Xploder PS2 HDTV Player

[lettuce]

Well just tired this now, and cant seem to get the few games ive tried it with to work. I have a V14 slimline PS2 with Matrix Infinity mod installed, i insert the blaze cd, select my HD option, in this case 720p, the eject the cd place my game in and press start, it then goes to a screen saying. 'Starting Game' and it just hangs there. Have tired it with, God Hand, and Bully both NTSC, and Guitar Hero PAL retail, and none of em work!!! So first impressions dont look promising. I dont know if its to do with my ps2 being chipped or what

[sj33]

So modded consoles are a no-go?

Preorder cancelled!

[EvilBoris]

It seems to be the same glitchy pieca crap that the VGA disc was.

[Shozuki]

damn, thats such a shame!

[mrsquare]

Just played around with this for a good half hour or so.

Overall impression - its a pile of crap, save your money.

Using a modded PAL PS2 (sorry, dunno what chip), couldn't get any NTSC games to work. God Hand oddly got to the 'checking memory card' screen and then crashed - also tried with no memory card in, but no joy at all that time. Okami was a no-go too.

PAL games - tried Rez, Dragon Quest 8, MGS 3, DMC3 and Frequency. Only one of those that didn't load was Frequency.

Tried Rez in 720p first - 720p makes it horribly squashed vertically, so its like watching through a letterbox. 1080i is even worse, condensing the view down both horizontally and vertically to a tiny box in the middle of the screen. Bizarre. Presumably it might be alright if you can force your TV to stretch the image outwards, but I would have thought that would just destroy the image quality and negate any benefits. The actual game doesn't increase in resolution either, so you're not getting rid of jaggies or actually making it look any better than 480p would.

Tried Dragon Quest in 480p, and it was quite noticably better than it usually looks thanks to the non-interlaced signal. Its one of the worst offenders for combing artefacts on my TV though, so I wasn't surprised by that. The downside is you lose a noticable chunk of your viewing area - there are really big old-school Square-style borders on each side. It also didn't put the viewable window anywhere near where I said it should, and you can't seem to adjust the screen postion from within the game options (maybe the Blaze HDTV overrides them or something)

The rest actually didn't look that great at 480p - not sure if it was just me getting pissed off with the thing, but things like DMC3 looked a hell of a lot better when I whacked them back on at fullscreen 480i.

The worst thing though, as Zero9X said, is that everything gets output at 4:3. I *think* its putting out a 16:9 signal, but the game gets rendered in a 4:3 window in the middle. As the actual signal is 16:9, my TV can't then can't even strech the image to fill the whole window, as from its view, it already is.

*edit* Following a bit more messing around, I found that San Andreas seems to render proper widescreen, so seems to depend on the game.

So yeah, if you have a fancy TV that can stretch and move the picture around to your heart's content, you may have more luck - as I said though, I doubt you really want to be stretching the image as it makes upping the res a bit pointless.


I'm off to stick it on eBay. Unless anyone on here wants to buy one? All of the above was a lie by the way, its great! Honest!

[SuperBeatBoy]

Well just tired this now, and cant seem to get the few games ive tried it with to work. I have a V14 slimline PS2 with Matrix Infinity mod installed, i insert the blaze cd, select my HD option, in this case 720p, the eject the cd place my game in and press start, it then goes to a screen saying. 'Starting Game' and it just hangs there. Have tired it with, God Hand, and Bully both NTSC, and Guitar Hero PAL retail, and none of em work!!! So first impressions dont look promising. I dont know if its to do with my ps2 being chipped or what

read my post above. im guessing you have a pal system right, you will need to turn the chip into stealth mode to get pal titles to work. if you dont know how to do this, hold down the start button when the ps2 starts up. it will say disabled, now press reset with the vga disc in. it will then boot up with the chip disabled. you just need to turn the ps2 off in order to start the chip back up.

[Shozuki]

had anyone tried this with DMS4?

[HaHaUK]

Wont work with my modded PS2. Wont recognise the disc if I try to disable the chip

[Eiji]

It makes sense now why Blaze didn't show any screenshots of this product on their site and the games they did show to the public at the Leipzig and Digital Life conventions already had 480p support like Tekken 5, Burnout Revenge etc.

Have you tried 576p on the PAL games mrsquare?

[EvilBoris]

This is just as much as a sham as the Blaze force 60HZ disc.

[mrsquare]

After my previous rant, I've had a (very small) change of heart.

First - mod chip success! My copy of Katamari 1 (US) works just fine - locked into 4:3 like the rest, but looks nice and crisp in 480p.

Space Channel 5: Part 2 (JPN) also works *perfectly*. Full wide-screen, 480p goodness. Very nice.

Tried both of the above on 720p, but it just gave up straight away and dumped me back at the xPloder menu.

I also managed to get to the Clover logo on God Hand, and the 'Now Loading' box on Okami. Er, woo!

(As I said before - no idea what chip I have. Its one where you press the power button x amount of times to switch mode/hold it down to go into DVD/PS1 mode. Not sure if that helps anyone)

But what I'm actually quite pleased about is that Frequency does work after all (it just takes aaaages to boot, I'd forgotten). Its still 4:3, but what makes me happy is that 480p sorts out all the timing issues that my HDTV was causing with it - as I suspected, my set must just be ****e at deinterlacing. It was practically unplayable before, but I just whizzed through a couple of expert mode songs with no trouble

I'll give it a go with Guitar Hero tomorrow, and if it sorts out that too, I may well consider keeping it. Its still rubbish, but the vague hope of it fixing all my music games was one of the reasons I bought it. So yeah - a very reluctant thumbs up for that.

[HaHaUK]

mrsquare - you using a Fat or Slimline PS2?

[mrsquare]

Fat PS2 - model SCPH-39003.

And Eiji, yeah, was generally sticking to 576p on PAL games - but overall I think I tried all combinations of region/resolution.

[ezee ryder]

Just updating my games tried so far with this, tried Bully and it worked a treat and looks very good in 720p.

Games tried so far

MGS 3 (working)
God of War (working)
ICO (not working)
Tekken 5 (working)
Scarface (not working)
Kingdom Hearts II (working)
Bully aka Canis Canem Edit (working)

[zeroboo]

could anyone give some feedback on the following games:

Disgaea US
Dragon Quest 8 US
Final Fantasy X International
Final Fantasy XII US (just figured not out yet...)