Skyrus456
Forum Noob
Currently trying to decrypt my PS2 Classics version of SMT: Persona 4 as a ISO, nothing seems to be working properly for Apollo Save Tool's decryption.
I apologize in advance, but I seriously need to vent a bit about how terrible my Homebrewing experience has been these past 2-3 days getting started with everything. I own a PS3 Slim 3001A that was refurbished at a local Retro gaming store and the experience has been nothing but pain and suffering.
My experience with homebrewing this PS3 Slim 3001A using PS3HEN has been nothing short of terrible. Nothing works properly and when it does it's nothing short of a freaking miracle. HFW Firmware flashes were a pain in the ass, because the system update kept locking up or looping indefinitely. Spend the entire day yesterday just trying to get the firmware to flash/update. When it finally relented after being stuck on 99% for over an hour long, thought my troubles were over. Apollo Save Tool won't let me decrypt my PS2 Classic (PS2 BIN.ENC) games to ISO files, stuck at 0% complete for over an hour long worth on getting it to work.
There is next to no guides out there teaching you how this Homebrew software works, all of them are outdated or are guides that guide me the exact opposite of what I want to do more than half the time. Load screens/times for Homebrew software take up to a minute or two long. It is truly unbearable. Nothing works as it should and there is next to no guides out there that teach me what I want to know about. I have constantly hard power off my console to escape frozen progress bars or system lock ups. System Firmware has to rebuild constantly after all these forced reboots. My first impressions of the stability of these Homebrew apps and firmware are not high, nothing works or is intuitive like it should be.
Any chance that I can resolve these issues with buying an older model PS3 or reformatting, I've already gotten so far and I'd reset if possible. Any help would be appreciated.
Update:
So I kind of figure out a workaround/solution to my problem with Apollo Save Tool decrypting ISO.ENC files, but it doesn't seem intended or intuitive. Because the Apollo Save Tool was not working with decrypting the USB Drive Directly (write speeds were incredibly slow, like 1% per hour), I attempted to just decrypt the file on the HDD and move it to the USB Flash Drive inserted using WebMan. This process did in fact work after some tinkering, but it was no where near an ideal solution as it was very tedious and unintuitive.
There is also no way to know how far along the file copying from the HDD to the USB Flash was complete as WebMan would be unable to load the page with 80070323 error code after about a 5 minutes of copying the file over to the USB. But I let it sit for like four hours last night and the file did successfully copy over to the USB Flash Drive. From there it was just the process of unhiding the first ISO file because it was marked as a hidden system file on Windows (for some unexplainable reason) and then merging the two ISO files into one ISO file. Then I loaded the ISO file into PCSX2 and it worked!
While I am new to this Homebrew community, like I previous stated, this solution/workaround is terrible and I think this problem should be fixed. I might submit a issue ticket on the Apollo Save Tool GitHub, if that would be advised. Also my homebrew app load times, for some reason, have significantly improved from yesterday. Now it takes about no longer than a minute to get from app to app (which is nice). The slowness yesterday might have been because the system was at fairly high idling CPU/RSX temperature of 51 C or it could have just been an anomaly.
I had an awful experience with getting HFW installed too which did not make the further frustrations better. I imagine that my case of installing the HFW was very abnormal for the average homebrew user. This still does not make my frustrations and problems magically disappear. Someone should seriously make a comprehensive guide on how to dump ISO.ENC files using Apollo Save Tool or fix the issue with the USB Drive decryption because it easy to do.
There is the slight chance that my USB ports on my PS3 Slim are defectively slow, but I highly doubt that is this issue here since I haven't had any problems with USB ports not working in the past. It seem to be more likely that it is a bug wit Apollo Save Tool. If there is a way to forward this to the Apollo Save Tool dev team, that would be great as it might actually mean that this gets some sort of fix so that people don't have to go through the headache I went through trying to get this done.
If anyone actually reads this, thanks for taking your time to read my insufferable ramblings, vents, and problems I had trying to do this.
I apologize in advance, but I seriously need to vent a bit about how terrible my Homebrewing experience has been these past 2-3 days getting started with everything. I own a PS3 Slim 3001A that was refurbished at a local Retro gaming store and the experience has been nothing but pain and suffering.
My experience with homebrewing this PS3 Slim 3001A using PS3HEN has been nothing short of terrible. Nothing works properly and when it does it's nothing short of a freaking miracle. HFW Firmware flashes were a pain in the ass, because the system update kept locking up or looping indefinitely. Spend the entire day yesterday just trying to get the firmware to flash/update. When it finally relented after being stuck on 99% for over an hour long, thought my troubles were over. Apollo Save Tool won't let me decrypt my PS2 Classic (PS2 BIN.ENC) games to ISO files, stuck at 0% complete for over an hour long worth on getting it to work.
There is next to no guides out there teaching you how this Homebrew software works, all of them are outdated or are guides that guide me the exact opposite of what I want to do more than half the time. Load screens/times for Homebrew software take up to a minute or two long. It is truly unbearable. Nothing works as it should and there is next to no guides out there that teach me what I want to know about. I have constantly hard power off my console to escape frozen progress bars or system lock ups. System Firmware has to rebuild constantly after all these forced reboots. My first impressions of the stability of these Homebrew apps and firmware are not high, nothing works or is intuitive like it should be.
Any chance that I can resolve these issues with buying an older model PS3 or reformatting, I've already gotten so far and I'd reset if possible. Any help would be appreciated.
Update:
So I kind of figure out a workaround/solution to my problem with Apollo Save Tool decrypting ISO.ENC files, but it doesn't seem intended or intuitive. Because the Apollo Save Tool was not working with decrypting the USB Drive Directly (write speeds were incredibly slow, like 1% per hour), I attempted to just decrypt the file on the HDD and move it to the USB Flash Drive inserted using WebMan. This process did in fact work after some tinkering, but it was no where near an ideal solution as it was very tedious and unintuitive.
There is also no way to know how far along the file copying from the HDD to the USB Flash was complete as WebMan would be unable to load the page with 80070323 error code after about a 5 minutes of copying the file over to the USB. But I let it sit for like four hours last night and the file did successfully copy over to the USB Flash Drive. From there it was just the process of unhiding the first ISO file because it was marked as a hidden system file on Windows (for some unexplainable reason) and then merging the two ISO files into one ISO file. Then I loaded the ISO file into PCSX2 and it worked!
While I am new to this Homebrew community, like I previous stated, this solution/workaround is terrible and I think this problem should be fixed. I might submit a issue ticket on the Apollo Save Tool GitHub, if that would be advised. Also my homebrew app load times, for some reason, have significantly improved from yesterday. Now it takes about no longer than a minute to get from app to app (which is nice). The slowness yesterday might have been because the system was at fairly high idling CPU/RSX temperature of 51 C or it could have just been an anomaly.
I had an awful experience with getting HFW installed too which did not make the further frustrations better. I imagine that my case of installing the HFW was very abnormal for the average homebrew user. This still does not make my frustrations and problems magically disappear. Someone should seriously make a comprehensive guide on how to dump ISO.ENC files using Apollo Save Tool or fix the issue with the USB Drive decryption because it easy to do.
There is the slight chance that my USB ports on my PS3 Slim are defectively slow, but I highly doubt that is this issue here since I haven't had any problems with USB ports not working in the past. It seem to be more likely that it is a bug wit Apollo Save Tool. If there is a way to forward this to the Apollo Save Tool dev team, that would be great as it might actually mean that this gets some sort of fix so that people don't have to go through the headache I went through trying to get this done.
If anyone actually reads this, thanks for taking your time to read my insufferable ramblings, vents, and problems I had trying to do this.
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