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A few posts back, I refreshed my original PlayStation 1 from back in the day.

Recently after an episode of My Life in Gaming, I picked up an OSSC (Open-Source Scan Converter), for a good price in AUD. (finally)

As well as a Pack-A-Punch SCART cable that killed me on shipping cost from the UK.

I picked up a PlayStation 2 Console fat model for cheap back in 2018, I already have my PS2 slim model from my childhood, but the reason I needed the fat model was because I also picked up a PlayStation 2 Ethernet\Network and IDE HDD Adaptor.

This was around the time I discovered FreeMcBoot, using this guide from MrMario2011, its now possible to soft mod your PlayStation 2 and run homebrew applications on it. - I'm rather late to the party on this, I didn't write about my experience with it, back in 2018, but that doesn't matter, the OSSC plays a bigger roll in my retro gaming setup; it allows me to use HDMI on my 75-inch Samsung TV, and will let me capture videos for *future projects*, before I was using composite through my AVX and the experience switching the sound input back was rather awful, my AMP has a HDMI hub on it, but it only outputs at 1080p, not 4k, which is fine to be honest, PlayStation 2 games look great on it!

I've tested it with GTA Vice City and Gran Turismo 4

The next step is to setup a NAS, I've picked one up for cheap, but I still need to get some hard drives for it. - the reason, running PlayStation 1 or 2 games off a USB stick, the music lags, because the port is USB 1.0 speed, the HDD is a much better experience, but I want a means to backup all of my games, from what I have read online, streaming game data from a network storage device is the way to go, the read speed of the DVD drive was only originally 1.5mbs, in theory the Network Adaptor should be able to keep up with it.

No doubt, physical media is dying, eventually the game discs I have will become unreadable and the laser in the PS2 DVD drive will stop working, so, I want to back all of my games up before its too late.

The other QOL pickup was a wireless controller, Dual Shock Gamepad for PS2 PlayStation 2, a generic brand off eBay, actually works rather well.

I also want to investigate PlayStation 2 development, after all I think it's a pretty capable system, and using FreeMcBoot means I won't have to track down and expensive Devkit.