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.
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.
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.
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.
Having tried both a USB3 drive adapter and downloading over Ethernet, I’ll say that Ethernet was way slower for me.
The average copy time on the adapter was about 30 minutes, but over Ethernet it took 3-4 times as long.
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
Why is it a paid in the butt
Probably because it’s pretty slow, and the custom drive format used by the PS2 isn’t very flexible; game images have to be in one continuous block, and blocks can’t be moved. You can overwrite one game with another, but only if it’s the same size or smaller. So if you delete games off in the reverse of the order you put them on you’re fine, but otherwise you’re going to leave empty “holes” of wasted space.
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.
I have a 500GB drive in my hard drive slot using the third party adapter and grimDoomer OPL