File: 9 KB, 405x270, McBooty.jpg Free McBoot Anonymous Wed Jun 17 17: Is McBoot worth using for the uLaunchELF feature? I'd never heard of this until it was mentioned a couple days ago in a thread.
Seems like I burn an installer, install to a memory card, the memory card acts as a boot loader and using uLaunchELF I can play burned PS1 games. I have plenty of those from PS1 mod-chip era. Is that accurate? Looking for pros, cons, other possible options, suggestions/advice and of course open discussion.
Thank you in advance. Anonymous Wed Jun 17 17: I don't even own a PS2, neither have I done more than read some stuff about FMcB. It's supposed to be able to load ISOs from a hardrive, is it be able to load PS1 ISOs too? Anonymous Wed Jun 17 17: last time I checked (which was a while ago) you still needed to use a swap trick (with a legit game disc and a console modded for swapping, i.e., you need to be able to access the disc tray) to play copied PSX games with FMCB. There's also an actual emulator that sucks, if I remember correctly. Again, I haven't looked it up in a while, so maybe it's gotten easier/better since then. Anonymous Wed Jun 17 18: You're basically right, the PSXLauncher app OP's referring to requires a console that can do the swap trick, when I did it years ago I just blocked one of the sensors inside the slim with some paper and got it going.
Massive headache as you described though, as well as coming with the usual pitfalls of burned CDRs (music playing out of order, multi-disc games not working) Wouldn't recommend it. The emulator's actually not bad, you can play a good few games perfectly (Crash series, SOTN, Rayman). Just check this list before doing anything: Admittedly the real selling point of McBoot is installing Open PS2 Loader and setting up a drive with some games, unlike the PS1 emu the PS2 compatibility is damn near perfect and feels really neat all in a menu. Anonymous Wed Jun 17 18: Yes, very much so.
No, unfortunately. Anonymous Wed Jun 17 18: Yes, very much so. Meaning it's worth using? installing Open PS2 Loader and setting up a drive with some games It'll just play PS2 ISOs?.multi-disc games not working.
Is that the case with PS2 roms as well? Anonymous Wed Jun 17 18: It would probably be easier to just emulate the games on a PC and pop the CDRs in. If you aren't using McBoot what are you using? Yes its worth getting. I find modifying the PS2 more confusing than the PSP or PS3 though.
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Anonymous Wed Jun 17 18: Yes. Also you can run burned PS1 games, just not ISOs. Anonymous Wed Jun 17 18: If you aren't using McBoot what are you using? I don't play burned games anymore. I only have a PS2 with a handful each of PS1 and PS2 games. I'd like to be able to play PS2 ISOs, do you know if there's issues with multi-disc games as said about McBoot's PS1 emulator?.multi-disc games not working. Anonymous Wed Jun 17 19: Multi disc isos work IF they let you save before prompting for the next disc.
Then you can run the next iso and load. Some games don't save before swapping.
Anonymous Wed Jun 17 20: I'm pretty sure there are workarounds for those though, either some kind of patch or a certain loader mode IIRC. The majority of games save before the swap in my experience at least. Anonymous Wed Jun 17 22: is it be able to load PS1 ISOs too This is the best thing I'm aware of right now, maybe there's a better way. Anonymous Wed Jun 17 23: Nah, that's it. And that's really not a good way, it's essentially running a PS1 emulator on the PS2 rather than using the built-in PS1 hardware. The PS2's backwards compatibility is achieved by literally shoving a PS1 inside of the PS2.
The hardware is completely isolated and because of that Free McBoot can't do anything with it. If I recall correctly, the PS1 hardware can't even access the USB ports or the hard drive either, so there's really no way to load ISOs any way you look at it. Anonymous Thu Jun 18 01: music There's a list of games that have borked music when run with a swap: it happens because the system's still using the TOC from the official disc if the game has its music in the data track, it'll be a-ok Overall, it's not much of a headache though. PS2's are okay with burned CDs in my experience, I've had way more issues running burned DVDs (even burned movies) on my PS2s. Anonymous Thu Jun 18 10: I don't recommend installing mcboot for ps1 backups from either physical media or the two emulators. If you want to play 'backup' ps1 games go for modchip or PC emulation and possibly psio in the future. I recommend installing mcboot for playing ps2 isos in OPL from fat ps2 internal hard drive (best), network shared folder (second best) or USB (in third place).
Anonymous Thu Jun 18 10: Mind giving some advice on USB loading? I've been forced to burn discs for the couple of games I've tried as loading over USB keeps getting stuck on one of the various colored screens. The fact that several of them seem to use the same or very similar colors doesn't help matters. Anonymous Thu Jun 18 10: Not only Swap, also Action Replay/Media Player and some others are fine too. Anonymous Thu Jun 18 11: USB is slow and has compatibility issues. Don't bother unless you're sure it's a game that plays well with it. Anonymous Thu Jun 18 12: It was a case of not loading at all on games that I believe were confirmed working.
Anonymous Thu Jun 18 12: Noob when it comes to this stuff. Could I use this to play other region games withing having to mess around swapping disks like with swap magic? Anonymous Thu Jun 18 12: Getting FreeMCBoot on your memory card is tricky. I got it because many years ago I bought a pressed copy of HDAdvance off of the internet, which was a modified version HDLoader. I installed a CD version of UlaunchELF to the harddrive, booted it, copied the FreeMCBoot stuff to my memorycard in FTP mode and installed it.
I know another way I could've done it too. There's a swap-trick that you can do with Gameshark to launch CD-based games and the UlaunchELF disc version happens to be CD-based. This involves opening the case of your fat-PS2 though, if you press the eject button to swap discs then the trick won't work.
Anonymous Thu Jun 18 12: Yes. You can also patch isos to change the y-offset if they don't show up on your screen right Anonymous Thu Jun 18 13: Can anyone recommend me a good HDD loader? I've installed HDLoader using WinHiip but the project died a long time ago and I was looking for a good replacement. Anonymous Thu Jun 18 13: Anonymous Thu Jun 18 13: You can hard mod your PS2 for $5. Or you can buy and mod a PSX for around $40 total. Just leaving those options out there.
Hard mods are really fucking nice. Anonymous Thu Jun 18 15: Just do it.
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There's literally no cons. Anonymous Thu Jun 18 15: hard mod your PS2 for $5 Where have you seen a price that low?
Please give me a link.:^) Anonymous Thu Jun 18 16: eBay has them for $4.29 shipped: If you buy 5+, you can get them on aliexpress for even less. Anonymous Thu Jun 18 16: Not directly related but Should I get a XenoGC for my GC?
Anonymous Thu Jun 18 16: Damn! Works on the slim PS2s too it seems:^) PS2 games burn onto DVDs right?
Anonymous Thu Jun 18 16: have fun installing it. The trace lines are so fucking tiny, you're going to need a good soldering iron to avoid burning traces. Yeah, tho some discs are cd. But keep in mind slim has a shit laser guaranteed to die from reading recordable media. Anonymous Thu Jun 18 16: keep in mind slim has a shit laser guaranteed to die from reading recordable media I'm not going to ask you about why that is and how it works but I'm curious now. If you have a link to an explanation I'd like to learn about that. I'd mostly like to know how much faster will the laser shit out are the lasers cheap are they easy to replace I'd probably buy a laser with the chip if it's cheap enough.
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Anonymous Thu Jun 18 16: Laser needs to work harder to read etched 'burned' media than pressed retail discs. Anonymous Thu Jun 18 16: will that chip enable the ps2 to play burned ps1 games as well? Anonymous Thu Jun 18 17: Yes, it will.
But only most PSX games. Some of the later PSX games have protections which the PS2 modchip does not defeat. For those you need a modded PSX. I just bought that chip off ebay the other day. Waiting for it to arrive from China.
I previously modded my PSX with a chip that cost me $10 from a guy on The Iso Zone named Zer0-2k11. I'll try my best with the install. I have a decent soldering station, but it's still tough work. The PS2 does have a shit laser, especially the slims, but replacement lasers are only like $8 so I'm not worried about destroying the laser. Anonymous Thu Jun 18 17: File: 640 KB, 1600x1200, PlayStationBBUnit.jpg Is there any way to format any HDD for my PS2 without needing the formatting disc, or am I better off buying the official Sony one instead?
Anonymous Thu Jun 18 17: I have an old modded PS1 but the AV port is dookin' on my chest; for years I always had to wiggle the hell out of the cord to stop the picture from going dark and barely viewable.as time went on it happened more often and was harder to fix by messing with the cord/port. It also got very load and Very very slow after I put in the mod chip.could that just be a bad laser? At that price though, I'll definately being modding my PS2 by the end of the summer.
Anonymous Thu Jun 18 17: how? Anonymous Thu Jun 18 18: You can format it using WinHiip. Easiest way I found to install Free Mcboot is FHDB 1.93 and hddrawcopy. Anonymous Thu Jun 18 18: what are the benefits of installing McBoot if not being used as a PS1 emulator? Anonymous Thu Jun 18 19: You don't necessarily even need to burn ISOs into CDs.
If you have the ability to use uLaunchElf, you can use POPStarter to play ISOs directly from a USB flashdrive. Of course, this involves software emulation, so not all games are gonna work. But those that do, will work beautifully, because POPS is Sony's own code that some nice soul leaked for the rest of us to abuse. So I'd say yes, FreeMC Boot and uLaunchELF are well worth having. Anonymous Thu Jun 18 19: POPStarter Is this a feature within Free McBoot? Please pardon my ignorance. Anonymous Thu Jun 18 20: it is quite the opposite of tricky.
There are so many people willing to do the service for you, and so many usb memory card adapters if you don't trust someone with your memory card. Anonymous Thu Jun 18 21: No, it's not native to the Free McBoot, but a separate software package that you have to install and launch from a USB stick with uLaunchELF. This is not a difficult process, however, once you have Free McBoot installed. Simply download the POPS files, place them to a flash drive, convert your ISO to a specific file format and copy that too to USB, then boot POPStarter with uLauchELF. Detailed information here: Anonymous Fri Jun 19 01: I bought a memory card with Free McBoot preinstalled because I was too lazy to do it myself.
I'd say it was worth it. PS2 games actually run fine from USB, aside from the annoying FMV lag.
It might be better if I get a hard drive installed. Would there be any advantage to using a SATA adapter with a cheap SSD instead? Anyway, I want to give POPStarter a try, and see how well it fares with PS1 games. Anonymous Fri Jun 19 02: How much was the card, and where'd you buy from?
Also, I thought you needed certain stuff to be able to put the data on the memory card, right? So that's not really being lazy if you don't have the action replay or whatever. Anonymous Fri Jun 19 02: Ebay, it was like $25 CAD. I know homebrew authors hate it when people do this, but softmodding a PS2 is a real PITA when you don't have the right equipment. It probably would have cost me just as much to get all the right equipment together regardless. Anyway, can anyone hook me up with a copy of POPS.PAK? I found an uploaded.net link in an archived thread, but I screwed something up and now it won't let me download the file.
Uloz.to or MEGA would be preferred. Anonymous Fri Jun 19 02: Wow, that's a lot of $$$ for one. What size memory card was it sent on? I was thinking of buying a stack of memory cards off aliexpress, adding FreeMcBoot to them, and selling them on Craigslist to help people out/make a tiny bit of money. Anonymous Fri Jun 19 04: I did it with no special hardware. It was trivial.
There's dozens of mainstream games out there that work with the disc swap trick, you probably own at least one of them. Anonymous Fri Jun 19 04: Just a normal 8MB. At least it was first party. I've wasted much more money on much more trivial shit before. Anonymous Fri Jun 19 10: Same anon. Does it do the same thing when the game is on another USB stick?
Is the game fragmented? Is the game a verified rip? Don't recommend USB because PS2 only has 1.1 speed USB ports. Playback is likely to be jerky. Network is a bit better, but still likely to have a bottleneck.
Internal HDD is faster than 100%, (obviously the game won't play super-fast, but loading screens will be a lot faster depending on game). I'm sure I read that Sony did things to the lasers to make sure they died faster when being used for purposes they didn't approve of (like burnt discs).
Anonymous Fri Jun 19 11: Sony did things to the lasers to make sure they died faster when being used for purposes they didn't approve of Crever deveropers! Anonymous Fri Jun 19 17: File: 168 KB, 600x590, alien-trilogy-usa.jpg Welp, I finally got POPStarter working, and Alien Trilogy is looking pretty nice, but it slows down to a crawl in sections with lots of enemies and/or complex level geometry. Does this happen on a real PS1, or is it an issue with POPSLoader? Anonymous Fri Jun 19 17: OPL using SMB works great. Compatibility is as high as using HDD.
The only downsides are it's a bit of a pain to set up the first time and FMV is choppy in a few games, but other than that it's pretty close to perfect. Locating a reliable IDE HDD these days is getting harder and harder. Getting ones over a certain size that aren't beat up or on their last legs is very difficult. If it's not dead technology yet, it's pretty damn close. Anonymous Fri Jun 19 18: I just tried it again on Mednafen, using the same ISO, and it runs much faster. I'm kinda disappointed. Is there any way for me to get glorious 240p output from my PC?
Anonymous Fri Jun 19 18: Mom and pop computer stores are likely to have IDE hard drives that are in good shape. Also those old Pentium 4 Dells with capacitor plague are a good source, people just throw those away. If you have a hamfest nearby (a ham/cb radio flea market that generally gets together twice a year) you can find IDE drives dime a dozen, as the people that go there have a lot of older technology. Anonymous Fri Jun 19 18: sony has always installed the lowest quality lasers in their playstation systems, cut at certain points the lasers were worse than others. Such as early ps1 systems, which used a lower quality laser than their japanese cousins used and the ps2slims compared to ps2fatties.
This is and many other issues are pretty well known, but not talked about much because sony has more media control (ad dollars) than their rivals. Anonymous Fri Jun 19 18: Also it is important to keep in mind that not all IDE drives will connect to the network adapter. This is because different brands of IDE drives do not all align at the same exact spots, unlike SATA drives. I don't remember which brands align correctly tho, just making sure you faggots are aware of this. Anonymous Sat Jun 20 01: Maxtor and Hitachi work best in my experience. Western Digital drives do not work, they have an extra set of jumpers that misaligns it for the network adapter.
Anonymous Sat Jun 20 01: Make sure you don't use a hard drive that has a very high operating temperature, unless you want to turn the inside of your PS2 into an oven. Anonymous Sat Jun 20 19: so you just hook up the HDD to an IDE to USB adapter and write data like that? Anonymous Sat Jun 20 20: I can't get the Swap Trick to work to boot uLaunch. Anyone have experience getting this to work? If so, what game did you use?
Anonymous Sat Jun 20 20: used THPS3 and a slide card for mine, however it only worked on my older gen phat ps2 (SLUS 5000 i believe) and not my newer phat one. Anonymous Sat Jun 20 20: Yup. I have a usb ide external enclosure I use to put stuff on mine. Anonymous Sat Jun 20 20: in theory, this is how you install FMCB without using exploit games and AR MAX, right? Anonymous Sat Jun 20 20: In theory yes. Anonymous Sat Jun 20 20: neat, thanks Anonymous Sat Jun 20 21: File: 44 KB, 632x396, MODBO.jpg Is it safe to say a ModBo chip is a better option than FreeMcBoot?
Anonymous Sat Jun 20 21: Can you solder? If not, FreeMcBoot is better. If you can solder, ModBo is better.
Anonymous Sat Jun 20 21: I can. I modded a PS1 years ago.that was only 6 leads I think but it went fine. Putting it back together was clunky but I do cleaner work now.:^).