So, long story short, I bought some memory cards from china on eBay and they were maked as 8mb in capacity. Upon entering the browser, they showed that they were in fact 8mb cards. As I had heard of a myth involving these cards, I loaded up action repay max, formatted them in max memory, and now the browser shows that have quadrupled in size to 32mb! I opened one of them up and they use 256mb ST NAND chips and a controller chip under an epoxy glob. Compared to pictures I've seen of other fake memory cards, mine looks even simpler. I counted all of 6 resistors, 5 capacitors, 1 diode, 1 fuse, and a crystal. Ill get a picture of the board if anyone is interested. It's what I expected, being only $2.95 per card with free shipping haha Would it be possible to expand the memory cards to a a capacity greater than the 32mb that I've achieved? Edit: I used the method described above on the 4 other memory cards I bought from the same seller. 3 of them successfully formatted to 32mb, but the last one could only be formatted to 16mb. I opened this particular card up to see what the deal was and found that it used a 128mb NAND instead. So in both cases, the around it can be formatted to is 1/8 the size of the NAND chip
Depending on the quality of the NAND chip and the rest of the parts used on the PCB, you might or might not be able to use it's full capacity. I'm quite sure that you saw "256Mb" (256 Megabits) instead of "256MB" (256 Megabytes), which means that those chips have a capacity of 256Mbit or 32MB (256/8=32). The same thing goes for the 128Mbit chip: 128/8=16MB.
I doubt that "extra" space is usable... It will probably corrupt or something if try to save over 8MB. Try filling the card up with ELFs.
I have a counterfeit memory card which had a 64MB nand in it. But it also had jumpers. I had to tamper with the jumpers until it shown the total memory as 64mb. lol I was also able to make it show 16 and 32MB in different configurations of the three jumpers. :very_drunk:
It might've been cheaper to use 128mbit or 256mbit chips, hiding their extra capacity. Than source actual 64mbit chips. IIRC there's good reason Sony never sold memory cards above 8 megabyte.
Market strategy. The PS2 OS and libraries allows for anything from 8MB to 128MB. After SDK3.0 when fake memory cards became common, SONY made some sabotage on the SDK code which is why games like Resident Evil 4 are picky with counterfeit cards that are bigger than 8MB and even some which have standard 8MB size have problems with it... So after SDK 3.0 SONY froze the size of MCs at 8MB.
Seems like Sony's strategy to counter anything they don't officially approve of is to fuck over the consumer.
I wouldn't have better words to say regarding this topic. And they're getting the punishment they deserve now, with the PS3 LV0 keys leak.
Silly me, I could hardly read what the chips said. They were definitely 256 megaBITS and 128 megaBITS. Could this possibly be patched out? I'd guess the protection is coming from mcserv or mcman. This is the seller I bought the cards from: http://www.ebay.com/itm/30076880690...eName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1497.l2649 If you're looking to get some, keep in mind that it's the typical super-slow shipping from China. But hey, it's free
Sadly some if not most of the issues with these counterfeit cards come from their controller chip itself being off with the specifications than actual protections within the drivers which means fixes aren't a realistic possibility...
Hmm, well is there I way I could format my cards back to 8MB? Becuase I tried a 32MB one with RE4 and it, in fact, did not work correctly. It could detect the card and save too it (slowly), but when I restarted the game, it first said something like "Failed to load data", then after trying a second time, "Data is corrupt".
Wanted to report that I've found a knockoff (Ok, counterfeit) that appears to work with re4 (and other newer sdk games I presume). It also works with fmcb and has better seek times then e other card I had before. I opened it up and spotted a 512mbit hynix BGA chip even though it comes up as an 8mb card. However, unlike the previous cards I used, formatting it with Armax doesn't unlock any additional space. Maybe th caught on to this little "trick" haha
Here's a comparison of a few memory cards I have with some notes From left to right: Card 1: Generic, contains 256MBit NAND chip. Came formatted to 8MB, but when formatting the card using Action Replay Max, you can unlock the full 16MB. This card has issues with recent SDK games (such as Resident Evil 4). Only card in the lot to use a crystal. Read/write times are the slowest on this card compared to the others here. Card 2: Counterfeit, contains 512MBit flash chip (BGA). Locked at 8MB and can't be formatted to 32MB using AR. Has faster read/write times than any other card I own (including an official Sony one!). This could be a side effect of its newer, less used flash chip possibly. Worst build quality of the 4 shown. Card 3: Officially licensed Nyko 8MB card. Contains a Sony CXD9600AR controller chip and uses the same Samsung RAM as an official. As expected, the compatibility is the same as an official Sony card. Card 4: Official Sony 8MB card, purchased in 2002. Contains a Sony CXD9600R controller chip. I guess I felt the need to cover the outside with gold Sharpie some years a go :moody:. This card is constructed better than the other ones pictured, by the Nyko comes pretty close.
