The Canada Post strike really disrupted me more than it probably should have. There was almost a year of building excitement for those Last Summer CDs, and all the time I spent drawing things for them, only to see the ones for Savannah and Connor freeze three days after I send them right along the border. Almost a month later and they still haven't moved. I had journal posts about putting it all together ready to go that I just wasn't able to post. I was gonna put the last dozen copies or so up for sale on my Bandcamp and maybe use Reddit to advertise some handmade CDs—desire to do that disappeared for a bit. I meant to take some time off to relax, but it kinda became more of a depressive streak than relaxing from a busy year, not just because of the strike, but that definitely didn't help.
Good news! The strike is expected to end next week, not because Canada Post and the union came up with a solution, but because the government has had enough of the billion dollars lost and millions of Christmases ruined as a result of not having a functional fucking postal service and they're forcing people back to work until May of next year. Hopefully an actually better solution that suits the workers better can be found—but this just can't continue like this. I heard from Savannah they were gonna do rolling strikes (where only certain areas would strike at a time)—that probably would've gotten people's hackles up a lot less if the mail service was just slower and not nonexistent. Tactical error, I dunno, I just want my friends' gifts to get there, and thankfully they should be there sometime within our lifetimes now.
I wanna dust off the journal with a more fun post though! I recently procured an MX4SIO card for my PS2, and I am supremely excited about it. Seriously, it's reinvigorated my love for console gaming. If you have no idea what an MX4SIO card is (and the name is stupid), it's effectively a MicroSD-to-PS2 memory card adapter that lets you boot games through the memory card slot, no disc needed, provided you have a way of running homebrew on your PS2. It is fucking cool.
The PS2 softmodding community has gone absolutely nuts in the past few years, coming up with new ways to boot games, getting online in games going again with custom servers, the works. For some definitions, softmodding means hacking the console through non-hardware means. Hardmodding would mean something like a modchip soldered to the motherboard, softmodding involves usually exploiting some software update function, a built-in Web browser, something you can feed bad data to to give it your own instructions. The goal of any of these exploits is to run homebrew, which are custom applications written for the PS2, and ideally, backups of games. Softmods are easier and usually free, so they tend to be preferable to hardmods.
Back when I first got into Guitar Hero II customs in 2014, we already had Free McBoot, which is a cute little exploit that lives on a memory card and uses the DVD player firmware update function to let you boot whatever code you want on your console, but nowadays, there's also FreeHDBoot, which only needs a hard drive and a Network Adaptor to do the same thing as Free McBoot, and FreeDVDBoot, which can boot homebrew using only a specially crafted DVD-R. It's wild. Some of these only work on specific PS2 models, but every single PS2 model can be exploited in one way or another.
So back in 2022, after I'd gotten this PS2, I dove into trying to get hard drive loading games working, because that's considered the fastest and most reliable way of booting backups, and I wanted to start testing my GH2DX and marfGH stuff on a real console. It was a disaster. I was using a Network Adaptor that I couldn't even verify worked properly, I switched out the IDE board inside with a SATA board using an upgrade kit, so who knows if that was the issue, the PS2 itself feels rickety with its slightly loose and spotty card and controller slots, and at the end of the day, Open PS2 Loader (which is the application that lets you run backups of games off a variety of media) never saw the hard drive. The whole thing was a dud, and I wound up returning everything but the bag of Torx screwdrivers I ordered for the project. My PS2 was still stuck playing disc games—and anyone who plays old disc-based consoles know that eventually, their lasers and disc drives wear out and you end up with no easy way to play games.
I have a couple streams coming up that call for playing some hacked PS2 games, and I didn't want to emulate them with all the issues that come with running PCSX2 on my slowass old iMac, so I figured it was finally time to buy an MX4SIO card and try it out. $30 got me a 128GB MicroSD card (a Samsung, whose cards seem to work the best anecdotally online and I can confirm it worked well for me) and a MX4SIO card from Bitfunx off Amazon. I'd already had the Free McBoot card from when I was toying with customs in 2014, and I've been using it to backup and restore saves, mostly. That's all you need to get it going, honestly.
Preparing the MicroSD card is the hardest part. OPL requires a specific folder structure and games to be named a certain way, with the disc ID as the first part of the name and the display name as the second. CD and DVD games have to be separated out. You can get art for each game to decorate OPL with. All of this can be automated with OPL Manager, thankfully. You just put the ISOs in the right folder on the card, and OPL Manager will rename the games and fetch art for you.
The MicroSD card came formatted as ExFat, so I needed to install the newest beta of OPL to take advantage of it. (You should do that anyway because OPL is always improving in compatibility, stability, and features.) ExFat is useful as well because it allows you to store games over 4GB without having to split the files, which is another thing OPL is picky about.
Anyway, that was it! You flip Block Objects to Auto in the settings, enable MX4SIO support, and it sees the card and lists your games, ready to play. How is the speed? Honestly, if it's slightly slower than the disc drive, I haven't noticed it. I'm pretty well accustomed to how quickly GH2 loads songs, and over MX4SIO, it felt as quick (or slow, however you wanna look at it) as disc or emulator. Compatibility is not perfect, but pretty close to it. I got Amplitude going no problem, NFL Street 2 worked great (and the spreadsheet said that was one of the non-functional games as well, so that's even better), my custom demo discs worked a treat, and of course, GH2 customs worked great.
Having a way to finally play my charts properly, on hardware, with a guitar even (which I still have to look around for, gonna check Marketplace after work and see if I can avoid eBay prices), or just any game I want to play, has gotten me totally reinvested in the PS2 ecosystem and also in working on marfGH. I'm aiming to have a nice half-dozen new customs done before the year's out, Connor wants a tie-in MoriHime GH track pack, PadGH is still partially finished and on the table—and now I can test these exactly as you'd actually play them, and more than that, I can actually enjoy them properly myself, not just tapping notes out on my keyboard. I have unfinished emulator saves for SSX 3 and Need for Speed: Underground that I can continue without dealing with any of the slowdown and glitches I get on PCSX2. It's just really fun to play with—and believe me, I have a ton of disc PS2 games I want to play as well, but this is a nice backup for those as well when my PS2's laser eventually goes, like it did on Caby's recently.
About the only limitation of any PS2 backup booting solution is that they can't boot PS1 games using the PS1 hardware in the console—they have to rely on POPS, which is Sony's bizarre software PS1 emulator for the PS2, and compatibility and performance is not great, as you might imagine. That's alright though—I have a Tonyhax International save for Crash 2 I can use to boot burned PS1 games if I ever get a hankerin' for some PS1 backup action.
That's another thing I toyed with briefly, the whole Tonyhax thing, another softmod solution for booting games that just so happens to work on all PS1 and PS2 consoles. I couldn't use my actual Tony Hawk discs for it because my old slim left the discs absolutely knackered with how much I played them (the ribbon cable for the laser assembly on most slimlines scratches the games up over time), but I have many Tonyhax capable games, thankfully. I don't have any CD-Rs on hand that don't make my PS2 screech in agony, just my Verbatim novelty vinyl ones I was using for the Last Summer CDs, but I can pick up a pack on Amazon when I want to play a PS1 game next, that's no big deal.
Video games are fun! I'll talk about Quake II soon, since I'm still doing some gaming through time type stuff, slowly but surely.
