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Comment by freditup | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know the best way to get a reliably working PS2 nowadays? I happen to have a bunch of old PS2 games and would love to have a reliable PS2 to be able to use them with. But buying online seems fairly fraught - how do you have any guarantee you get a reliable device? And they seem to be fairly expensive now.

(I couldn't read the article because the site was currently down for me, so apologies if this comment is off-topic, but hopefully relevant!)

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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.

Yes! That latency was very quick to induce nausea for me while trying to play Battlefront with my son. I thought maybe it was just the frame rate… but latency makes more sense.

Thanks for sharing that and solving a mystery for me!!

The base retrotink models work well and are inexpensive.

You mean the 99 USD one? After duties, VAT and shipment to EU, it will most likely get more expensive than the PS2 itself.

If your console supports either RGB output via SCART or YPbPr via component cables, which an European PS2 definitely does, I would recommend you the GBS-C. You can find it in Amazon for less than 80 euros, and the upscaling quality is great.

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

Sadly, does not ship to the US.

IF you're really dedicated, you can find Japanese reshippers.

Does Buyee not ship to the US?

Have you considered emulating instead?

There are still many beloved games that don't emulate well.

Really? Like what?

In my case I'm a big fan of Ace Combat and PCSX2 has rendering issues in both software and hardware modes:

https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/issues/10976

https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/issues/12173

It's gotten better (no more black untextured planes!) but the best experience is still on original hardware.

The Stuntman series is a still painful example.

Blame the odd non-IEEE-754 floating point implementation changing physics enough that AI fails most of the missions which softblocks progress quite egregiously

Made me laugh though, when in the first level that it completely blocks, the director tells you to get close to a pickup, but the car you're chasing smashes the pickup to the sky like Team Rocket.

Last I heard there was a feature branch for testing a software implementation of floating point that would fix these issues, but naturally it would be a lot slower. I haven't tried it myself.

> The Stuntman series is a still painful example.

I tried PS2 emulation just a year to ago, just to play Stuntman and found the same thing, painfully slow and barely playable.

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

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