PS2 Slimline guide: external USB hard drive & game playing (NO CHIP REQ'D)

Would the Swapmagic 3.8 Plus Coder PAL package work with this tutorial or is it strictly to the Swapmagic 3.6 package?

 

Hey. I was reading that you use USBAdvance and have it working. I was just wondering if you could point me in the right direction (I just really want to play some FFXII).

I have an original PS2 and no mod chip. I have a USB HDD (WD 250GB) and I don't really know where to start if I want to use USBAdvance. I guess the first place to start would be:

1. What do I need to make this all happen?
2. Can I get the stuff online or do I have to buy something?

If you could help me out, I'd appreciate it. Thanks in advance.

 

Aeryk, Would you be able to tell me if I have to buy SwapMagic or if there is an alternative to modding my chubby? Thanks in advance.

 

I have a slim line and I am not sure how the old ps2 works. I figure it would be the same concept. You have to have something that will load ELF file. That means you are going to have to buy something. I got SWAPMAGIC and it is a great program. Using the ELF file USBAdvance it only plays about 10% of the entire collection of ps2 games created. It is basically worthless if you are a hardcore gamer.
If you really want to play games from a HD and you have a fat ps2 then just buy a HD and Network Adapter. After you do that I can lead you in the right direction.

If you are going to get swap magic, have a usbhd, and are willing to be very patient with it then I can help you out.

1. Buy SWAPMAGIC 3.6 or 3.8
2. Msg me back after you get it...

 

Did anyone with a modbo760 chip managed to start usbadvance.elf ? I tried everything... all i got is a black screen .

Thank You

 

To clear things up you guys seem knowledgeable another forum on here said that it is not worth backing your games up to a hard drive if you have a slimline because it is slow or doesn't work with many games. This sucks as I have a 250GB HD and swap magic 3.8 coder on it's way here right now I just want to be nice to my laser as I can now basically professionally install ps2 lasers due to the amount of breakdown's.

 

@ croy00.... all is not lost... the swap magic 3.8 coder is great. There isnt anything I have found so far that it won't play. So at least if you don't like doing the usb hd thing, then just back up games and play with the SM 3.8.

Not all games are slow on the usb drive. I have played quite a few that play normal. A lot with big movies can be slow but the game will play fine. But you have to want to spend the time and research if some games will work or not.
A lot of games have been checked at Jaydium site.
It really depends on what type of games u play as to what works and what doesnt. But if you choose not to use the usb drive you can always just add it as another drive to your computer. So all is not lost that way.

Like Aeryk said earlier I was someone could make a homebrew file for the usb drive in that some way it could detect the usb drive like an ide drive or something. That way we could use Hd loader. Wishful thinking I am sure on my part.

 

Wow thanks alot I knew someone could help and yeah I only own like 7 PS2 games so I am going to use a partition on my drive and keep the rest for my comp.

 

Thats great. Another bit of info if using the USB HD for ps2 games, you can also keep other files on the drive as long as they are in their own folder.



Also in reply to someone earlier about showing the proper size on USB HD after transferring games. If you use USB insane to transfer the ISO instead of USBExtreme it is much closer to the size, and it also sorts your games in alphabetical order.
I use both cause with the USBextreme I find it easier to delete them if they don't work, and also it transfers faster for me.

 

Computer files in there own folder gotcha. I can't wait because I am always at my friends and we always have our 360's and ps2's side by side and to not have to pack as many games with me would mean more time to spend playing them then hauling them.

 

Hi i've been having problems with the hdd solution.
First of ... those read errors that usb extremes gives out all the time, are pretty poorly documented, and no one seems to be able to point out a reason for them. Anyway, i think it just means that the game is incompatible with usb extreme/advance.

FF12 - couldn't put it on the hdd; but managed to install two other games sucefully.

Before going directly to current problem, there is this curious fact:
Aside from usb advance, there's a couple of interesting .elf files that u can use to start runing programs, for instance: elf launcher.
I've tried out swap magick 3.8 lauching elfs, and i found out it works pretty okey... I put the elf's in the folder swapmagick, i start booting with the elf launcher, and everything runs smoothly.
WIth elf launcher, i browse all my hdd, and all the files seem to be there. One important fact: this is all playing out with a small flash pen device of 64MB (more than enough to store200 and 400K elf's.

Now the games are installed in 20 gb ide drive, put onto a usb 2.0 enclosure. Mounting the device doesn't seem as simple for the ps2 as with the pen, things don't go as flawlessly, anyway... swap magick does manage to run SWAPMAGICK.elf file as it should.

But now 1 of these two situations happens:
1- if the elf file is elflauncher: the program freezes if i try to browse the usb mass storage device folder (pretty bad sign, that didn't happen with my pen);
2- if the file was usb advance, again the swap magick manages to put it runing, but the program however doesn't detect that there is a usb hdd mounted, it keeps asking me to connect a usb device, and doesn't browse any of the games installed.

Any ideas why this should happen. And i won't really understant if it's possible for a device to be incompatible: afterwall usb 2.0 is backward compatible, so the ps should work with it just as well.

My ps2 is however very old. Solution would be much appreciated.

 

I just setup my PS2 for this last night and it works great (using Swap Magic 3.6).

One question though, is it possible to play Japanese import games with this setup? I have a few loaded on there (Ex: Garou - Mark of the Wolves) and I just get a black screen. Thanks!

 

I am not an expert but just make sure you are playing it in NTSC or PAL if not switch it with swap magic or try a special boot.

 

Hey PPL
I have a few question
1 how is the performance of the games running of the USB? Laggy?
Also I have a ps2 v14 and have toxicos .41 on it. I was planning to get a WD 500gb SATA and use my usb/e-sata enclosure by nexstar to boot from it. Some advice would be really nice cuz i am still very confused.

 

Been reading through these forums for a while and thought I'd pitch in with my own experiences.

I've managed to get ULAUNCHELF running off my memory card as well as USBADVANCE.

This is where my confusion starts kicking in. I have managed to copy over one of my games, Disgaea, onto my hard drive (a Western Digital 120Gb usb 2.0 drive) but when I load usbadvance I get told that I must plug in a usb device. If I unplug the usb hd and then plug in my 1Gb pen drive which I have also copied Disgaea to I am then able to run the game.

Is there a size limit or any other pre-requisites needed to be run first on the usb drive? I have attempted to run it under FAT, FAT32 and NTFS formats as well as following guidelines on allowing USBExtreme to format teh drive for me.

Any help or information would be very appreciated.

 

That USB drive should be compatible. Not sure otherwise why it wouldnt recognize your drive.
I use a Samsung 350 GB usb drive and formatted it as FAT32 using USBExtreme.
Put a folder on it and name it SWAPMAGIC, copy the system files, elf files and rename usb advance elf to SWAPMAGIC.ELF and it should load fine.

 

Does anyone know if there is a compatability list for what hard drives will and won't work.

I had another think about the problem and I'm wondering if it is the age of my PS2, it is just over 6 years old now and is a version 3-4 if I remember correctly. Is there a chance that it only has USB 1.0 connections while my drive requires USB 2.0?

 

Is your usb drive usb 2.0 only. It needs to be usb 1.1 compatible to work.

 

I'm fairly sure the drive is USB 2.0 only, it's been a few years since I got it. One thing that bothers me though is the fact that ULaunchelf can see it, USBAdvance can run off it, but asbadvance won't take games from it.

Surely the fact that ulaunchelf can read the contents of the disk means the ps2 sees it ok. In that case is it a compatability issue with usbadvance? I think I remember seeing somewhere that it had problems with Western Digital drives, but I'm pretty sure that was for IDE drives connected directly to the console and not via usb.

 

Oh ok so your saying it does recognize the drive, it just won't load the games off it.
The games are listed on the device then on your screen, and when you click on a game what happens?