Soft-Modding a PlayStation 2

While my fondness for the GameCube is well documented, I actually have a deep appreciation for all of the systems of that generation. The Dreamcast, PS2, even the original Xbox make up, to me, some of the finest years of gaming. In a perfect world, I would have a robust physical library for all of these systems (and many more), but real world economics combined with the amount of available space on my shelf makes this somewhat impossible. Most people today would default to going down a pure emulation route, which is arguably the correct approach. Emulation, even on advanced consoles such as the PS2, has progressed to the point where the vast majority of titles can be played virtually identically from real hardware. This, combined with extra features such as achievement support and upscaling, really makes emulation the ideal way to play older games.

However, for me there's something about having the physical system that I just find rewarding. Warts and all, I enjoy interacting with the actual, original hardware. I enjoy creating an optimized set up for all of my devices. Perhaps most of all, I also enjoy translucent colored plastics. Therefore, when I discovered that Sony produced a Japanese-only version of the PS2 which game in a translucent blue shell, I prowled the internet auction sites until one finally came my way.

Now, I should say that this is not my first PS2. While I actually didn't own one during its original life-cycle, I did pick up a used Slim model about a decade ago when they went on sale at my (then) local retro gaming store. I've always loved the PS2 Slim specifically. The original PS2 model is sized fairly typically for devices of that era, which makes it an engineering marvel that Sony was able to miniaturize it down to the Slim size, barely larger than the case the games came in. Many other manufacturers have released "slim" products over the years, but none have truly deserved the title as much as the PS2 Slim.

However, there are two notable problems with the PS2 Slim model. The first is that, at least on my unit, it has difficulty reading certain titles, especially those released on dual-layer discs. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, for example, won't get past the loading screen on either of the two copies I own. While this has always bummed me out somewhat, it's the second of the Slim's limitations that is the more pressing issue today, namely its moddability.

Now, many people have successfully modded a PS2 Slim, but most of the attention from the modding community has been directed towards the original "fat" PS2 model for one simple reason — it has an internal hard drive bay. While it wasn't required for the vast majority of games, certain titles such as Final Fantasy XI relied on an internal HDD to store patches for the game, a precursor to today's digital game updates. The internal HDD went hand-in-hand with the PS2's network adapter, which provided either ethernet or dial-up capabilities for supported games. You could even install and run a custom version of Linux with it, if you were feeling particularly fond of your PS2.

In my case, picking up this original PS2 served both as an excuse to indulge myself in the lovely Ocean Blue casing, but also opened the possibility of installing an internal HDD into the system, allowing me to store and play any game I wished on the system, with improved load times over the traditional optical drive.

The Console

For those unfamiliar, the Sony PlayStation 2 is a pretty typical system of its era. The front features two memory card slots, two USB 1.1 ports, a FireWire port (remember those?) and two proprietary controller ports (a source of controversy amongst its detractors; the Xbox, GameCube, and Dreamcast all supported four controllers). On the right-hand side are a Power/Reset button, eject button, and tray-loading DVD drive. The PS2 is famously the best-selling DVD player in history, as the high price of competing DVD players at the time made the PS2 competitive, even before including its gaming capabilities. The DVD drive on my unit appears to function well, although the tray mechanism itself needs some attention. It does not slide well and nearly gets stuck while ejecting. However, since the PS2 was a region-locked system, none of my North American discs will even play on this device, requiring me to mod the unit even if I didn't want to. Thus, while I might someday clean up the tray mechanism, it's lower on the priority list.

The rear of the console is somewhat lacking in I/O. In the center is the fan exhaust, with a power switch and DC power socket to its right. Below that is an optical audio port along with its display port, which supports a variety of protocols. I picked up a component cable for my PS2 slim some years back, which functions similarly with the original model. On the left-hand side though, is our object of interest, the HDD bay.

The HDD

I suspect that most PS2 owners never even bothered to open this panel (stories of teenagers hiding paraphernalia notwithstanding), but on every PS2 unit is an empty cavity designed to hold an IDE hard drive. However, this empty cavity is just that, completely empty. There is no I/O on the far end for the HDD to connect to, instead data and power are provided to the drive via an adapter which fastens to the outside of the unit.

This adapter provides a sort of "U-turn" connection, plugging into the power/data ports on the hard drive, and then connecting to a revealed port on the back of the PS2 unit. If you wished to install a HDD back in the day, you would use Sony's first party Network Adapter to do so, which provides both the connection for the hard drive, while also adding ethernet and dial-up modem ports. However, while these adapters aren't hard to find, they're no longer ideal for our purposes. For one, I personally don't plan on using the networking features of this system (although there are many applications for doing so, ranging from playing games remotely to connecting to fan-run game servers). Secondly, this original adapter was for IDE hard drives. This is a somewhat older HDD standard, being largely replaced with SATA in the following years. Rather than settling on an older, probably smaller drive, or getting an IDE-to-SATA adapter, I chose to try my luck with a 3rd party SATA adapter.

These devices are surprisingly inexpensive, although I had heard some mixed reviews regarding them, mainly focused on their reliability. However, I'm pleased to say that I've yet to encounter any problems with mine. All of my difficulties getting it to work were a result of software, as we'll see. However, there is one major downside with this device — they don't make them in Ocean Blue.

Fortunately, since it's on the rear of the unit, it's difficult to see the color mismatch unless you go looking for it.

Injecting a Memory Card

Let's move away from the HDD for a moment and discuss our plan of attack. Simply putting games onto a hard drive is not enough, a vanilla PS2 has no mechanism to load them. Instead custom homebrew software is required to browse and load your games, which requires a method of running said homebrew on the system.

Among retro hardware, methods of loading homebrew varies wildly from system to system. Some consoles, like the GameCube, require a hardware modification to allow access, others — including most modern systems with fully-fledged operating systems — are done by jailbreaking the console, allowing for complete control over what software is installed. The PS2 falls somewhat in the middle, where the console itself will remain unmodified, but we will load custom software onto a memory card, which will perform the jailbreaking injection on the unit.

The somewhat annoying nature of this is that in order to create a hacked memory card, you need a hacked memory card. I am now available to provide this service to anyone who knows me personally, but if you wish to get a foot in the door like I needed to, you'll need to purchase a previously hacked memory card online.

...Or so the traditional wisdom would tell you. PS2 memory cards are still readily available, and getting a hacked one is surprisingly inexpensive. However, it dawned on me that for a few bucks more, I could instead pick up an accessory that would be much more versatile — an 8BitMods MemCard Pro. If you read my Ultimate GameCube post, you'll know I already had the GC equivalent of this device. It essentially allows you use to a typical micro SD card for storing game save data. Even modest micro SD cards these days are thousands of times larger than typical PS2 memory cards, which range around a few megabytes. It also allow you to back up your saves to a PC, either for safekeeping or to transfer play to an emulator.

I had been debating whether or not to pick one up anyway, but the realization that I could instead inject the homebrew onto an SD card myself was too tempting to pass up. Besides, they make them in translucent blue. A few years ago, 8BitMods actually introduced a MemCard Pro 2 model, but I honestly didn't see anything that it supported that I felt was worth the extra price.

Now, how to load the software onto the memory card might not be immediately apparent. Yes, we now can load files onto a micro SD card. However, the PS2 is expecting data saved in their proprietary memory card format, which the MemCard Pro identifies as a .mc2 file. This turned out to not be as big an obstacle as I feared, as there are a number of pre-made .mc2 files available online that served my purpose. It was simply a matter of powering on the console once, so the MemCard Pro would create a new memory card image, then renaming the one I found online and replacing it. It worked like a charm; so far so good.

The Software

I keep mentioning this "homebrew software", but I've been a bit cagey on the details. What software do we actually need? The memory card .mc2 image I found online actually had more than I needed, but there's really only three vital pieces.

The first is the injection software itself, known as "FreeMcBoot" (FMCB). This isn't a typical application per say, but it's the software suite that performs the injection needed to trick the PS2 into loading homebrew programs, as well as creating the UI menus that the user will interface with.

Along with FMCB you'll need a file manager, such as wLaunchELF. This will allow us to format the HDD to the filesystem that the PS2 prefers, as well as transfer files around. This is very useful, since we don't have a direct interface to a memory card from our PC, we can instead load software onto a USB stick, mount it, then copy it to the memory card or HDD via our file manager. It's wLaunchELF that allows you to create new FMCB memory cards, simply by duplicating all the files from one to the other. I actually took this opportunity to do so. Now that I had a MemCard Pro, I wasn't really planning on using my original memory card anymore, and having it be the FMCB card makes certain operations on the MemCard Pro easier.

wLaunchELF allows you to access files on all mounted devices. Of particular interest are the memory cards (mc0:/ and mc1:/), the HDD (hdd0:/), and any available USB stick (mass:/).

Lastly, but not leastly, is OPL. OPL is the program that actually provides a menu to launch our PS2 files saved on the internal HDD. Once our initial set up is complete, the typical usage when playing the console will be to immediately navigate to OPL, then from there launch our game of choice.

At this point, we've circled back to our physical hard drive yet again. With the PS2 now ready to receive and play games, all that remains is to figure out how to copy them to it.

Game Installation

There aren't a huge number of ways to transfer files to the PS2's HDD. Some owners have FTP servers on their console, and simply transfer files over the network. I prefer not to do this, partially because I don't have a wired network connection easily accessible to where I keep my consoles, but also because I chose to not get a HDD adapter with network ports. Instead, we'll settle on doing things the old fashioned way — plugging the drive directly into my PC.

Fortunately, we don't need to actually make a SATA connection to my motherboard, as I have a USB adapter for SATA devices. I actually originally got it so I could use an internal Bluray drive on a computer without an optical drive bay. I've since remedied that set up, so my adapter is free to assist me here.

The drive itself is nothing special, just a 1 TB Seagate drive that I'm not 100% sure where it came from. While doing research for this project, I came across this video by Macho Nacho Productions, which includes a step-by-step process for setting up much of the stack that I've been describing here, in particular configuring OPL. What caught my eye though was the discussion of a new Beta version of OPL that allows for the HDD to be formatted with exFAT. This might not sound like much of a difference at first, but the stable version of OPL uses FAT32. Eagle eyed viewers might spot a problem here, as FAT32 has a file size limitation of 4 GB. There are many PS2 games that exceed that limitation, so transferring PS2 .iso files would require some sort of homebrew tool to split them up in a way that OPL understands.

For me personally, the fewer homebrew tools I have to use the better. This is partially because transferring games to and from the HDD will be a common operation I'll likely want to do many times in the future, so the fewer required steps I have to remember, the better. In addition, I'm also a Linux user, and many hobbiest tools are hacked together applications with only Windows consideration. Getting some of them to run on Linux at all can sometimes take longer than the rest of the project put together. With that in mind, I banked completely on using the beta OPL release, and didn't look much into the traditional way of doing things.

This ended up being a mistake. Try as I might, I never got the OPL beta to recognize my exFAT-partitioned drive. At one point, I did get it to recognize an exFAT USB stick, which made me worried my HDD adapter was the weak link, but in the end that wasn't the case. I spent hours on this before giving up, setting the drive back to FAT32, and attempting to use HDL dump, the recommended tool to break up and copy PS2 titles over to the HDD. Sure enough, it worked flawlessly. It might not be as friendly as just copying files over with my file explorer, but soon enough I got all of my games transferred to the drive and playing like a charm. I have my suspicions the OPL beta never really panned out, as it released several years ago, around the same time as that video, but never received any further beta releases, nor was ever merged into the main release branch.

Conclusion

I'll admit that when I started this project, I knew a lot less about the PS2 ecosystem than the GameCube's. However, I'm quite pleased with how everything came together here. The ability to play any arbitrary game on real hardware is a very rewarding feeling, and the case of the PS2, one that honestly didn't require too much fuss. All you really need is the system, a spare SATA drive, and some rather inexpensive parts such as a HDD adapter and pre-made FMCB memory card. The whole process of putting it together took just an evening, and it would've been even smoother if I hadn't spent so much time avoiding the stable OPL version.

All that aside, it's a relatively straight-forward project, arguably easier than the installation I did putting the Flippydrive into my GameCube. If you're interested in dipping your toes into retro hardware, then I would recommend this as a strong and rewarding project to begin with.