need some advice installing an hard drive to fat ps2.

i don't think messiah chips allow dev2 booting. i don't know if they even have a menu. my slim ps2 has a messiah chip installed (or so said the man who installed the chip about 6-7 years ago)

matrix infinity or its clones allow dev2 booting.

about 4 gb games installing time, do the math. i could get about 5 megabytes per second which means 300 megabytes per minute and 3 gigabytes per 10 minute.

of course the speed you get will vary depending on a)if you are using a router or doing a direct pc to ps2 connection b)kind of hdd in your ps2

 

looks like i have to use the mcboot method ten. i have a matrix infinity in my slim and it's a good chip except a few games are incompatible ie: everybodys tennis.
and i'm more than concerned about laser usage. i always played games from cd/dvds and over a number of years tyhe laser is on it's last legs. i will use the laser hopefully just the once to install the mcboot software and then never again.

 

yeah, i would avoid using the laser. plus you will get used to lightning fast loading speeds on internal hdd. only disadvantage is sometimes games have useful info on their loading screens, but you can't read them as they go too fast.

also many 3rd party memory cards fail for fmcb install. use an official 8 mb sony memory card.

 

i've been using a 3rd party card for ages for my fmcb, think it just depends on the quality of the card.

 

yeah it might be. i tried to do fmcb install to a chinese fake 8 mb card and it didn't install. as the official ones are really cheap, i would just buy the real thing.

after fmcb and installing opl, creating a 64 mb virtual memory card will take care of game save issue. for the few problematic games with VMC, you can always use the 8 mb fmcb card.

 

i only own official sony memory cards for ps1 and ps2. learned my lesson with a 24 bank multi crap card for ps1 which just died and turned into a expensive single bank card. lost far into game saves for FF7, everybodys golf, silent hill and many others. was so pissed that i thought never buy third party crap for game saves ever again lol.