5mo ago

Run Your PS2 Library from a $50 Memory Card Effortlessly

www.retronews.com

A new innovation in the retro gaming community now allows you to run your entire PS2 library directly from a $50 memory card, thanks to the Multi-Purpose Memory Card Emulation (MMCE) protocol.

36 comments

times like these I wish I didn't live paycheck to paycheck
- If it makes you feel any better compatibility is probably pretty mixed. Last I checked the PS2 memcard slot doesn't have enough bandwidth to load all games reliably.
  
  Makes me wonder if it's faster than the USB 1.1 ports on the PS2. I used to load PS2 games from a USB drive but 1.1 speeds meant that some games had stuttering FMVs and some with texture/geometry streaming were more susceptible to pop-in.
  I can't imagine it'd be much better via memory card though, considering it was only ever intended for small savegames and for loading firmware updates (which is also what this memory card or rather FreeMcBoot exploits).

That's cool and all, but you can probably run your entire PS2 library from stuff you already own.
- Some people like to play on original hardware but I guess this still being emulation makes that a little cloudy. I certainly couldn't justify it. I own a computer and wireless controller, so as you said.
- Kinda difficult to put all of your game discs into the PS2
  Although seeing a CD carousel for it would be pretty neat.
  
  You can install a hard drive and burn your games to it.
- If you have a relatively powerful computer or phone, and your library only contains games from the console's top 100 or so, you're probably right.
- I have my ps2 games on my Nas and set up a share that Open Ps2 Loader could access, except the games that don't work like that which i have on an internal ssd, this sounds like a much easier solution I could have done instead of needing to get an oem network adapter, a hard drive, a sata adapter board, a d all the configuration and freemcboot... sounds like this would replace all that... if I wasn't already set up I would have gone this route.
  
  Woah woah slow down, this sounds like more fun. What is your setup?

Probably cheaper/better to use a 2.5" hard drive. Though I guess this works with Slims as well
- I think the best thing is to load your games over the network. The usb ports are only 1.0. And I’m pretty sure the network adapter hard drive connector either only accepts up to 40gb drives or it only uses a pata connection.
  
  There are newer adapters for the network port. I use a 500GB SATA drive just fine, it's just a pain in the butt to transfer games
  
  I bought a 3rd party drive adaptor without a network port and had to load my games on my PC using a network enclosure.
  It was still a pain. Its all soooooo slow and buggy.
  
  I have a 500GB drive in my hard drive slot using the third party adapter and grimDoomer OPL
  
  I have a 2TB SATA HDD in my PS2 fat. AFAIK that's still the maximum storage size possible with the FMCB/wLaunchELF software. I believe that an unmodded original network adapter should be able to take up to a 512MB IDE drive, but I'd have to double-check that.
  I used to use a third-party "network adapter" (they usually don't have Ethernet, just an HDD connector) with SATA support, which still works fine (it seems like most brands stopped working properly after a certain homebrew software version), but later I bought an official adapter (IDE/PATA) and a SATA conversion kit (a kit specific to the PS2 network adapter, not a standard IDE-SATA converter, which sometimes work with the PS2 and sometimes don't) so I could try network stuff.
  I don't think it was worth it, but these days it's probably the way to go since there no longer seems to be any way of telling the non-working aftermarket adaptors from the working ones; the companies making the bad ones just started putting the brand name of the one still working adapter on their products.

From my experience using mem2sio to run games from an SD card is that the memory card slot causes issues with certain games causing issues from lagging cutscenes, long load times, and freezes. Are those fixed in this version or is it similar as far as compatibility goes?