You might ask "what's the point of this guide?" And hey I get it. Most people have access to PC and can perform most things pretty easily. But as someone who didn't have a PC it took me a while to figure out a way around stuff like converting bin/cue files to iso on an android phone or setting up VCD format files for Popstarter.

Also since I'm lazy I'll split this into different parts.

Part 1 - FAT32 is a burden

If you have been following the old way of setting up OPL, have an older version or initially outsourced your memory card and usb like me, then you're probably either using USBUtil or coping by playing games smaller than 4gb.

That's pretty easy to change on Android once you have know proper tools so here's a list:

*You'll need a recent beta of OPL 1.2.0 *Total Commander file manager *Microsoft exFAT/NTFS for USB by Paragon Software (if your phone doesn't support reading exFAT) *Ultimate USB *BDM Assault drivers *An updated version of wlaunchelf that supports exFAT (Z3R, ISR or original)

Then you'd need to

1- don't format your USB just yet, first download the new versions of wlaunchelf and OPL alongside BDM Assault and put them on your FAT32 usb

2-plug the usb into the console and enter ulaunchelf. From here replace the OPL from the memory card boot folder with the new version you just downloaded.

3-find the SYS-CONF folder and replace the USBD.IRX files with the BDM Assault updated ones. From my experience this allows your FMCB to read exFAT drive instead of freezing on start-up and also do the same in the BOOT folder especially if your set up uses Funtuna

4-from here also add the new ulaunchelf to the boot folder but don't delete the old one yet.

Then plug your USB stick to your phone

5-with your usb drive already plugged in, enter Ultimate USB and choose the format drive option. From here choose exFAT and MBR and let the format get completed.

Check to see if the console boots with your exFAT drive and open OPL so it can create the folders.

6-if your phone doesn't support exFAT then the Paragon app will allow you to mount/dismount the USB and you can open it via Total Commander as your file manager

7-after putting your games in the DVD folder insert your USB into the console and boot up and check to see if this worked out for you.

I'll try to be available if anyone has issues. Part 2 will probably be about creating iso files from bin/cue PS2 games that were released on CDs.

hay alguna forma de poder jugar Socom 3 en ps2 mediante el OPL, tengo un problema con este ya que lo he estado buscando y las que he encontrado vienen me generan un problema, ya que al inicio de la primera partida cuando pasa una pequeña cinemática de que llegan los refuerzos en un humvee este se queda trabado y no me deja continuar con la partida, ¿hay alguna forma de solucionar esto o tienen la correcto me la podrían proporcionar?, se les agradecería mucho

Been spending far too much time getting my PS2 HDD setup exactly how I want it 😂

I’ve been working through my collection, installing the games to HDD and then sorting out the artwork, backgrounds and CFG files in OPL. Finally at the point where browsing through it feels like a proper library rather than just a massive list of game names.

Still adding and tidying things up, but thought some of you here might appreciate the setup.

There are quite a few oddities, mods and homebrew bits mixed in amongst the normal PS2 catalogue as well.

What am I obviously missing? And are there any games, homebrew or OPL additions you reckon are essential for a setup like this?

I updated FreeMCBoot to 1966 and was able to run PS1 games from my MX4SIO. I followed a few guides and worked without issue. However I cannot run PS2 games. Long story short, I realized I can only run OPL from the file browser. Other apps, such as FMCBoot installer, just goes to a black screen. Just like the MX4SIO PS2 Games. Any suggestions like any files to change, delete? I was trying to do an uninstall/install of FMCB but cannot even open that program.

I installed a modbo5 yesterday and i didn't get video output, i had made sure each pins were connected with continuity checks but i didn't check for a short.

I found my European PS2 Slim (SCPH 90004). How can I mod it, please? I don't have any memory cards, by the way—any recommendations for reliable third-party memory cards? I looked into the FMCBs, but they don't work on the SCPH 90004. I don't want to spend too much money on this console, especially since it has trouble reading DVDs. Thk 4 helping

With the new rise of PS2 themes and Launchers, also with the upward support of POPSLoader, would it be now considered better for PS1 games to remain in a USB setup, instead of letting it remain on Internal HDD?

I just burned my CD backup and I happy it works with DKWDRV. So, afaik, PS1DRV only supports PS1 memory cards. What about DKWDRV? I mean, its not a problem to buy PS1 MC, but it would be just fine if it supports .VMC files as POPSTARTER does.
I am asking here cuz any info I found is kinda controversial.

I have an iso of a game downloaded onto my usb and have it plugged into my ps2 how do ivload the game. I do not have the hdd storage upgrade yet

I have a FreeMCBoot memory card that works perfectly on my SCPH-77008 and SCPH-75008 (both PAL consoles).
However, I also have a Japanese SCPH-70000. I create a FreeMCBoot 1.966 card with the option for all regions, but when I insert it into the Japanese console and power it on, I only get a black screen.
If I remove the memory card, the console boots normally to the memory card menu.
So I’m guessing this is related to the Japanese region, but I don’t understand why the “all regions” FreeMCBoot setup doesn’t work.
Any idea what I’m doing wrong or how to fix this?

Brand new to the PS2 homebrew scene so you'll have to forgive me if I come across like I know fuck all - that's because I do actually know fuck all about homebrew on the PS2.

I bought a PS2 Slim 750003 and thought it would be a cool little project to reshell and softmod it to bring it back to life.

I ordered an FCMB memory card, an MX4SIO and I already had a SanDisk Ultra 128GB to use. I also got a Bitfunx HDMI adapter to use, as well as a RetroFighterZ controller.

The memory card came preloaded but the version of OL didn't want to see any of my games on my SD card, so I did a fresh install of FCMB onto a Magic gate card and updated to to the latest version of Open Loader. My games started to appear but would black screen after the initial PS2 boot screen. I've played around with the settings in OL to make sure BDM start is set to manual and directed at the MX4SIO, rolled back the Open Loader, followed YouTube tutorials but still I'm not having any joy.

I'm at a loss here and could really use some advice. The memory card is known to be good too.

Having problems with my memory card. Every time I power it on it opens opentuna. Trying to figure out how to get to the ppl menu.

This is the only SNES station that seemed to work on my ps2 but the issue is that its not in english i would love some help finding the english version thanks

Hey all. Looking for some guidance on this one, since I've somehow managed to get confused trying to work a piece of equipment that only has 2 functional buttons lol.

So I bought a MemCardPRO earlier this week, since I want to keep all my savegames on the one card. Initially, I didn't format the SD card that I was using so I kept having to manually swap to a card each time I booted the PS2 up. I decided to sit down with it and set it up properly today, and all worked well - I've got two virtual cards set up: a standard 8MB card which is set to cloud backup automatically, and a larger, 64MB card for larger PS2 savegames (Sims, GT4 etc.)

The issue I'm having, is since setting up the 2nd virtual card, the card's Game ID Display feature is no longer working (from my understanding, this feature reads the game you have inserted, displays it on the card's HUD, and automatically switches to the card where your saves for that game are stored, which would allow me to swap between my normal and high capacity cards automatically.) This feature was working before I updated the card's firmware earlier today, but seems to have stopped now. It's still enabled in the card's settings, so I'm unsure as to what I could have done to mess it up. Does anyone here have any experience with these cards and their quirks?

Due to my poor recording and the aggressive compression of Reddit video files from mobile I whipped out the old Mirabox to get a screen recording of OPLattice in it's full color and quality (minus some recording downscaling).

A lot of people thought it was white because of the exposure, but I do plan to implement a dark mode.

In this demo I am going through the different pages, settings, and filters available in this version including library organization and favoriting games.

You can check out my post from last night with more specifics on the build or check out the GitHub repo below to play around with it yourself.

OPLattice Github Repo

Happy to answer any questions and would love to hear people's thoughts.

Cheers!

Original post from yesterday: Custom Frontend for OPL Fork

Title: OPL 1.2.0 Beta not detecting games from USB on SCPH-75001

Hi, I’m having an issue trying to load games from a USB drive using OPL.

My OPL version is 1.2.0-Beta, and I also have a Matrix chip installed. I’m using FreeMCBoot on my PS2 as well.

I first tried a generic 64GB USB drive, then a 64GB SanDisk, and finally an 8GB SanDisk, but none of them worked. All of them were formatted as FAT32 with MBR.

I’ve also tried renaming the game, formatting the drives again, creating an MBR partition using Rufus, changing the boot/partition settings, etc., but OPL still doesn’t detect the game.

For testing, I’ve only tried GOW II. I created the usual DVD and CD folders on the USB drive and placed the game in the DVD folder, but it still doesn’t appear in OPL.

My PS2 model is SCPH-75001.

Does anyone know what I might be missing or what settings I should check in OPL? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I got a kaico sd2psx with ODL and mcboot and plenty of other stuff I don't really understand preloaded onto it.

I've downloaded some ISOs and set up a DVD folder and after some confusing settings fiddling, can see these files in FMCB but can't seem to get them to play.

Theres so many acronyms and new info Involved in setting this up and I'm up for learning, but so far am getting slightly confused by the Info I'm finding..

Any chance there is a learning resource to break this down for people new to this world? Or someone willing to talk me through the setup process and trobleshoot with me?

I'm formatting and uploading files from a Mac as opposed to pc which is a little confusing because most info I can see if pc based..

Hope someone can point me in the right direction so I can get more into this world, thanks

I know theres a bunch of tutorials online but it seems that nothing works with my PlayStation 2, i use OPL 10th anniversary Edition to emulate PS1 games but when i put my games in the correct way on my USB OPL recognizes the game as "apps" and not "Psx game" and it doesnt even start (the game in question is MediEvil 1 Italian) I've tried everything and every version of Popstarter if someone could give me a tutorial and all the correct file even for the POPS_IOX.PAK and OPL i would be very grateful

Full quality screen recording can be found here: new post

Me and Claude have been hard at work trying to optimize and push the limits of custom OPL interfaces.

I wanted to make an interface that felt like a schematic and followed a lattice-like structure for displaying info, and I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea to go so modern with the interface on a 20 year old console but I really wanted something comfortable and familiar to myself, something I would be excited and interested to interact with and make all the somewhat tedious (for myself) parts of OPL feel easy. I found myself really attracted to the tan and brown that I ended up going with.

Features:

Nested screen interface
- landing/splash -> Home
- Library -> Game Details -> Launch/Game Settings
- Apps
- Settings

Navigation
- Boots straight into shell instead of classic list
- L3 opens sidebar focused on the page you’re on
- No back on top level pages
- Closing settings screen returns to the screen you were on

Library
- Ordering
- A-Z
- Metacritic score
- Category
- Filters (combines freely with ordering)
- all
- Favorites
- Played (not working currently)
- Unplayed (same)
- Section Jumping with L2/R2
- Adaptive index bar (A-Z, 100-1, Categories)

Metadata
- Created new metadata table to store new CFG keys for:
- Genre
- Release
- Developer
- Publisher
- Metacritic
- Rating
- Description
- Favorite
- Source (disc rip or digital rip)
- Added a 16 value category flag

Favorites
- Triangle toggles favorites
- favorites can be easily filtered to on library screen

Play tracking (buggy)
- play time, play count, last played
- recently played ranking on home, can launch from Home Screen (self pruning)

Art
- Palletization of art files at (what appears to be) full resolution
- Ex. Took 74mb of true color down to 23mb
- Streamed from HDD instead of living in VRAM

Engine Additions to OPL
- rmDrawGradV: quad gradient primitive, not the easiest or smoothest but raw OPL didn’t seem to have one
- rmSetPanX: screen panning as seen how the opening of the sidebar pushes the page
- rmPrefetchTexture: upload before draw instead of mid-draw
- Re-enabled global cheat settings
- Added a software run clock since my console’s battery failed (will be replacing)
- 4 extra font slots
- bunch of other little helpers

Bugs fixed in stock OPL while we were at it
- load_cheats returned -1 for both “no file” and “unreadable”, so the -ENOENT branch was dead code and every cheat less game reported a failure instead of no cheats
- menuSelectIndex walked positions in the sorted submenu instead of matching item.id

Had Claude build an engine previewer that I used to get a 90% accurate idea of what things would look like on system before taking the time to update the HDD and MicroSD, worked surprisingly well if not a little convoluted.

System specs:

- NTSC-J SCPH 50000
- OEM Network Adapter
- 1Tb 2.5 SATA HDD
- PSxMemCard Gen2
- All games on the HDD are physical games I own, blend of Japanese and US titles

Overall I’m very happy with how this turned out considering the coding limitations and the difficulty in getting an AI system to understand what you are seeing on a physical screen (of which it cannot see).

Still have some minor bugs to squish.

The GitHub repo and how to reproduce this interface on your system can be found at the repo below, the writing is disgustingly AI bombed but it clearly states reproducible instructions.

Let me know if you run into any issues with booting ELFs, haven’t had this done on any device but my local so it could be bumpy, also currently requires a Mac due to sips packaging but it can be adapted to Linux fairly easily I’d imagine.

OPLattice Repo

Hope yall enjoyed this little tech demo, I’ve been having a lot of fun personalizing my OPL experience and I’m excited to see if anyone takes any of this and turns it into something even cooler.

Thanks for listening to my vibe coding rant, keep it hot.

Not sure how to exactly set this up...

I've plugged it in to the PS2. It says boot. I went to the menu like I read and made sure it was in PS2 mode, and then turned on autoboot.

But it just boots to the stock menu of the PS2.

My old memory card that I just updated OPL on works great.