iiotenki

The Tony Hawk of Tokimeki Memorial

A most of the time Japanese>English game translator and writer and all the time dating sim wonk.



But for good reason: a kind soul recently updated OPL with two big features: exFAT support for hard drives of virtually unlimited sizes instead of the previous 2 TB limit and, arguably more crucially, the ability to now just drag and drop game images directly into the hard drive instead of futzing with proprietary partition formats and upload programs nearing 20 years old at this point.

Having avoided doing this for years partly because of the latter issue in particular, I decided to take the dive finally and, even though the update is still in beta, so far so good! Jury's still out in terms of compatibility since these sorts of things tend to get less vetted against the Japanese-only games I tend to play, but it's still great to see such a big advancement hit the PS2 homebrew scene after all these years. Now if you're one of those weirdos who likes to have every single game for a system at their fingertips when playing on real hardware, you can get a hell of a lot closer to that dream (provided your ISP doesn't yell at you too much at the terabytes of data you're downloading in the process, but hey, you do you).


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in reply to @iiotenki's post:

Aw, it's always great to hear from you! Hope you're doing great and then some so far this year! c:

Anyway, I haven't done a whole lot with this setup yet, but so far it's been great, yeah! I will say that since you obviously have the original network adapter, there are SATA boards out there that you can put into one by just unscrewing some things and plugging in some ribbon cables. You might want to look into that so you can preserve networking functionality, since the clone adapter I'm using doesn't have ethernet. Hypothetically, some IDE>SATA adapter boards made for PCs are supposed to be able to work, too, but the one I bought that was specifically reported to work with the PS2 network adapter didn't, so your mileage may vary. 🤷 I bring all this up mainly because the one main hassle with my setup is having to manually undo everything every time I want to add games to it, so I may ultimately just end up using networked storage in the end since compatibility is supposed to be pretty good, but yeah.

Otherwise, I have heard that the clone adapters like what I'm using aren't necessarily the most durable, but they're not terribly expensive, either, which is why I was okay with buying one when my network adapter was being stubborn with the first IDE>SATA caddy that I bought. If you know what all you wanna throw onto a drive ahead of time so that you only have to futz with data stuff once or twice, though, I think it's a pretty viable solution. 😌

Hey sorry for the late reply. I've had a few days of bad brain fog and today is the most clear-headed I've felt in a while. Unfortunately this year hasn't been great for me thus far because of my health issues. I've been having bad muscle spasms in my back pretty much every day since October.

Still I've been trying to make the best of things. Been spending a lot of time with my partner, Alex (over discord because distance/country borders are transphobic hehehe). Recently made good use of the elgato to show him some of my favorite Harvest Moon games - A Wonderful Life and Magical Melody on the gamecube.

Anyway thanks for the heads up on the adapters. I definitely need a solution where I can easily add more games. I'm constantly learning about cool obscure PS2 games to try out. Looking at my options I'm kinda thinking networked storage might be best for me.

(p.s. is twitter DM still a good way to message you privately or is there a better alternative I should use? I was disappointed to find out cohost doesn't have DMs hehehe)

No worries whatsoever! Your well being comes way before my dumb ass, so glad to see you're taking care of yourself when you can like always. c: And yeah, I still check my Twitter DMs. I mostly use them for work stuff these days to minimize my time on there, but my door's always open to you. 😌

Glad the Elgato's still treating you so well, too! Pretty sure you've already given it more attention than I ever had time to, so it makes me genuinely happy to see it getting some proper love after all these years. 😌