Bacteria's project - Modding a GP2x....FINISHED

bacteria · Post by **bacteria** » Thu Dec 06, 2007 7:13 am

Decided to use a material I can reinforce easier, and something I can work on this afternoon, so going to use the cardboard tube from Xmas paper wrapping; it is quite strong, smooth surface, easy to cut accurately, has a diagonal line I could use as a "design feature" if it works. I can reinforce it with card triangles and Polyfiller (if I need to).

bacteria · Post by **bacteria** » Thu Dec 06, 2007 10:50 am

I cut up the controller mobo, I only need the part for the digital joystick area.

Extracted. I damaged part of the trace (the dremel slipped a bit), so I wired it back on the tracers. I also added solder to the connections I need for the direction controls.

Extracted mobo with joystick on top:

I realised that I needed an extra button for the centre click button on the GP2x, so I added another one to the top of the others. The tact switches and speakers are all hot glued in place.

Now I know the circle area I have to play with by the speakers (in the corners) I can make the corners circular.

View:

That's all for today, folks!

bacteria · Post by **bacteria** » Tue Dec 11, 2007 6:28 am

I received my GP2x a kind chap on the GP2x forum sent me from Australia this morning, for the cost of shipping. He also sent me a freebie - an MP3/MP4/camera gadget he was about to chuck away as it didn't work, in case I wanted it...

I haven't checked the GP2x yet, screen is smashed, but that doesn't matter as I don't want the screen anyway.

I was curious about the other gadget, so I set to work on it - I presumed the problem was the Li-ion battery (they don't last forever), so the first thing I did was open the baby up, snip off the power lines, drill a hole in the back of the case, attach a battery pack (the Li-ion was 3.7v at 800mAh; I attached 3 x AA's at photo quality at 2700mAh!) and all works fine. Nice free gadget!!

Camera quality is poor and unusable, NES games are a bit slow but very playable, sound is nice and it is a fun little gadget, I will have some fun with it! I removed the Chinese NES ROMS in the system (via USB port) and put several English NES ROMS on the system.

I thought you might like some pics:

Yes, I know it is a fair bit fatter with the AA cells; I could have used AAA cells but I don't have a batter holder for 3 AA cells, so I used AA's. It doesn't matter anyway. Mod only took about 30 mins, start to end.

Just a diversion, just for fun.

In the next couple of days I intend to open up the GP2x after testing it is fine (tv out), send the casing off to someone else who wants it (I don't need the casing on the GP2x), and carry on with the modding. I will leave the wiring from the Gp2x mobo to the system buttons until the rest of the case is ready for this proceedure.

On the gadget above, the camera is very basic and crude, so no real use. Inside the back of the case there is some space to play with, so I may make my own backing for the gadget case to make it all nice and flatter, and use AAA cells. Another small project, as an interim...

bacteria · Post by **bacteria** » Wed Dec 12, 2007 12:32 am

I spent some time tonight playing with this new MP3/MP4 gadget, actually it isn't bad! The camera is a bit poor, but it records .avi clips with sound, and it is therefore more useful than the other camera I used before for this purpose - this means I can upload more meaningful vids of my projects in future!! It is good for .avi recording for project work and MP3's; the FM radio only picked up a couple of channels, doesn't matter though. As for NES games, if you pick puzzle games (eg Spot, etc) rather than action games, it is ok; also the poor buttons don't matter then too.

I doubt I will get anything done on the project today, but will on Thursday and Friday.

arfink · Post by **arfink** » Wed Dec 12, 2007 10:01 am

Good grief, you really are an amazing portable hacker. I am feeling re-inspired to finish off my portable NES project this Christmas season because of you're ideas. I plan on making mine a little more "rough-n-tumble" than plexi and wallpaper, I'll have a regular plexi faceplate like your's though. I'm getting really quite good at cutting clean holes in plexi lately, so I should have no problem. I'm intrigued by the idea of using hot glue to hold things in place, I had no idea it could be that strong. Maybe for more critical parts I will use Gorilla Glue or something... wow. That's about all I can say. If I had money (waaa, college is so expensive...

) I would build cool projects like this one!

Consider yourself highly commended Bacteria!

bacteria · Post by **bacteria** » Wed Dec 12, 2007 1:36 pm

Thanks very much arfink; your kind comments are highly appreciated!! I am very pleased people find my projects inspiring.

I re-upped the pics in my previous post as the other host I tried sucked.

Perspex is tough and easy to work with. hot glue is strong, although it does need a reasonable amount applied; it is also very quick to set hard. I have gone through several sticks of it so far on my projects!

bacteria · Post by **bacteria** » Fri Dec 14, 2007 8:31 am

Rough today, I got the flu a fortnight ago, I seem to have got it again. Felt crap earlier, managed to get a short while this afternoon when I didn't feel so bad, and did this short update:

The GP2x I acquired for the cost of postage works fine. The LCD screen is literally smashed, but that is fine as I have set the GP2x to autostart in tv-out mode, so boots straight into the PSone.

I tried to use gmenu2x, a very good alternative menu system, however for some reason it looks shockingly bad on tv-out, so I installed alternative skins for the GP2x menus. The stock menu backgrounds are lime green or orange, which the PSone screen finds hard to display nicely. The skin I am using is an old favourite, candy skin. The firmware on my GP2x is 2.1.1 so I installed the skins for it. I chanced my luck doing this as it was, so i'm not going to chance my luck by performing a firmware update as it may not be happy doing this purely in tv-out mode - not worth the risk.

Anyway, you can see the state of the LCD:

Once it boots up, it goes into tv-out mode:

This light blue looks nice on the PSone screen.

Website · Post by **Life of Brian** » Sat Dec 15, 2007 2:46 am

You impress me more and more with your hacks and mods. Thanks for being so thorough with your posts! That camera/game player thing does look like fun...

TheOnlyOneHeFears · Post by **TheOnlyOneHeFears** » Sat Dec 15, 2007 6:04 am

Sainsbury's Foam Bath FTW!

Another seriously nice looking project bacteria! Long may your hacking continue

bacteria · Post by **bacteria** » Sun Dec 16, 2007 2:41 am

Boy, have I been sick lately, I got flu a fortnight ago, recovered after a few days apart from a continuous cough; then a few days ago I got sick again, this time worse than the last time. Saw the doctor, he put it down as bronchitis and signed me off work for next week. I spent the last day and a half mostly asleep, rough. My concentration levels are poor at the moment, but I do intend to do some project work over the next days as I find it uplifting.

I did turn the system on yesterday, silly really because I wasn't up to it, and didn't check some of the bare wires (I left some wires bare as I was deciding if I was going to shorten them or not): one of the speaker cables shorted on the battery terminals, I heard crackling and touched the batteries, which were very hot; disconnected the batteries, had to throw away the battery holder as the terminals shrunk, changed it (the batteries were still fine), checked the terminals were ok, booted the GP2x, fortunately the PSone screen wasn't damaged, all back to normal. I was lucky! Proves not to try anything if you aren't up to it!

Hoping to do some work on the project tomorrow, depending on how well I feel, although it will probably be only for a short project session.

(short update, wasn't worth a new posting)

Life of Brian - My conclusions about the MP3/MP4 player unit are:

1) as standard, the battery life must really suck, the lithium battery is very small and very thin. Using 3 x powerful and just recharged AA's seems to give somewhere about 12 hours use.
2) the camera feature is useless, low resolution, no flash so everything is dark and low res.
3) the video feature, which initially I thought was fine, isn't as the frame rate is very poor.
4) NES games run a bit slow, yet the system is sold with this built in.
5) buttons are not useful for game play anyway.
6) it takes a long time to transfer files via USB to it, about 10 times longer than anything else I have.
7) it takes mini SD cards, yet you can't use them with anything, the MP3 player only works via its internal memory, so you are left with "movies" as the only reason for the mini SD card slot. (?).

The saving grace however is that it is a very good MP3 player, 1Gb capacity, random play.

I had been using an old computer to play music all day and night in the bedroom, however it started beeping whilst everything was running (CMOS battery needed changing) and I decided it must be costing a fair bit to keep this old system going in electricity; plus the fact being a Pentium 1 computer the only fan it had was on the processor so the case gets very hot all the time (I could hack out holes in the case and give it cooling, but not worth the effort).

Solution - all I need to do is use a spare power supply (PSone supply), a TI board with about 4v (until I find a cheap 4v supply from a car boot sale next year). With the volume on max there is enough sound from external speakers without needing an amp, as I only want background music and not volume (it is running off batteries like this at the moment). Very cheap solution!!

When I remove the mobo from the GP2x I have someone who wants the outer casing as his is damaged, so I will send it to him.

another zero post update

Today is Monday, had rough night again, pleased the doctor gave me a sick note (I didn't need to ask he just did it after accessing me), my levels of concentration are very low - if I try to concentrate I break out in a sweat and feel a bit hazy. I'm certainly not fit to work, or any project work today for that matter.

bacteria · Post by **bacteria** » Wed Dec 19, 2007 1:18 am

Had to see doctor again, reactions against the antibiotics, so another set to take. I have now seen two doctors. She said I got "proper flu" initially and then got bacterial infection causing my more recent issues. She said I would "probably" be back to work after Xmas (of course I will be), signed off until then.

Anyway, usual night of overheating and sweating and poor sleeping because of my sickness, so got up for a couple of hours and removed the GP2x mobo from the casing, put the SD card back in, set up the batteries and inserted the external cable for the tv-out; booted up, all fine. I believe the GP2x screen takes a fair bit of juice to run, as it is now removed, the batteries will last even longer.

This is what the mobo looks like:

I am worn out now, so going back to bed again. At least I did a minor bit of work and can get the casing sent off to the guy who needs it, although I won't be posting it until the end of the week when I go outdoors.

Kyo · Post by **Kyo** » Wed Dec 19, 2007 9:01 am

heh. bacterial infection.

Anyway, nice work. looking forward to the done thing

arfink · Post by **arfink** » Wed Dec 19, 2007 1:10 pm

Well, heres hoping you get better soon, it would suck to be so sick during Christmas. BTW, how do you get it to auto boot into TV mode when you couldn't get the original screen to work in the first place? Also, when it boots, does it go to TV mode right away, or only after loading the GUI? It would be odd to have the thing boot without the classic GP2x logo displaying.

I know you've used this thing for a while probably, but how is the joystick on it? I have pretty big hands myself, though I have very thin fingers. I've heard people complain about the stock joystick being unresponsive. Is this true, or is it more of the fact that if you have big hands it's just more difficult?

vskid · Post by **vskid** » Wed Dec 19, 2007 5:13 pm

bacteria wrote:My conclusions about the MP3/MP4 player unit are:

1) as standard, the battery life must really suck, the lithium battery is very small and very thin. Using 3 x powerful and just recharged AA's seems to give somewhere about 12 hours use.

I took my brother's MP4 player apart, the battery was a whole 180mAh, still lasted a few hours on that tiny amount of power. He had a spare PSP battery, so we mutated that on it instead, lasts longer, but not as long as would be expected from a 10x increase in capacity.

bacteria · Post by **bacteria** » Wed Dec 19, 2007 6:06 pm

Kyo - Yeah, I know. I thought someone would make that joke!

arfink - I am taking it easy at the moment so I recover. Ages ago I asked on the GP2x forum if someone could make a proggy that auto-started the GP2x into tv-out mode, it was woogal who did it. The PSone screen is blank until the GP2x is booted; you don't see the green GP2x boot screen. Once the boot sequence is done, it goes straight into tv-out mode. This means you don't have to use the GP2x screen at all if you only want tv-out move (as I do). The file is at http://archive.gp2x.de/cgi-bin/cfiles.c ... 0,0,8,2096

The joystick on the MKII GP2x (ie rotated) is fine but far from perfect, nothing is better than a proper D-pad, which is further improved by a digital type top as playing side scrolling games needs this type of input to get easy diagonals.

vskid - The battery from the MP3/MP4 player I removed (dead) was only 52 x 35 x 4mm, 3.7v and 800mAh.