I had a PS2 slim years ago and was annoyed that it wouldn’t let me use a “dual analog” controller I had kicking around to play PS2 games, eg for second player. Seemed like an unnecessarily hostile move to force an upgrade there when all the functionality other than rumble was clearly present.

But of course it’s the same now on PS5. I still have my PS4 pads and use them to round out 4p couch coop for broforce, overcooked, moving out, etc, but actual PS5 games will only work with PS5 pads.

Strange analog stick fact: According to YouTuber Wulff Den, the first ever game that used an analog stick for third-person camera rotation was only Super Mario Sunshine in 2002. A GameCube game that came out more than two years after the release of the PS2, and several years after the N64 and the PS1 Dual Analog controller.

I guess some ideas seem only obvious in hindsight.

Omg, I remember exactly that intermediate joystick. It was lighter than the dualshock, so when you held a dualshock it felt cool, especially when it started rumbling!

So it's unrelated to the analog face buttons?

Alternately:

https://archive.is/vxjmQ

15 hours later, it still is suffering the hug of death.

I actually have a PS2 and don't use it much, as it's a pain to hook up to a modern TV. Most games don't support progressive scan, which forces your TV to deinterlace, which im my case adds enough latency to make it unpleasant to play. There's some boutique hardware that can deinterlace with less latency, but then it starts to get expensive really fast.

Ideally you'd have to buy a CRT TV along with it.

The author claims they could not find a buyer for theirs but they added hard drives to the finished PS2s. Browsing EBay finds a plain refurbished PS2 for 160-200 from seller with 99.3 percent rating with over 1100 sold. The mods in the article seem really nice - allowing you to rip games you own to a hard drive and play games off the hard drive instead of waiting for DVD seek/read times. There are not a lot of details about the cost of the mod in article but I’m guessing it would add a couple hundred to his sale price .

Mercari + Buyee will get you things that are decent.

Here's just one of many listings. Shipping depends on where you are of course. And it's a Japanese model so you'll need to do stuff based on that. https://jp.mercari.com/item/m93693596459

Have you considered emulating instead?

Either spend a lot for an eBay seller that looks reputable or find them at garage sales or thrift stores where they’re cheap enough to buy and try if you can’t fire it up there.

If you don't care to do the work yourself, I've bought many modded consoles from Etsy sellers and have always had a great experience.

The ones you can find online are sold by people who know the market all too well so the prices are high. Plus it's online so there's no guarantee about anything.

Pawn shops, thrift stores, or their "modern" equivalents (EasyCash, CashConverters, etc. YMMV) would be a good start. I got mine out of a pile for 10€ at a countryside GiFi (French store) ten years ago.

Try a gaming store that offers a guarantee? I don't know where you are, but here in the UK, second-hand stores such as Cash Converters are full of PS2s, fat and slim. Dedicated second-hand entertainment stores like CEX will test consoles before buying them off people, and claim to offer a several-months guarantee.

You could also check out https://ongoldscar.com, sometimes there is a PS2 in the current drop (repaired, certified and with warranty)

Look for the slim models. They are much more reliable than the standard PS2.

Buy one and replace the laser they are cheap and plentiful

The 2 OEM Dual Shock 2 I got with my console, worked for 10+ years right until I sold it

Generics varied in quality vastly but never felt quite that sturdy I regret having to sell that PS2, specially seeing the current resurgence

My PS3 controllers are still working perfectly almost 20 years later. Yet I’ve had to replace my PS5 controllers three times so far, due to the joysticks not reading their position correctly. Each one lasted about a year and a half.

My PS2 Fat still works perfectly. The only difficulty I had was getting it running on a HDMI TV, but that was fixed with a fairly well known HDMI adapter and inputting of a specific controller combo to get it into the correct display mode.

I was kinda shocked to see the state of some of those PS2 consoles.

My fat PS2 stopped reading discs and was replaced with a slim when you could still buy them new. The spindle that holds the disc exploded in it over 10 years ago.

I'm not sure what what the reliability is long term, but the PS2 is the only console I've had to replace. Kind of funny that the replacement failed too. In comparison, I have a working GameCube, Wii, and gave a working Sega Genesis to a friend a couple of years ago

It's not that they were expensive (the HDD + adapter probably being the most expensive part), but rather that the PS2s on the used market are so cheap no one was willing to pay the extra, even if it's been refurbished.

He said in the comments on the post that he valued the parts, units, and his time at about 100 bucks, and put them up for 150, which no one would pay. This was back in 2022ish.

If the devkit is a DTL-H, the instructions are pretty much the same as retail systems. For DTL-T (e.g. DTL-T10000 or DTL-T15000), there is lots of info here, including a link to a disassembly guide: https://archive.org/details/ps2_tool_guide/

They're fine for data storage, but CF card controllers for large capacity(16GB and above) had issues with severe stuttering and performance issues in random reads/writes causing OS to become unresponsive for seconds at a time if not BSoDing - no, they were not instantaneous for everything just by being flash based. There were also some problems in some SSDs that the SSDs sometimes take much longer than HDDs to complete its own firmware bootup process, so much so that BIOS might consider the disk broken. Could be those reasons.

Or it could be just that HDDs are still more economical than SSDs. About ~2x cheaper for 2.5" 1TB as of now.

Most CF cards are marked as "removable drive" by firmware and can't be changed. I'm not sure PS will accept that.

Industrial CF cards that don't do that are very expensive.

Most ps1 games only supports the d-pad. If you have a dualshock controller but want to move your dude with the analog stick instead of the d-pad, you activate the analog mode.

Emulate the old D-pad.

It's kind of a silly question, but: when the N64 came out in 1996, MIPS CPUs were high-end workstation chips; by the time the PS2 was released in 2000, SGI had effectively declared MIPS a dead-end and was shipping Intel-based machines. So I'd say the N64 wins handily: peak MIPS was a MIPS chip in every living room, powering video games that felt like the future.

Even though the PS2 won its generation - and the N64 decidedly did not - that was despite and not because of its technical prowess; it was a less impressive machine than its two closest competitors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCI_Blue_Mountain

The SGI Onyx2

I certainly miss having COP2 instructions.

Some older PS1 games didn't work with the Dual Shock in analogue mode. You needed to press the button to disable the analogue sticks to play those games.

Emulate the old D-pad.

Basically acted as a trigger. So if you pressed harder the game could respond. I only really remember driving games taking advantage of it though, and can't remember the game but remember being super annoyed at some action-rpg-like game where it used it to differentiate between actions but running into issues of it interpreting all of my presses as hard presses.

I was going to comment on this too. I notice this happens with what feels like more traditional plastics - what exactly is going with these? It feels like over time they are breaking down and liquefying, or releasing their oils?

I believe isopropyl alcohol is safer for both plastics and humans. It even doubles as hand sanitizer refills!

Isopropyl alcohol works well too.