I just got a fat PS2 anlong with a network adapter, and I have a 500GB Seagate drive kicking around, can one of you fine folks point me at a good tutorial for setting this up to rip/load games to/from the HDD? I have Free Mcboot memory card already set up.
Free McBoot: http://sksapps.com/index.php?page=fmcb.html Windows: http://sksapps.com/index.php?page=winhiip_tutorial.html The HDLoader on the memory card is very simple to use as well.
I thought you needed a mod chip to be able to address over 127GB? I didn't think the PS2 hardware could handle LBA48 on its own?
Well, I stuck the drive in the ps2 and fired up the HDLoader that came in the Noobie FMCB pack and it immediately saw the drive, formatted all 500GB and took me to the main GUI where even an idiot like me was able to figure out how to rip games. Funnily enough, the first game I tried (Namco Museum 50th) appears on some lists as incompatible, but seems to work just fine for me. Did Shadow OTC next - perfect. Currently ripping Resident Evil 4 'cause it's one of my favourite games, then I might try GT 4 which is supposed to be troublesome. This was so easy, I wish I'd done it years ago.
It can. Any of such limitations are software limitations. You're probably thinking about HDD support in official SCE software and games. Modchips offer that feature, so that users do not have to first patch the software on their own. But in reality, it's not a thing that can be solved by only modchips.
A PS2 with a hard drive is great, isn't it? The reason games that are listed as not working do work is that compatibility is increasing all of the time, see http://psx-scene.com/forums/f150/open-ps2-loader-project-v0-9-2-a-62141/ for more information. Plus sometimes it's only one region of a game that works, and the other do not (i.e. PAL, NTSC, JAP), and also sometimes a game has different releases, such as version 1.0, version 1.1, or budget rereleases. In these games, some versions might work and not others, though hopefully one day every PS2 game will work from the hard drive.
Yup, GT 4 working just fine. Now to pull the HDD and see if I can stick some ISOs of games on it direct from PC.
