Hey all, I was wondering if anyone had any experience with the ESR program that comes with the Free McBoot software package? I know what it says it does, but the documentation isn't there, the forum is insane, and the wiki is quite mad. So, does anyone use it much, or have any tips, on how to use the thing? I'd like to have a discussion on it, if possible. Thanks
What is the problem exactly? Im not sure if this is the right forum to discuss backup loaders... There used to be tons of FAQ's at psx-scene and lots of video tutorials ao youtube
I use it all the time and as long as you patch the .iso it should work!! I use DVD-R's myself, (just my own personal preference) but I have also used DVD+R's but I didn't like the way the game looked after it was burned!! You should be burning it 4 or lower!!
ESR works fine, you just have to make sure the media is good. Only DVD-R discs I've had issues with pretty much all my consoles is Maxell. I dunno about the unbranded really generic types (Mr.Data, Superstore packs, etc), they'll definitely not work. Games which don't work afaik is Parappa the Rapper 2, Music 3000, eJay and a few others.
ESR's pretty easy to use. Simply rip your game, run it through an ESR patcher, then burn it onto a disc using ImgBurn. I've used it for playing foreign region games without requiring a modchip, and it's pretty good - if a little more odd than just bunging an original disc in.
That's not the best advice. It's actually generally best to burn at about half the disc's rated maximum, so for a Verbatim 16x rated DVD (in reality capable of 20x speeds, but "downgraded" by Verbatim for stability reasons), you would want to burn at 8x or 10x.
Is this based on anecdotal evidence/personal experience, or on something more concrete? I don't mean to be rude but I've heard a whole bunch of advice on this matter over the years and I've never been entirely satisfied it's anything more than "this works for me so must be best". I've heard a lot of wild theories from both ends of the spectrum, often contradictory. A definitive answer never seems forthcoming.
Personally I've always burned as slowly as the writer and media permit and this generally seems to be the rule of thumb with everyone I know. Whilst burning isn't an exact science I think the thing to take into account is disc drive speed. If you're backing up PSX, Saturn or Neo Geo CD titles etc where the read speed of the units is very slow then discs burnt at quick or relatively quick speeds will normally tend to 'stutter' and skip during FMV playback and give playback errors if the games have CDDA whereas games burnt as slowly as possible usually tend not to. As for DVD based games or movies again at the lowest possible speed but as is the case with CD-r's always be careful which brands you buy. A Ritek G04 or G05 dye based disc or a Verbatim will still be usable in years to come, whereas your CMC etc dyes will often go 'milky' and fail within a year in a lot of cases.
The best speed to burn at is the HIGHEST speed that doesn't use zonal recording. Watch the speed while burning... does it ever skip from one speed to suddenly higher? It just switched speed zones, and that means the disc will probably fail in the console. You want a speed that is constant, or smoothly increasing. The drive in the console can track a slow change in speed, not a big jump from one zone to another. This applies to CDRs or DVDRs.
:lol: The people that built and designed the ESR program recommend burning at x4, I've never had any problems doing that way!!
Well from personal experience, using my coffee table which is a 366MHz PC with '95 and ImgBurn. I burn at the slowest speed the drive allows. I've very very very rarely had a bad burn (about 1 in every 100 discs at most), and it's due to either the media being poor, I was pissing around with the computer during burning or the rip was bad in the first place. And it takes about quarter of an hour to burn a disc at x4 DVD, which isn't bad IMHO. I used to have a x4 speed CD writer with no buffer protection, now that was fun :/
Good info everyone. I don't have much experience on it, I was just trying to research up on it. It sounds pretty interesting, especially since I have games that don't work right. I bought a used copy of MK: Shaolin Monks, tried to copy it with HD Loader, and failed. Bought a 2nd copy, got a bit further, and then it still corrupted. I'm not sure if ESR works with HD Loader, but that'd be great. I could just rip a copy (hope it rips correctly), patch it, burn it, then copy it to the hard drive. Man, I do a lot of work, for trying to be lazy about this.
My understanding is that at the lower speeds a more accurate burn can take place. Obviously if it can be read your burn can't be too far off in terms of accuracy though if you were to write data badly to a disc it won't be read at all. Though with audio CDs it is clear that the error correction can kick in to fix any sort of write errors which I could easily see attributing to the death of a laser albeit very slowly.
I haven't found any games myself that don't work with ESR except CD based media, but I think that I just need a different ripping program for these!! You could try using WinHiip to transfer the games to your PS2 HDD or HDLDump if it's less than 120gb!! You just change the Mode settings (I think select gets you in there) of the game if it doesn't work!!
I too have never had a game that couldn't be patched either, including homemade compilation discs. As for CD based games they have to be converted to DVD and apparently not all games can be done, there's no way of patching them to work with ESR 'as is'.
I've never had any problems with CD/DVD brands or burn speeds (maximum FTW) since I discovered the recordable compact disc. All sounds like BS to me. Anyway yeah ESR, as others have already said, patch burn and try. 99% of games work.
Converting a CD PS2 game to DVD is pretty easy actually. You can either extract an ISO with Deamon Tools or even 7-Zip extracts ISOs, since they're standard CDFS. You then repack them with a UDF ISO building util like ImgBurn, once you've built the ISO you patch it with ESRpatch since all the patcher looks for is a UDF filesystem signature. But TBH, I converted Gradius 4 which turned out was also on a Gradius complation disc which I wish I'd found earlier rather than burning a <700MB game to a 4.5GB DVD Still, it works and I can't see why any game wouldn't work since it's not the game that handles the raw disc data accesses. I expect the reason a game wouldn't work is if for some reason it needs to switch DVD video mode and finds itself already in that mode because of ESR loader. Oh and before you try ESR patching them, PS1 games don't work, don't bother trying. They're handled by a different part of the PS2's BIOS, which hasn't been hacked yet.
Had relatively few problems with writing discs (aside from a few duffers in a stack of 100 and a few that got scratched before they were used). The problem I find tends to be reading said discs, mostly in 'better quality' CD players. Honestly, what is it with the more expensive the CD player, the less likely it is to able to read CDs?
