Free MCBoot on 70000 series PS2 - White screen (of death?)

Question

I have a 70000 series slim PS2 in which the laser seems to have died, so I picked up a memory card with Free MCBoot v1.952 installed. I got the system to boot into Free MCBoot and everything looks great and OPL starts up fine.

I've had a very hard time finding any information with regards to how to get my games into the system, but here's what I've tried. Most of my work is done in Fedora 25, so I'm operating most of this from Linux. I set up a USB stick (yes, I know the caveats, but it's a slim system) as FAT32, and created the following directories:

• CD
• CFG
• CHT
• DVD

After accessing the stick through the PS2 and Free MCBoot, I also see these directories:

• ART
• THM
• VMC

Using a very simple PS2 game I have, Namco Museum, I ripped an .iso file using K9Copy. Everything seems fine - I can mount the .iso, it looks like the original, etc. I copied this .iso to the DVD folder and named it slus_202.73.NamcoMuseum.iso. I also checked the config file inside the .iso and I see this same slus_202.73 identifier listed.

When I take this back to Free MCBoot, OPL sees the game and I am able to go to game settings (but didn't change anything) and select the game to run. The screen then turns white and nothing else happens. I don't get any colors flashing, etc. - just white.

From what I've found, this should just start up, but I can't seem to find any additional troubleshooting tips anywhere. Any help/suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

A very important point: make sure you are using OPL version 0.9+.

That said, your main problem is that you cannot simply install the game for use with OPL by extracting it and naming the folder accordingly. In fact, it shouldn't even be in a folder, but at the root of your USB device. In order to load games off of a USB device with OPL, you have to use a particular Windows program (linked below) to automatically split the ISO into sectors to make it appear to the PS2 as though it is reading the data from a DVD, or the loading will fail. OPL is only there to provide a way to read what is on the USB device and to recognize when a game is there; the game is still processed as it would be when read from a DVD.

Which brings me to my second point: once you have properly installed the ISO using a given program (linked below), you have to use a defragmentation program (namely Power Defragmenter (linked below)) to make sure the game is completely contiguous, because if there is any fragmentation inside the game on the USB device, the game will freeze up and possibly cut out the same way it would with a scratched DVD.

As a side note, I know you can also load games from a network using OPL, but I haven't the slightest clue how to do that, as I've never done it myself.

A second note: when installing games, make sure you do it one at a time (install a game to a USB device, scan the device for fragmentation, defragment the game if needed, then install another game), because if more than one game is heavily fragmented, there won't be a large enough amount of contiguous free space to move parts of the game to when defragmenting it.

Unfortunately, no matter what, you will likely have to use Windows, and at the very least, you will have to use Wine, because as far as I know, there are no programs for installing PS2 games to USB devices on Linux, or macOS for that matter.

USB Util v2 can be found here. Use it to install your ISOs to your USB device (FAT32).

Power Defragmenter 3.0 can be found here; use the command line version if possible; the GUI has some issues if I remember correctly.

First format your USB disk as FAT32, then run USB Util v2, select your ISO, wait for it to install, and use Power Defragmenter 3.0 to scan your USB disk and repair any fragmentation. Make sure you have OPL 0.9.3 installed, and launch your game. It should run fine now. Good luck!

BTW, this is what the game should look like once it has been installed. There are two in the picture: Metal Slug Anthology and Gran Turismo 4. The format for a game's name is ul.SERIALNUMBER.gameid.PARTand you should also have a file called ul.cfg.