Retro Journal: PlayStation 2 - Part 1

One of the goals that I had when I went back to visit my parents during Chinese New Year this year was to try and get my PlayStation 2 out of storage and see if I could manage to get it to work on a HDTV. I had not tried this previously because I only have an HD monitor while I'm living in Kuala Lumpur, so it didn't cross my mind to attempt this until fairly recently when I started thinking about collecting games for the older generation of systems. I was personally pretty excited to give it a try because I theorized that I could use the AV cable that came with my AVerMedia Live Gamer Portable (LGP) with the PlayStation 2 as the AV cables of the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 are the same.

However, to my dismay, it didn't work out quite as I theorized and I spent the rest of my time back in Brunei looking up ways to get it to work. I was disheartened as many videos I saw online were quite straight forward, just change the Component Output from RGB to Y Pb/Cb Pr/Cr and you're all set. But I couldn't figure out if the problem lied on my LGP being an older model or the AV cable not working. So I continued to search and managed to find a Mini AV2HDMI in one of the shops in The Mall.

While the device worked as advertised, it only supports composite inputs. Which was not very good in the first place. It was abundant, just not good. So this forced me to think of other solutions that I might have and what came to mind was something that I had used previously for capturing video on the PS3, EasyCAP.

EasyCAP was pretty much the go-to solution for video capture in the late 2000s. High definition television adoption at the time wasn't as prevalent as it is today and there was a market for capturing video straight onto hard drives without the need of a VCR or DVD burner. But long story short, I somehow managed to accrue 3 of them. Each of them with different chipsets and input capabilities even though their exteriors looked the same, besides how messy they look after being left unattended for ages.

I had to pry each of them open to see which chipset they had and find the right drivers to go with them. A task made slightly more difficult that the company that made these devices did not have the latest drivers on their website.

My main focus was on the EasyCAP that had S-Video input working. I only managed to find one or two drivers that actually worked. If you are looking for drivers that work with the eMPIA Technology 2861 chipset, here is a link to where I got the driver that works with Windows 10.

With the hardware all setup, next comes the software to capture the video which I will write about in my next Retro Journal.