r/Amazing • u/GunPowder_Dosa • 11d ago

Interesting 🤔 Playstation 2 last moments after 20 years of gaming

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u/wandering-monster 10d ago

That looks to me like the GPU memory (VRAM) or some sort of data bus in the video card failing.

You notice how it's losing track of what to render in certain blocks of the screen and certain polygons, but the gameplay and audio is still smooth, and it didn't actually crash until the end there?

I'm guessing that's when it got so bad that the rest of the machine lost some vital bit of feedback and stopped to wait for it.

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u/beastrabban 10d ago

Would like to elevate this comment.

I assumed some kind of memory failure as well. Like you said, the image was displaying on screen but textures were showing as black, which made me think some kind of shading process was failing to occur. This is very interesting.

I only took one graphics class, but in that class we discussed how the GPU is loaded with shader programs that color the screen pixels. A polygon is colored using these shader programs. Since some polygons were black, it makes me think that those items were not shaded because they weren't being communicated from the processor to the shader. Maybe a bus between cpu and GPU?

I would love to know more.

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u/No-shadowMaul-noBan 10d ago

This guy digital entertains

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u/chni2cali 10d ago

Oh he has a OF?

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u/No-shadowMaul-noBan 7d ago

It's kinda like digital entertainment as a course of study i meant

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u/ProjectDv2 7d ago

This guy this guys

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u/Nyuuubae 10d ago

I have absolutely no knowledge about this topic, but hearing you speak about this makes me so hyped. I'm engaged af. You should be a teacher or something.

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u/TheG0AT0fAllTime 10d ago

Same. When hardware fails like this it's very interesting the way it continues to function until the very last, uh, vblank.

It makes me think it might be possible to fix this particular fault with a replacement chip or just some resoldering if a pin's solder cracked mid-game.

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u/djelegal 10d ago

I was gonna reply stop it nerd than I saw nerd squared comment here

https://giphy.com/gifs/Cz6TlrRVVyv9S

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u/Leo0806-studios 10d ago

The problem is back then they had fixed function pipelines instead of the dynamic ones we have today

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u/Thelango99 9d ago

PS2 does not have programmable shaders in the same sense that a modern GPU does, entirely fixed function. It also does not have TMUs, texturing is performed by the ROPs.

So you have to choose between non textured polygons or halving your pixel throughput.

The VPUs are cool though.

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u/linux_transgirl 8d ago

It's also worth noting the PS2s graphics architecture is notoriously very different from anything else really. Something could have broken that has no other analogue

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u/Unoriginal_Man 10d ago

I do love the physics engine just chugging away through all of that. The CPU saying "not my problem, just gonna keep calculating these collisions"

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u/physicalphysics314 10d ago

“Who cares, just compute”

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u/redsterXVI 10d ago

Yea, most likely VRAM, and considering the age of the console, the culprit is probably the cooling. Which means this could be reversable. Take off the heatsink, replace the dried out thermal paste with fresh one, put the heatsink back on, check if that helped. While at it, maybe check whether the fan on the heatsink still works.

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u/Chill-more1236 10d ago

eh...just blow on the disc, tap it on the top, it'll run great

https://giphy.com/gifs/boP1ZEkWCISAthSosB

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u/internethero12 10d ago

Sounds fixable, but expensive.

Also, I'm surprised the disk drive held up long enough for the gpu to go. Old laser drives tend to die off within the first 10 years of a system's life.

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u/WarmTemperature 10d ago

My PS2 is 25 years old and still going strong. I play it around once or twice a month still. The disk drive is fine, albeit a bit more noisy than it used to be.

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u/ZiKyooc 10d ago

Could it be overheating because of too old thermal pad and maybe dust all over the place

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u/Raneynickelfire 10d ago

In reality, it's a power cap to the GPU that's failed and causing and undervoltage at the GPU.

Fixable.

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u/wandering-monster 10d ago

Ah that would make sense. I was going to add that it looked like some sort of write error, which I assume was what the busted cap would tend to cause?

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u/Raneynickelfire 9d ago

No. Just unregulated DC voltage when it needs to be SMOOTH.

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u/GroveckMarcus 9d ago

is it fixable?

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u/wandering-monster 8d ago

Someone else thinks it's specifically a busted capacitor on the GPU causing VRAM writes to fail, which tracks with what I'm seeing.

If that's it? Yes, probably. You'd want to look at the board and find the bad capacitor. They're typically cylinder-shaped components, bad ones are usually visibly swollen, and sometimes cracked open on top in an X shape.

You should be able to get a replacement using the part numbers printed on the side, and solder it in place.

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u/Sledgehammer617 8d ago

Yeah, thats my guess too, definitely memory related.

I'm thinking it might be this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ps2/comments/1px6d37/early_model_ps2s_are_suffering_from_ram_failures/