Question about importing PS2 system.

[wakka]

Yes, it's not 100% reliable, but useful for some games. I wanted to run Outrun 2 SP off my PS2's internal HDD, but unfortunately some music tracks don't play which is a shame. Once it's run into a BGM track it can't play, the game won't play any BGM at all until I completely restart the system.

I like to keep wear on the laser down so it's slightly annoying.

[speedlolita]

Long as your discs are clean there's no real reason to fear laser wear, surely.

[nakamura]

My white PS2 has been used regularly for years and is fine.

[wakka]

As has mine...still you never know. Plus it's the convenience of selecting from a list instead of switching discs.

[gunrock]

Even if the laser is fine, it is a mechanical device and there will be wear and tear on the gears and servos.

[S3M]

Yah, only shortfall.

Debug unit ftw.

Yes indeed but as I mentioned before it's not totally 100% compatible with all games as it depends on what region the debug unit was set too. It work with 100% of the matching region and about 99.8% of none matching region games.

But yeah it's the best way to go.

Long as your discs are clean there's no real reason to fear laser wear, surely.

It wears anyway as the PS2 was such a poorly built machine, even the CD laser on my slim is going despite it not being used that much.

[speedlolita]

I've still got a launch SCPH-70003 going strong, despite them being supposedly flawed.

Only machine I've ever had the laser die on was my PlayStation 1 that fell off of my chest of drawers, maybe I just don't play them as much as other people? Who knows.

[smouty]

I had a stack of 10+ PS2s at one point all with dead DVD lasers. All were unchipped so it wasn't due to reading writables and often the CD side still worked. It also wasn't a focus issue but mainly burned out focus chips.

The best option for me is the FMCB + HDD and a USB caddy to load out of region games using WinHIIP on a PC.
A bit of a faff to setup but pretty stable once working.
You can also use the 'hold eject' trick to load some discs using HD Loader.

[wakka]

Not sure whether I should be glad my fears weren't unfounded or not.

Currently I run a copy of HD Loader from a CD-R and boot some games from an internal IDE HDD. Others I play from the original disc. Ought to switch to OPL as that might fix some of the issues HDL has with some games, I couldn't seem to find a CD bootable version though and I'm loathe to bother with going into an ELF launcher menu first. I have done it in the past to tinker about with GSM loader, however I never got particularly good results with it.

[smouty]

It is easiest to boot HDL from the FreeMCBoot menu.

[Radirgy]

I'll look into playing imports off a hard drive if I can't get an imported slim.

[J0e Musashi]

Open PS2 Loader works with retail discs. I had a FreeMcBoot SCPH-50000 with a 750GB HDD in it, which I used as a jukebox for almost my entire collection. I stripped the install of everything barring OPL. I even reprogrammed the OPL software to swap the O and X functions around. Critical Velocity was the only game that ever gave me trouble, so I just ran it from the disc for the three minutes that I played of it.

[dvdx2]

back on the scene JOe? where have you been?

[J0e Musashi]

Nope. Just passing through.

[speedlolita]

Open PS2 Loader works with retail discs. I had a FreeMcBoot SCPH-50000 with a 750GB HDD in it, which I used as a jukebox for almost my entire collection. I stripped the install of everything barring OPL. I even reprogrammed the OPL software to swap the O and X functions around. Critical Velocity was the only game that ever gave me trouble, so I just ran it from the disc for the three minutes that I played of it.

Retail discs of the region of your console, sure.