[thechat] Playstation 2 Help

[seb potter]

On Mon, 2002-12-02 at 16:24, Ashok Hariharan wrote:
> A friend of mine has bought a new playstation 2 from spain.
> The games are really expensive so he has bought a load of
> "manafactured in taiwan" games.
>
> Unfortunately :
>      1) the DVD player on it is region locked.
>      2) he is unable to play the "taiwanese" games.

Yep, welcome to European consumer electronic hell. I don't know who
likes to shaft us the most, the Americans, the Japanese, or our own
governments.

> There are some people selling mod-chips for the PS2 here
> which they will claim will solve the above 2 problems.

Yep. The best mod chips for the PS2 are the Messiah chips... check out
http://www.divineo.co.uk/ for a good range.

> I spoke to some people who had bought mod-chips to solve
> the above 2 problems -- sadly all of them had various problems
> ranging from "my ps2 died", "my dvd player stopped working but
> now i can play those made-in-china games" and vice-versa....
>
> Is there a bullet-proof mod-chip available (is mod-chipping worth
> the effort anyway...?)

No. There is *no such thing* as a fool-proof mod-chip. There is a very
good chance that installing one, especially if you do it yourself, will
fry your PS2 totally, leaving you with the world's least attractive
paperweight. Modding a PS2 *is a very bad idea*.

Really. You're better off buying second-hand games and waiting a while.
If you can cope with this and just want multi-region DVD use, get
DVDRegionX, which allows you to watch any region DVDs without hardware
modding.

That said, when it works, it's pretty cool. The new Messiah 2 PRO is
supposedly a very nice piece of hardware.

Just remember, if you can't afford a new PS2 when the mod-chip fries it,
then you shouldn't be modding your PS2.

- seb

--
seb potter - seb at poked.org
http://poked.org - It's what you value.