, and viola - the screen came up asking me if I wanted to flash. I answered yes, let it do its thing and by jove it worked. I put the backup game in and this time it worked. It probably worked from the get-go I just didn't know I had to flash the bios in order to work with backup games.
So after what seemed like a nightmare and about 5 hours of fussing with various things, my sister now has a fully functional modded PS2 capable of playing any game you can throw into it (PAL, NTSC, backup, import, homebrew, etc...)
