neon_nova comments on Run Your PS2 Library from a $50 Memory Card Effortlessly

Run Your PS2 Library from a $50 Memory Card Effortlessly (www.retronews.com)

submitted 2 years ago by Kain1@lemmy.world to c/retrogaming@lemmy.world

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A new innovation in the retro gaming community now allows you to run your entire PS2 library directly from a $50 memory card, thanks to the Multi-Purpose Memory Card Emulation (MMCE) protocol.

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[–] neon_nova@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 2 years ago (15 children)

I think the best thing is to load your games over the network. The usb ports are only 1.0. And I’m pretty sure the network adapter hard drive connector either only accepts up to 40gb drives or it only uses a pata connection.

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[–] ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 years ago* (10 children)

There are newer adapters for the network port. I use a 500GB SATA drive just fine, it's just a pain in the butt to transfer games

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[–] Kit@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 point 2 years ago (7 children)

I just added a SATA drive to my ps2 yesterday, and it plays ps2 games fine but I really want to play psx games. Is there a solution for this yet?

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[–] ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 years ago*

You can use POPStarter to use the built-in software emulator, but it's not great. There's also FreeMCBoot and MechaPwn if burning discs isn't a problem (might only work on some models? I'm not sure)

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[–] RamenJunkie@midwest.social 2 points 2 years ago (4 children)

I modded my PS Mini for PS1 games. Its pretty simple.

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[–] Kit@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 point 2 years ago (3 children)

Hell yeah, that sounds awesome. Does it have native composite video out? I wanna play on my crt without using an hdmi converter

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[–] ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

I think the PS Mini is HDMI only.

Do you happen to have a Wii lying around? It can do actually pretty good PS1 emulation nowadays, and supports analog signals (including 240p)

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[–] Kit@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 point 2 years ago

I do! I'll have to play around with it

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[–] RamenJunkie@midwest.social 2 points 2 years ago

Its HDMI only.

The Wii someone else suggested may be a good way to go, I think they are fairly easy to get a hold of. I have not personally modified a Wii yet but its next ony todo list for console upgrades.

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[–] Redkey@programming.dev 2 points 2 years ago

What ShinkanTrain said. The last a read about it, the PS2 only switches into PS1 mode on a trigger from the optical drive subsystem, and then most of the memory and other hardware used to run homebrew is deactivated. AFAIK no-one's yet found a way to trigger the change in software and keep the connection to wherever you're loading your game from.

I believe that on certain revisions of the console, MechaPwn can overcome the protection, but you still need a "Playstation 1" CD in the drive to actually run something, as ShinkanTrain wrote.

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[–] neon_nova@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

Why is it a paid in the butt

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[–] Redkey@programming.dev 3 points 2 years ago

Probably because it's pretty slow, and the custom drive format used by the PS2 isn't very flexible; game images have to be in one continuous block, and blocks can't be moved. You can overwrite one game with another, but only if it's the same size or smaller. So if you delete games off in the reverse of the order you put them on you're fine, but otherwise you're going to leave empty "holes" of wasted space.

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[–] RamenJunkie@midwest.social 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

I bought a 3rd party drive adaptor without a network port and had to load my games on my PC using a network enclosure.

It was still a pain. Its all soooooo slow and buggy.

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[–] Redkey@programming.dev 1 point 2 years ago*

Having tried both a USB3 drive adapter and downloading over Ethernet, I'll say that Ethernet was way slower for me.

The average copy time on the adapter was about 30 minutes, but over Ethernet it took 3-4 times as long.

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[–] TORFdot0@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

I have a 500GB drive in my hard drive slot using the third party adapter and grimDoomer OPL

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[–] Redkey@programming.dev 1 point 2 years ago

I have a 2TB SATA HDD in my PS2 fat. AFAIK that's still the maximum storage size possible with the FMCB/wLaunchELF software. I believe that an unmodded original network adapter should be able to take up to a 512MB IDE drive, but I'd have to double-check that.

I used to use a third-party "network adapter" (they usually don't have Ethernet, just an HDD connector) with SATA support, which still works fine (it seems like most brands stopped working properly after a certain homebrew software version), but later I bought an official adapter (IDE/PATA) and a SATA conversion kit (a kit specific to the PS2 network adapter, not a standard IDE-SATA converter, which sometimes work with the PS2 and sometimes don't) so I could try network stuff.

I don't think it was worth it, but these days it's probably the way to go since there no longer seems to be any way of telling the non-working aftermarket adaptors from the working ones; the companies making the bad ones just started putting the brand name of the one still working adapter on their products.

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