PS2 Grimdoomers OPL does not show any games

[AlteKuh]

Hello everyone,

I've been trying my hand at this for at least 2 hours now and need to ask your advice.

I'm using a fat PS2 with an original network adapter that now has a SATA port. Consequently, I'm using an exFat formatted SSD (Samsung 870 EVO SATA III 2.5 inch SSD, 4 TB) for the games.

Since the original OPL does not recognize exFat, I switched to Grimdoomers OPL (v1.2.0-Beta-1996-b6717a) and transferred the .elf to the PS2 accordingly, where it started without any problems. With the SSD connected, the program also fiddled around for a long time - but no games are displayed.

I dragged the games onto the SSD as normal with Windows (folder with "DVD" and the ISOS in it)

What the heck am I doing wrong? If anyone has any ideas, I would be very grateful.


(Sadly I can't upload any images here, otherwise I would provide them)

 

[Berion]

Turn off HDD, enable BDM and seek games on BDM category.

Besides that, be sure that your SSD using 512 bytes or so called 512e sector size, not 4096 (4K).

sudo hdparm -I /dev/sdx

 

[AlteKuh]

Turn off HDD, enable BDM and seek games on BDM category.

Besides that, be sure that your SSD using 512 bytes or so called 512e sector size, not 4096 (4K).

sudo hdparm -I /dev/sdx

Thank you for your answer Berion!

HDD Device Star Mode is Off in my Settings, so this can't be the problem. The SSD is using 512 bytes as well.

I'll write down my Settings of OPL, since I can't share a picture.

Debug Colors	Off
PS2 Logo	On
Cache Game List (HDD)	Off
IGR Path	<not set>
Write Operations	Off
Remember Last Played Game	Off
BDM Prefix Path	<not set>
ETH Prefix Path	<not set>
Automatic HDD Spin Down	20
BDM Start Mode	Auto	Block Devices (USB On / iLink Off / MX4SIO Off / HDD Off)
HDD Device Start Mode	Off
ETH Device Start Mode	Off
Applications Start Mode	Off
Default Menu	BDM Games
BDM Cache	16
HDD Cache	8
SMB Cache	16

 

[khat17]

Hi there. For science. Connect your drive in a dock or enclosure by USB to the PS2 and check if the games show up.

 

[AlteKuh]

Hi there. For science. Connect your drive in a dock or enclosure by USB to the PS2 and check if the games show up.

Hey there khat! Thank you for your post.

I'm baffled and ashamed at the same time, I did not think of that. OPL does find the drive and displays my games with no problem! So does this mean my adapter is at fault here?

 

[khat17]

Hey there khat! Thank you for your post.

I'm baffled and ashamed at the same time, I did not think of that. OPL does find the drive and displays my games with no problem! So does this mean my adapter is at fault here?

Nothing to be ashamed about. So let me give my take on this.

The community is great - we have lots of persons from all over. An issue would be broken into one of two parts IMO. Either language barrier issues - not everyone has English as their native language - and that doesn't help with the whole explaining what needs to be done....and I think the other may be just intentional ambiguity. Maybe because info is there in another thread, the questions have been asked, the search is not used - whatever the reason - some persons just leave details as they are.

From what I recall in prior discussions with @Berion - and correct me if I'm wrong - what you want to do can be done, but it carries a risk.

https://www.psx-place.com/threads/apa-jail.34847/

APA-Jail is hybrid drive but needs extra careful and it is rather for advanced users only (week ago I released RC2 of my toolkit which i.e allows formatting to that format; however it is for Linux only).

Why not? Look...

• exFAT partition on APA is possible to make by hand but literally nothing will read it.
• exFAT partition on GPT is a normal PC drive formatting but it will be read only by OPL GD.
• Hybrid environment called APA-Jail can be used "for eating cake and still having cake" but it is only for advanced users (because it can be very easily killed).

From what I gather, OPL can work with USB drives quite fine. The issue is getting it to work with the INTERNAL drive. It's not impossible, but carries a risk. If I had the time and could actually mesh with Berion or some other user that has the time, then I'd do some tutorial with screenshots along the way to get it working.

Maybe years ago when I tried to do things the enclosures/drives were slower, because I recall BR3 having jittery loads and the FMVs were especially choppy. From the USB port on my phat it worked fine today when I tested. If I recall, the slim has USB 2.0 and would do better, but I'm kinda attached to the phat since I built it from scraps and chipped it with the DMS4.

The other reason for wanting exFAT is to easily copy the VMCs to have backups of my saves regardless. Apollo seems to be the thing to use, but I guess I need more XP with that as well.

Overall - glad you got it working. If Berion has the time and can enlighten some more if/as needed - that would be great.

 

[AlteKuh]

Nothing to be ashamed about. So let me give my take on this.

The community is great - we have lots of persons from all over. An issue would be broken into one of two parts IMO. Either language barrier issues - not everyone has English as their native language - and that doesn't help with the whole explaining what needs to be done....and I think the other may be just intentional ambiguity. Maybe because info is there in another thread, the questions have been asked, the search is not used - whatever the reason - some persons just leave details as they are.

From what I recall in prior discussions with @Berion - and correct me if I'm wrong - what you want to do can be done, but it carries a risk.

https://www.psx-place.com/threads/apa-jail.34847/

From what I gather, OPL can work with USB drives quite fine. The issue is getting it to work with the INTERNAL drive. It's not impossible, but carries a risk. If I had the time and could actually mesh with Berion or some other user that has the time, then I'd do some tutorial with screenshots along the way to get it working.

Maybe years ago when I tried to do things the enclosures/drives were slower, because I recall BR3 having jittery loads and the FMVs were especially choppy. From the USB port on my phat it worked fine today when I tested. If I recall, the slim has USB 2.0 and would do better, but I'm kinda attached to the phat since I built it from scraps and chipped it with the DMS4.

The other reason for wanting exFAT is to easily copy the VMCs to have backups of my saves regardless. Apollo seems to be the thing to use, but I guess I need more XP with that as well.

Overall - glad you got it working. If Berion has the time and can enlighten some more if/as needed - that would be great.

Thank you very much for your answer khat.

Yes, I can understand that very well. English is not my first language either and I may be misunderstanding things.

In addition, I can't really categorize many terms like "BDM" or "APA" and I'm not aware of what exactly they do.

The problem with the solution via USB is actually that FMVs stutter in my experience. It's been the same with Devil May Cry, which I've been testing. What I know now is that my SSD hard disk is not broken and the folder structure is correct. Unfortunately, this doesn't really solve my problem, because I want to play through the network SATA connection.

Unfortunately, I don't really understand the "APA hybrid" part. Is this a potential solution for dealing with exFat drives? Because I have seen many YouTube videos where this worked without any problems.

 

[khat17]

Thank you very much for your answer khat.

Yes, I can understand that very well. English is not my first language either and I may be misunderstanding things.

In addition, I can't really categorize many terms like "BDM" or "APA" and I'm not aware of what exactly they do.

The problem with the solution via USB is actually that FMVs stutter in my experience. It's been the same with Devil May Cry, which I've been testing. What I know now is that my SSD hard disk is not broken and the folder structure is correct. Unfortunately, this doesn't really solve my problem, because I want to play through the network SATA connection.

Unfortunately, I don't really understand the "APA hybrid" part. Is this a potential solution for dealing with exFat drives? Because I have seen many YouTube videos where this worked without any problems.

I'd like to get it working myself. I also do not know the terminologies and what they all mean.

BDM - Block Device Manager. I assume this is anything connected with media/files. So USB, CD/DVD, memory cards and HDD interface.

@Berion did a write-up on some stuff from before as well.

https://www.psx-place.com/threads/a...thing-you-should-know-about-hdd-in-ps2.30912/

I assume APA is referring to both the file system, partition type and type of images that can be used by the PS2. I also assume that's a proprietary file system which is why special software is needed to access it. I've not tested in Linux to verify whether or not it can be read/written from there, but it's not seen from within Windows.

The issue that you have with the FMVs stuttering is what I'm familiar with. I haven't been able to fully test on the slim as well. But we'll see.

 

[Peter_Rod]

I had the same problem, and this worked for me.
I should've came here sooner, I was spending entire days just trying to fix this issue xD