The PS2 Port No One Used is Incredible

Okay, so I think we all have an i-link cable, two first gen ps2’s, two crt tv’s, two copies of Time Crisis 3, two lightgun controllers, and two dance mats laying around…but where do I find a friend?

Back when I worked on PS2 software at Sony we used the iLink port to allow the PS2 to be plugged into a Mac so audio engineers could audition their sounds on the PS2 directly to hear how it would sound when playing on the device.

The Ilink port was used for some very sick homebrew in the early 2010s as well. Using a piece of software called KERMIT, using the Ilink port to link to a Windows PC with a firewire port, you got access to a debugger/memory editor/cheat engine. You could alter your PS2 game's memory in real time, as well as rip uncompressed textures/2D images out of memory. A little esoteric for most but it was a blast for a few weeks for me. I've never used the Ilink port for anything else haha. I actually didn't know it had any use for actual games.

The moment you said "any second controller port input" I knew it was gonna be a dance mat. You're not fooling me with your steering wheels!

Firewire 400 is also faster than the USB 1.1 that all PS2s came with, and it's not even close. Firewire 400 caps at around 400Mbps while USB 1.1 caps out at around 12Mbps. This is insane since using USB drives and external Hard Drives on a softmodded PS2 to play games is sluggish and has compatibility issues. Support for the i-Link port has been worked on for a little while, and will offer much better compatibility and performance.

Namco really should’ve gave us a Time Crisis collection on like the Wii or Wii U, or even the PlayStation Move. Now, it feels like it’s mostly too late for that (despite the Switch joycons giving a similar experience, it’s not as accurate without some kind of positional tracker or pointer sensor)

Ah, Firewire - the amazing port that did everything that was shamefully struck down in favour of the lacklustre USB2. FW400 was 400mbit and USB2 was 480mbit, right? Not exactly. USB2 quoted the raw speed including protocol overhead, theoretical throughput was about 20% lower and not only that as it was a polled CPU driven interface actually achieving the theoretical speed was essentially impossible. FW on the other hand had a real controller with DMA and as such could operate independently of the CPU, reading and writing directly to blocks of RAM and never getting bottlenecked by a clunky windows kernel pre-empting it. Essential when you were transferring video from DV tape, couldn't very well ask the player to pause and rewind a bit to get that block you missed, can you? Or with your digital audio workstation where you needed audio to arrive thousands of times per second in precisely timed packets. But wait, I hear you wonder, if it could read and write RAM directly without the CPU wasn't that a security problem? YES! Tremendously so! A bad device could hook into your FW port and dump the contents of RAM, passwords and security keys and all, at 400mbit/s and there was not a whole lot the OS could do to stop it. Security was retrofitted into it but for a while those innocuous little ports that few had devices to plug into were an exposed security hole waiting to be exploited. Good times.

I love when developers took the time to put complicated setups in games that make the experience so much better even if very few people actually got to use it. I always wanted to try this with Gran Turismo 3. Also, obligatory shout out to the Zelda: 4 swords adventure setup with 5 tvs.

We've had Time Crisis 3 setup with 2 PS2s and 2 28" CRT tvs in the arcade for nearly a year now. Always a favourite with everyone.

The iLink port could have done so much more… People think camera and hard drive, but it was a 400Mbit universal interface that kind of replaced SCSI. If you knew what SCSI could do on computers at its peak, you've got some idea where it could go. Video displays, scanners, drives, network devices, audio equipment, MIDI, that was all done back in the day. Since the PS2's USB was v1.1, the USB ports were never going to be even as fast as the PS2 memory card, but iLink was already faster than USB2 speeds. (I know USB 2.0 has a 480Mb speed vs 400, but USB has a lot higher overhead.) I wish this was used more in games—or in homebrew!

8:03 It's okay, if they call the cops, the cops can play Time Crisis with you instead of the random person on the street.

Notably, with Aromred Cors four player split screen battles were possible with i-link. I have so many fond memories of playing 2v2 mech battles back in the day.

I personally have done this setup with 2 24 inch CRTs on top of Milk crates to get that shoulder height, loaded them on the back of my van, and even had the 2 player setup at someone else's house. Another thing I did for immersion is dump quarters in the milk crate every time we wanted a continue. An extremely satisfying endeavor, I'll have to look into the dance mat for PS2, sounds like a super enhancement

0:30 FireWire was basically intended as what USB turned out to be. Only USB overtook it and it became redundant.

In 2017 I started getting back into classic gaming, and what reinvigorated my interested were light gun games, in particular, TIME CRISIS! I've owned and enjoyed every game that was ported to home consoles. So when I found out that Time Crisis 2 and 3 supported 2 screens at once, I picked up a second CRT TV (and now I have 5 all of them at 32 inches), and I bought heavy duty chrome shelves and placed the CRT TVs at arcade height (3 feet, or 1 meter), I have two PS2s linked with the firewire cable, and I get to play the Time Crisis arcade experience at home! But I actually took things a step further, because I bought two Time Crisis 4 arcade pedals, and opened them up, placed a PS1 controller inside it and now I have the literal arcade pedal at home usable with all Time Crisis games on PS1, PS2, and PS3! Yes, it works for Time Crisis 1, Project Titan, Time Crisis 2, Crisis Zone, Time Crisis 3, and yes even Time Crisis 4 (single player only, not in CO-OP mode strangely enough), however only on the stand alone disc version of TC 4, not on the Time Crisis Razin' Storm disc, Namco removed the support for it. So stupid! There is one downside, however, which is the i.link ports on PS2 seems really flaky, often times the game would just cancel because it lost its connection between the two consoles, which is terrible. The game developers didn't program an option to reconnect, nope, just boot you right back to the title screen the moment a tiny blip in the connection occurs. Very sloppy coding unfortunately. Its happened to me a lot, and its quite frustrating Its also possible to convert the Time Crisis arcade guns to function on PS2, but its a lot of work, and its above my knowledge and skill level. But if I could figure it out, then it would be the fully complete arcade experience at home!

Timesplitters 2 crew checking in. I even had an iLink hub. Was able to do 12 player virus back in 2003. Was absolutely nutty.

if you look back at old PS2 trailers there's so much they were meant to do that either didn't or barely happened.. like, printer support, i can't remember off the top of ny head anything that used it. mobile phone support was very underutilized as well iirc. but this firewire thing is so awesome. never heard of this before, I love finding out about new things

Now I'm thinking of a random British fan of the channel walking up to Jon's house, ringing the doorbell and asking him "Wanna play some Time Crisis?"

That is a flippin cool time crisis setup. I'll keep an eye out for Jon waving a gun con at me.

This is part of the reason the 5th/6th gens were so interesting and exciting, it seemed like there was just endless potential waiting to be unlocked and the hardware was designed to take advantage of whatever waited in the wings.