There are more than a few games that won't install directly from the PS2 for one reason or another. Also, installing from the PS2 can be really slow. There's a single solution for both of these.
If you look around, there's some software you can download to let you install discs from your PC to the HD. A simple case of hooking the drive up to your PC for a bit and installing from there. Many games will still be incompatible, but I've found a few in my collection that just wouldn't install from the PS2 itself but will play fine anyway using this method. It's also quite a bit faster-- in my own case (may vary based on DVD drive in PC and the speed of your PS2 HD) it's actually three times as fast.
Of course, there are other benefits to this method, but I'll leave that line of thinking to those who would go there...
The Sony-backed HD has a slightly modified firmware that allows the PS2 to detect an official HD through software. All "officially" installable games like FF11 and RE Outbreak will try to check the HD and fail if it's not the Sony one. Modchips can get you past this, but then you run the risk of additional headaches if Sony/Squeenix decide to add additional 'copy protection' checks via downloaded code from the server (like X-Box Live does).
If you want to play FF11, you'll pretty much need a Sony HD.
HDLoader, on the other hand, will work with ALMOST any drive.
Yes, the SNES used battery-backed RAM. Also the Sega CD used battery-backed memory on external cartridge, and while I'm not sure about the internal savespace but I believe it to be the same. Saturn used battery-backed memory-- that one I learned the hard way. I'm not completely sure on the N64, though.
A *lot* of Japanese stuff supports the HD. Xenosaga and Ace Combat 4 right off the top of my head. Both of which had the support removed from the US release-- Sony's delaying the release of the HD over here and subsequent demand that developers remove the HD support really didn't help the situation.
Had it been where gamers discovered a lot of their collection supported HD installation after they got the HD, I think things would be quite different now.
Simple. Loading time. Loading times are getting worse again in the cyclic pattern it traditionally does. First generation games are typically either very good or very bad for loading time because while they haven't learned to optimize for the hardware they don't have to worry about them pushing so much data onto the disc for the loading times to be so bad.
Second generation games and onward we start to see a slow creep towards worse and worse loading times as the data increases but the disc data throughput rate stays pretty much the same. They can optimize the data positions and do a multitude of other tricks, but in the end the speed is going to get worse no matter how much effort they put into it because you can't upgrade the optical drive's speed.
Also, no matter how fast your optical drive is, it still can't compare to the raw speed of a hard drive.
Tracking you? They could already do that via IP address or normal email address. If you're running XP, you don't *have* to associate a passport with your user account to use it.
Then you go sign up for a hotmail account and use that. Hotmail accounts pass as passports, so you could just grab one email account specifically FOR the beta.
That's truly sad. A lot of those are lost permanently as a result-- only MAME romsets left, and MAME can't truly get the feel for such things as a sit-down cabinet for some of these.
Even worse when some of these are incompleted prototypes that just never made it to the production stage.
Really? I was totally disappointed with Far Cry. The AI seemed really flaky, where they could sometimes see you crouching in the middle of bushes so thick you couldn't see out, but other times couldn't see you if you were standing practically in front of them. Admittedly the water looked good, and the environments looked nice, but the gameplay was really suffering.
Entirely plausible. They'd probably end up using some sort of caching of binary translations to prevent there from being the same startup delay every time you start up your application. Applications where you have an identical interface (eg OpenGL) would see no performance hit on the graphics side.
Emulation programmers have been playing with dynarec cores for years now, but compatibility at a low level tends to suffer. Some software is expecting scanline-perfection because they're talking right to the hardware and are tuned to that performance. You'll notice the ABI/API compatibility only talks about various Unix variants and mainframes. So, dynarec PROBABLY won't have to worry about that so much in this case.
Kinda disappointing. I'd like to see what wrangling they could do with MacOS and Windows. Those would be much harder to pull off.
Unless it's a static or dynamic recompilation technique-- it could translate before execution, dumping a new binary which it executes. You'd have a much longer start time, obviously, but it'd run at the full speed possible. Assuming, of course, that your recompilation techniques are 100% perfect.
Heh. Most of us on the PC side don't pay much attention to the advertising, all things said and done. Intel-- hell, even Apple-- they all follow the hardcore, those insane enough to live on the bleeding edge.
Played that game awhile. It's impossible to walk it without getting cut a few times on bad decisions (Voodoo 3, anyone?) but that's life.
I've noticed similar, but a definite pattern.. my 5.25 floppies are still in good condition, my 3.5s are less so. HD disks die frequently, and LD ones a good bit less so, but both 3.5 types are extremely flaky in my experiences.
I remember back in the early 90s that I hated to put stuff on floppy for fear that it'd not survive long. I picked up a habit of saving four or five copies of a given file to a floppy in the hopes that ONE of the files would make it through in one piece.
Reminds me of when a friend of mine got a network adaptor right after they came out over here. All he had was the demo disc, so he brought the adaptor over and we gave the demo disc a try.
Three demo runs through Madden, three disconnected opponents as soon as it looked like they were going to lose. You run into this sort of thing on any platform when you're online. It's enough that I only play online in groups of people I know and trust not to play that way.
Reminds me of a purchase I just made recently. I preordered Gradius 5 on PS2 about six months ago and paid it off right when I made the preorder. Well, when the Japanese one came out, I burned a copy to check out. Do I feel guilty? Not in the slightest-- I've already paid my way, so it really doesn't matter whether I use the Japanese burn or the US original. Finished it within 24 hours, but I'll still be picking up my original next month.
Well, if that screenshot is any indication, it's running as System.. you wouldn't even have to have a logged-in Admin. You've got kernel-level access to the machine from that VNC.
That doesn't answer whether it'd change ports if an existing VNC is there, but nevertheless, it looks like a particularly nasty and hard-to-track rootkit.
They can't get them all on a single disc for PS1. The PS1 apparently isn't powerful enough to do the audio emulation, so the Rockman Complete Works discs on PS1 use digital XA audio rather than emulate the sound chip-- each game, as a result, uses up nearly an entire CD..
Okay, when last I looked there was no answer yet, so..
^H is the ascii code for a backspace. Something like:
My boss sucks^H^H^H^H^Hisn't so bad...would just be me backspacing out 'sucks' in favor of something less likely to get me fired. It's an old joke, and pretty tired, but still in common use.
It does still come with VBScript built in via the Windows Scripting Host-- you could pull out a copy of notepad and code up a quick applet right from a fresh install.
Acclaim has the most CONSISTENT record out of any game company I've ever seen. Wall to wall crap starting from the late 80s.
I'm STILL amazed at the fact they haven't gone out of business. Guess that just makes them the cockroach company of gaming.. maybe nothing CAN kill them.
Big difference. Apache isn't so tightly integrated into Red Hat that trying to remove it will completely render the underlying OS unusable.
It's been said a thousand times, but it's a real truth: I shouldn't be FORCED to have Media Player installed on a server machine that's going to be just feeding out webpages. It's just one more piece of code exposed to potential exploit, requiring additional updates, and to add insult to injury it's something that'll never be USED.
THAT is the big difference between Microsoft Integration and F/OSS Integration.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a tip for you, then.
There are more than a few games that won't install directly from the PS2 for one reason or another. Also, installing from the PS2 can be really slow. There's a single solution for both of these.
If you look around, there's some software you can download to let you install discs from your PC to the HD. A simple case of hooking the drive up to your PC for a bit and installing from there. Many games will still be incompatible, but I've found a few in my collection that just wouldn't install from the PS2 itself but will play fine anyway using this method. It's also quite a bit faster-- in my own case (may vary based on DVD drive in PC and the speed of your PS2 HD) it's actually three times as fast.
Of course, there are other benefits to this method, but I'll leave that line of thinking to those who would go there...
The Sony-backed HD has a slightly modified firmware that allows the PS2 to detect an official HD through software. All "officially" installable games like FF11 and RE Outbreak will try to check the HD and fail if it's not the Sony one. Modchips can get you past this, but then you run the risk of additional headaches if Sony/Squeenix decide to add additional 'copy protection' checks via downloaded code from the server (like X-Box Live does).
If you want to play FF11, you'll pretty much need a Sony HD.
HDLoader, on the other hand, will work with ALMOST any drive.
Yes, the SNES used battery-backed RAM. Also the Sega CD used battery-backed memory on external cartridge, and while I'm not sure about the internal savespace but I believe it to be the same. Saturn used battery-backed memory-- that one I learned the hard way. I'm not completely sure on the N64, though.
A *lot* of Japanese stuff supports the HD. Xenosaga and Ace Combat 4 right off the top of my head. Both of which had the support removed from the US release-- Sony's delaying the release of the HD over here and subsequent demand that developers remove the HD support really didn't help the situation.
Had it been where gamers discovered a lot of their collection supported HD installation after they got the HD, I think things would be quite different now.
Simple. Loading time. Loading times are getting worse again in the cyclic pattern it traditionally does. First generation games are typically either very good or very bad for loading time because while they haven't learned to optimize for the hardware they don't have to worry about them pushing so much data onto the disc for the loading times to be so bad.
Second generation games and onward we start to see a slow creep towards worse and worse loading times as the data increases but the disc data throughput rate stays pretty much the same. They can optimize the data positions and do a multitude of other tricks, but in the end the speed is going to get worse no matter how much effort they put into it because you can't upgrade the optical drive's speed.
Also, no matter how fast your optical drive is, it still can't compare to the raw speed of a hard drive.
Tracking you? They could already do that via IP address or normal email address. If you're running XP, you don't *have* to associate a passport with your user account to use it.
Then you go sign up for a hotmail account and use that. Hotmail accounts pass as passports, so you could just grab one email account specifically FOR the beta.
That's truly sad. A lot of those are lost permanently as a result-- only MAME romsets left, and MAME can't truly get the feel for such things as a sit-down cabinet for some of these.
Even worse when some of these are incompleted prototypes that just never made it to the production stage.
Really? I was totally disappointed with Far Cry. The AI seemed really flaky, where they could sometimes see you crouching in the middle of bushes so thick you couldn't see out, but other times couldn't see you if you were standing practically in front of them. Admittedly the water looked good, and the environments looked nice, but the gameplay was really suffering.
Entirely plausible. They'd probably end up using some sort of caching of binary translations to prevent there from being the same startup delay every time you start up your application. Applications where you have an identical interface (eg OpenGL) would see no performance hit on the graphics side.
Emulation programmers have been playing with dynarec cores for years now, but compatibility at a low level tends to suffer. Some software is expecting scanline-perfection because they're talking right to the hardware and are tuned to that performance. You'll notice the ABI/API compatibility only talks about various Unix variants and mainframes. So, dynarec PROBABLY won't have to worry about that so much in this case.
Kinda disappointing. I'd like to see what wrangling they could do with MacOS and Windows. Those would be much harder to pull off.
Unless it's a static or dynamic recompilation technique-- it could translate before execution, dumping a new binary which it executes. You'd have a much longer start time, obviously, but it'd run at the full speed possible. Assuming, of course, that your recompilation techniques are 100% perfect.
Doubtful, but possible.
Heh. Most of us on the PC side don't pay much attention to the advertising, all things said and done. Intel-- hell, even Apple-- they all follow the hardcore, those insane enough to live on the bleeding edge.
Played that game awhile. It's impossible to walk it without getting cut a few times on bad decisions (Voodoo 3, anyone?) but that's life.
I've noticed similar, but a definite pattern.. my 5.25 floppies are still in good condition, my 3.5s are less so. HD disks die frequently, and LD ones a good bit less so, but both 3.5 types are extremely flaky in my experiences.
I remember back in the early 90s that I hated to put stuff on floppy for fear that it'd not survive long. I picked up a habit of saving four or five copies of a given file to a floppy in the hopes that ONE of the files would make it through in one piece.
I'm so glad to have a USB flash drive.
Reminds me of when a friend of mine got a network adaptor right after they came out over here. All he had was the demo disc, so he brought the adaptor over and we gave the demo disc a try.
Three demo runs through Madden, three disconnected opponents as soon as it looked like they were going to lose. You run into this sort of thing on any platform when you're online. It's enough that I only play online in groups of people I know and trust not to play that way.
Reminds me of a purchase I just made recently. I preordered Gradius 5 on PS2 about six months ago and paid it off right when I made the preorder. Well, when the Japanese one came out, I burned a copy to check out. Do I feel guilty? Not in the slightest-- I've already paid my way, so it really doesn't matter whether I use the Japanese burn or the US original. Finished it within 24 hours, but I'll still be picking up my original next month.
Well, if that screenshot is any indication, it's running as System.. you wouldn't even have to have a logged-in Admin. You've got kernel-level access to the machine from that VNC.
That doesn't answer whether it'd change ports if an existing VNC is there, but nevertheless, it looks like a particularly nasty and hard-to-track rootkit.
They can't get them all on a single disc for PS1. The PS1 apparently isn't powerful enough to do the audio emulation, so the Rockman Complete Works discs on PS1 use digital XA audio rather than emulate the sound chip-- each game, as a result, uses up nearly an entire CD..
Okay, when last I looked there was no answer yet, so..
...would just be me backspacing out 'sucks' in favor of something less likely to get me fired. It's an old joke, and pretty tired, but still in common use.
^H is the ascii code for a backspace. Something like:
My boss sucks^H^H^H^H^Hisn't so bad
I saw "l33t"speak on BBSes long before the internet was generally available, sadly. I'd say a lot of it sprung up from the warez movement in general.
Zone Alarm is also particularly good at blocking outgoing connections at an application level, like those from a virus or spyware.
It does still come with VBScript built in via the Windows Scripting Host-- you could pull out a copy of notepad and code up a quick applet right from a fresh install.
YHBT.
If you do a textsearch across Slashdot for the non-specific parts of that post, you'll find it's pretty much a fill-out-the-form troll.
Like this.
Acclaim has the most CONSISTENT record out of any game company I've ever seen. Wall to wall crap starting from the late 80s.
I'm STILL amazed at the fact they haven't gone out of business. Guess that just makes them the cockroach company of gaming.. maybe nothing CAN kill them.
Big difference. Apache isn't so tightly integrated into Red Hat that trying to remove it will completely render the underlying OS unusable.
It's been said a thousand times, but it's a real truth: I shouldn't be FORCED to have Media Player installed on a server machine that's going to be just feeding out webpages. It's just one more piece of code exposed to potential exploit, requiring additional updates, and to add insult to injury it's something that'll never be USED.
THAT is the big difference between Microsoft Integration and F/OSS Integration.
That's currently near-impossible with modern games. UT2k3 uses up around three gigabytes of HD space, if I recall correctly.
You're just not going to get all the files to memory-- besides, UT2k3 is a multiple disc game already.