Sony may not be making handheld game consoles anymore, but that hasn’t stopped makers from building their own. Sometimes it just takes a while.

Hacker Darkwing has managed to take the guts of a PlayStation 2 and stuff them into a portable game console, along with a screen, game controllers, batteries, and a Raspberry Pi, which is used to load games.

The end result is a handheld game system called the PIS2, and it looks pretty great.

It’s also a project that took a very long time to complete — Darkwing started working on the PIS2 in 2013, put things on hold for a few years, and then documented progress starting in 2017 in a thread at the BitBuilt forum.

Now the PIS2 is fully functional, and Darkwing has posted a seven minute video showing the system in action.

According to Darkwing, the Raspberry Pi works as an SMB server, with games loading onto the PS2 hardware via Ethernet. There’s no need for emulation or for an optical disc drive, and most games run smoothly at full speed.

We’ve seen a bunch of similar projects using stripped-down Nintendo Wii hardware in recent years, and even a DIY handheld Sega Dreamcast. But I’m always impressed at the ingenuity of hackers who manage to make old hardware feel new in this way.

via Engadget

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3 replies on “PIS2 is a DIY handheld PlayStation 2”

  1. While this is nice and all… I just think it’s too thick, too heavy, and the battery life is abysmal.

    I think the best option to play PS2 on the go, is to use a GPD Win2. It runs nearly flawless and lasts a decent long time/battery life of 3-5 hours. And in the near future, we will eventually get a proper port of PS2 Emulator on Android. So it should run more smoothly and run for longer (4-8 hours?) once its emulated on a phone like the Samsung S11 Plus or OnePlus 8 Pro.

    So when that happens, that would be best way to play PS2 on the Go, and projects like this will become ever-more pointless for aficionados around. Sort of like people who used a Desktop Computer to build a Briefcase PC, it was neat, but now you have Laptops instead.

  2. Isn’t the Raspberry pi said to be not powerful enough to run PS2 games? Though I actually am impressed by the project and I like that it looks professional.

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