PS1/2 PS2: Reassigning Controller Ports?

[WarMasterXX]

Is it possible to reassign the PS2 controller ports on the system to act as, say, controllers 3 and 4?

Why do I want to do this?
Because for the TMNT arcade game on TMNT2 Battle Nexus, as well as Turtles in Time on TMNT3 Mutant Nightmare, the four turtles (like the actual arcade machines) are locked to specific controller ports. My favorite TMNT is Donatello, and unfortunately he's locked to controller 3. I have a multitap, but it'd be really annoying to have that bulky thing always plugged in just so I have access to all four turtles. Get what I mean?

I have a FMCB memory card with OPL and all that stuff.

 

[MrCokeacola]

No the ports on the PS2 are hard wired to be ports 1 & 2. Unlike on an OG Xbox were it doesn't care what port you plug a controller into the PS2 cares.

Is it really that hard to use a multi-tap?

 

[FAST6191]

Do you get to change after a continue or anything, or is there a bonus level where you play as someone else? If so then that can make certain types of cheats easier. In those cases the character selected (even if the menu at the start is nominally forced) might well just be a value somewhere. Find this value and force select another character with a cheat. It could still be without such things mentioned in the first question but it is less likely.

Otherwise yeah sounds like you get to redirect inputs around the place. The PS2 probably lacks the ability to do any OS level switching like we saw for the 3ds, 360 and I guess Switch these days, or PC stuff since... years and years ago. To that end you get to fiddle with control reads, and possibly still have to fake a multitap in some way. I had a scan around emulator and homebrew dev sites and source code but right now I can't find a nice hardware listing that covers how the controllers work (most such things being more concerned with the nitty gritty of CPU and general memory rather than controller/pad IO). If it is in line with the more classic consoles with hardcoded memory (rather than assigning players based on who pressed start or something) and is a simple player 1 lands in this area of memory, player 2 lands here, player 3 lands here and player 4 lands here, otherwise all identical in function then you can probably find something that says read this address and bump it up or down (probably better to use a simple overwrite memory rather than maths for this one) however many bytes to land on the next/relevant controller location.