In 2008 I was visiting a lot of Pinball shows and playing a lot of real pinball. There wasn't a lot of good video pinball about at the time. Virtual Pinball and Future Pinball existed, as did Windows Pinball. I became aware of Williams Pinball by Farsight on the PlayStation 2. Alas at the time it was NTSC-U/C (North American) release only, and be default you can't play NTSC disks on a PAL (Euro) PS2.
I researched my options and thought my best bet for playing the one import game I wanted to play was a Swap Magic, which was 2 disks and a plastic tool to open up your Phat PS2's disk drive without it realising. Boot the PS2 from either the DVD or CD disk, depending on the import game you wanted to play. You unscrewed the front of your disk tray and that enabled you to slide the tool in to open the disk drive. Swap the disk with your import disk, use the tool to slide the disk mechanism back and away you go - import game loads on your PS2.It was a bit fiddly the first couple of times you used it, but you soon got the knack of where to insert the piece of plastic and which way to slide.
It allowed me to play the only import game I was interested in, and it was a pretty good version to boot. It was missing a couple of tables present on other versions, but nothing too important. The main ones were there like Funhouse and Black Knight. Eventually in 2011 (3 years later), System 3 published the game in Europe.
Anyway, why did I start writing this blog entry.... ah yes of course...
Just this Christmas gone when I visited my parents I got my phat PS2 out of storage and tried to boot up this game for old times sake. Curses. Took a while to get the knack of the slide tool, but curses, I couldn't get it to work. It would play normal PAL PS1 games but nothing else. I needed to slim down my stuff in storage so I decided to sell it and the controllers, but keeping my Logitech wireless controller, memory cards, games and Swap Magic. I thought later down the line I'd pick up another machine capable of playing the game.
After Christmas I was looking at modded PS2s on Ebay, but they were a bit pricier than I wanted to pay - £70+ for a Slim version - a lot of money to play a game I own on two other formats as well (PS3 and PS2). It took until lockdown when I decided to revisit the problem. I put a wanted post on RLLMUK forum and a chap responded saying he had a console only NTSC-U Slimline PS2. He wanted £19 delivered for it. Done.
While I waited for that to arrive, I set about acquiring the other parts of the puzzle. A power adaptor was BIN'd off Ebay so that was easy. Then I had to think about the display cable. I decided that HDMI would be the most flexible. The cheap (~£10ish) adaptors on Ebay got middling reviews, so I thought I'd pay a bit more as I've been bitten by going for the cheapest option before. I had been happy with the Kaico GameCube offering so I looked at their offering. £29.99 with excellent reviews. It doesn't upscale the image, (I'd have to pay nearer £50 for a device that does that), but it looked like it would do the business. So total outlay - £19 + £9.95 + £29.99. Essentially £60 to play one game, however for nostalgia's sake - priceless!
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Finally I had all the parts of the puzzle assembled. The adaptor looked to be as well made as the GameCube one and I quickly set it all up. The adaptor needed power via micro USB which the PS2 could supply. The image output is 480i which the TV deals with just fine. It looks as good as I hoped, considering it's a standard definition picture on a HD screen. The most important thing though in a game like this is lag - you can't play Pinball if you've got above the normal lag. I'm already using a wireless controller, but it plays absolutely fine. It loaded my saved game off the memory card and now I'm busy hitting high scores again. Success!
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