Tuesday, June 29, 2004
As many of you know, I contribute from time to time to 1UP, run by my good buddy Sam Kennedy. 1UP is about to relaunch with a ton of new features, among them... a blog. I'm not going to ditch this one naturally, but I figured it'd be cool to 'cross-post' by sticking any game-related posts I write here also up at 1UP. Basically, this is just one big plug for 1UP. Check it out. It's cool. Seriously. My page is at: http://fowler.ogamo.com
I picked up this thing called "HD Loader" for PS2 today. It's basically a program that allows you to rip games to the PS2's internal hard drive, eliminating the need for a disc. Though I can see one very serious "evil" use of the HD Loader (rent, rip, return), there are two "legit" uses for it: saving the PS2's notoriously finickity laser from wearing out and cutting down on load times. And for the most part, it works.
One other cool thing is that you don't have to use the official Sony-branded PS2 hard drive here -- any IDE drive that fits the Sony network adapter will work, though naturally any games that actually use a hard drive like Final Fantasy XI won't recognise it if it isn't the official one. Given that virtually nothing actually supports the damn hard drive, I saved myself a ton of cash by just picking up a 40GB Maxtor drive (less than half the price of the Sony one!).
Once you slot the hard drive into the back, pop the HD Loader disc in and start up the PS2. HD Loader will take a few minutes to format the drive, and then you're ready to go. To rip a game to the drive, hit "Install". It prompts you for a disc, then to name the game, and it rips it. Thus far I've only ripped GTA3, Vice City and WE7I, and a 4GB game takes around 20 minutes or so to copy to the drive. Once it's ripped, boot up the PS2 with the HD Loader disc in, select the game from the menu, and you're off instantly. I haven't extensively tested GTA3 or Vice City with it, but neither exhibits any strangeness on initial viewing, but load times are definitely improved. They're not eliminated, and they're still on the long side, but there's a definite improvement. WE7I runs flawlessly, and the load times there have also been cut down by quite a bit, which is good for addicts like myself!
HD Loader is a bit buggy though. It's frozen on me a few times (at various points, including boot-up and before it starts ripping a game), and since the PS2's reset function is sometimes disabled when the Network Adapter/HDD is in use that means you have to reset by switching it off from the back -- which can be dangerous if it's accessing the hard drive when you yank the power. And considering that I want it to save my PS2's fragile DVD drive, it's rather stupid that it keeps spinning the HD Loader disc while you're playing any ripped game (though this is easily remedied by popping the HD Loader disc out as soon as it presents you with the game select screen).
I'm not entirely sure whether the HD Loader and is worth it just for faster load times and the lack of a disc, and the freezing bug is annoying, but I'm not exactly unhappy with it. Does what it says it does I guess, it's just that what it does isn't all that magical really. Mind you, given how much Winning Eleven I play, a 50% reduction in load time will probably work out into saving me something like an extra day or two over the course of a year... though I'll probably waste that extra time playing Winning Eleven again, so I guess it balances out.
Posted at 5:30 AM
