Hacker News Reader

Comment by dinobones | Hacker News Reader

Mega cool, I’m curious if there’s a way to burn the ISO to a disc and get this playing on a physical console?

You'd need to hack the console to get it to load a burned disc, but if you can do that, you can also just load it from USB.

Though I guess you could burn it to a disk anyway purely for the sake of authenticity.

USB on the PS2 is limited to 1.0 or 1.1 speeds, so a disc may work better anyway.

Just to clarify, the difference on the PS2 is:

* CD: 3.6MB/s

* DVD: 5-8MB/s

* USB: 0.8-1.1MB/s

So the disk would almost definitely be the better option.

USB is fine for PS1/retro games; should be more than enough for AthenaEnv. The difference only matters for PS2 backups. And there're more options than those two. HDD/SSD, Ethernet, MX4SIO/SIO2SD, MMCE (SD2PSX et al).

Is it possible to use PS1 games and USB simultaneously? I thought the USB was handled by the B/C chips.

That's true; network too. Can play digital backups (off USB/Eth) only by using POPStarter (for those unaware, POPS being Sony's PS1 emulator ripped off the single game that was officially used on). Although POPS isn't really that good (was used, experimentally, only once afterall), USB throughput isn't an issue.

Can also use a micro SD adapter through the mem card slot. Generally considered a bit better experience than a USB drive.

Combined with https://github.com/CTurt/FreeDVDBoot, I think it would be possible

FreeMcBoot on a memory card + USB flash drive (or internal disk) is a popular option to play on real hardware. Saves wear and tear on the optical drive too.

I have sat on a freemcboot mem card for probably 6 years now. I’ll get around to it eventually…

It's a good time! I feel the PS2 is an iconic member of any living room TV setup, especially with an SSD, a couple controllers, and component out. Nice to have for hangouts!

Oh damn can you get some real performance boost out of an SSD? Do you install it or does it hang out externally?

The original Phat PS2 models support internal IDE disks, though it's easy to convert them to SATA with an inexpensive adapter. Then prepare the SSD and install (I use WinHIIP, "obsolete" but works fine). It noticably improves startup and load times in games!

Some also swap the fan for a Noctua to give it a complete "quiet upgrade", but my stock fan isn't very loud.

Very cool. Jotting this down for later, appreciate it

Why use physical disc instead of some optical drive mod

ODEs aren't common for the PS2 because they already support flash drives, network shares, and (for fats) full size hard drives.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com