Need advice on buying a PS2 for GT4

[astrarobotica]

I've been wanting to play older racing games a lot lately, I've spent a decent amount of time in the first Gran Turismo, and I recently bought Forza Motorsport 3 to dive back into after a decade. But my most sought-after game is probably Gran Turismo 4, mainly for nostalgic reasons, but I've been a bit wary of the prospect of buying older consoles. My main concerns are affordable options for HDMI output, as well as decent third-party controllers, given that used controllers of that age tend to be worn out or just plain gross.

I have no experience using older hardware with modern displays, and I'm not looking to spend much money on a converter, as my decision to impulsively buy a sixteen year old console/game depends on whether I can do it relatively cheaply. This seems like it could be a good option for me, especially because I could use it with my computer monitor and split the audio to my speakers. If it works well it seems perfect for my needs.

The obvious answer would be to just google it and research for myself which I am doing, but I'm also fairly certain some people here have first-hand experience with trying to play GT4 on legitimate hardware. I'm just looking for general advice on decent third-party controllers (hopefully with pressure sensitivity) in case I get a busted one with the console, decent/cheap image converters, and any other suggestions, or just pitfalls to look out for when dealing with older consoles. Thank you!

 

[2_FAST_4_U]

I’ve used my NTSC Silver Slim serial number version #79001 for GT4 during many years of play without a hitch. Should you have any extra interest in hybrid of the game it also runs Codebreaker versions 9.x and 10.x with out any problem as long as you don’t have anything plugged into the USB. Of course it’s way more fun to complete the game without that as it was meant to be played. IMHO it is one of the best games ever produced for the era.

 

[astrarobotica]

I’ve used my NTSC Silver Slim serial number version #79001 for GT4 during many years of play without a hitch. Should you have any extra interest in hybrid of the game it also runs Codebreaker versions 9.x and 10.x with out any problem as long as you don’t have anything plugged into the USB. Of course it’s way more fun to complete the game without that as it was meant to be played. IMHO it is one of the best games ever produced for the era.

I found a cheap PS2 on ebay. I went for the slim model because I had both growing up, and I distinctly remember the older models having more issues (which is why I had both). I'm absurdly excited to play this game for the first time in fourteen years.

 

[JakeMR2]

I wouldn't recommend anything that is a slim PS2 because I had issues with GT4 for some reason. Dunno if the disc drive was failing after 10 or 15 years of use, but GT4 does stress it out a lot.

 

[astrarobotica]

Here's an update to this saga; I suppose it could be helpful for anyone looking to do something similar in the future.

GT4 and the HDMI adapter both arrived earlier in the week, and the PS2 itself arrived yesterday. I hooked the HDMI up to my computer monitor and the audio output to my speakers. The thing is, I had to set the PS2 output to Component Mode rather than A/V without being able to see anything. I was prepared for this, and it wasn't hard to find the correct button sequence online by other people who have had to do the same thing. And I was still getting audio, so I knew the buttons were registering. I managed to get it on the right setting, and my monitor recognized the signal, but the screen was still black, and an error message popped up.

"Not Optimum Mode: 1920 X 1080 : 60hz". Okay... so I googled that, turns out certain Samsung monitors will flat-out refuse to display signals less than the "optimal" resolution, even though they can technically recognize them. And there's apparently no way around that. The adapter I bought converts the image to HDMI without actually upscaling it. The thing is, I knew GT4 was one of like four games capable of outputting at 1080i. So maybe, I could try to navigate, again blindly, into GT4's settings, and change the game resolution to 1080i mode, and see if that would produce a picture. I quickly found a video of someone navigating to the specific setting from startup, and it was fairly easy to reproduce the same button sequence. I changed the setting and, shockingly, the screen lit up with the typical prompt asking if I wanted to keep the current resolution settings. I clicked yes and... the screen went back to black.

GT4 is capable of outputting at 1080i, but only once a race has been loaded; the menus in between are still SD. So I blindly hit X a bunch of times to see if I could load a race in Arcade Mode and, sure enough, once the race was loading, 1080i mode kicked in, and the picture was back. And then at that point, I could go through the menus and settings just fine. Everything was displayed at 1080i once the race was loaded, but the game just doesn't bother with the menus in between races. So... still no really playable.

So this morning I took the PS2 to the living room and tried hooking it up the the 4K Samsung. And it worked perfectly. And I could switch output modes within the game without any issues. I'm glad it works, but I do wish I could play it on my desktop monitor. I suppose in the future I could buy a converter that does actually upscale the image to 1080, but it just seems a bit absurd that my monitor refused to even display an image smaller than that. This is exactly the sort of pitfall I was wary of; I didn't want to spend money on a console, and a game, and an HDMI converter, only for something silly to get in the way and make me feel like an idiot for wasting money. But hey, I got it to work in the end.