Hoping to make your life's design a bit more dynamic!

I've been wanting to play some PS2 games that are in Japanese and have translation patches coming out for they system like Dragon Quest 5 and Tales of Destiny 1 and 2. I want to avoid using the slip disk or modding my system and I was thinking of trying the Free McBoot program that can be installed on your memory card. Anyone ever try this? Apparently it is kind of a pain to install but the site PSX Scene has a volunteer service that will install it for free if you send them the card with postage paid for.

I have a PS2 slim but its modchipped so I'm not sure if I could help there.
This program thingy, is it downloadable?
Though honestly, it would be less of a pain in the long run
to just chip it. just my opinion.

I've read about people having success with some of these soft-mods, but I don't have any first-hand experience doing it... I actually hacked (quite literally) my ps3 when I first got it so that I could play some older ps2 games. I have a Korean ps3, so ps2/ps1 games were region locked.

Region locks are annoying and stupid.
Good thing you got around them Drakie.

MCBoot works AWESOME!

I use it all the time instead of a swap disc now.

If you do not trust those services. I'd be happy to do it for you except maybe you can find someone to do it closer to your area. The deal with MCBoot is. Once it is on 1 memory card. You can install it to all the memory cards you want.

There are very few things that you can't do with MCBoot that you can with a modchip.

Thanks for the offer Taskforce, I actually had the whole bubble envelope, postage prepaid setup ready before I saw your post and the person I talked to seemed very helpful so hopefully the Free McBoot installation will work fine. If not, then I will come back here.

So when you use Free McBoot, do you just have the card in your system when you turn the power on and that tells the system to ignore the region lock?

There are 2 things you have to do to use MCBoot.

First, you have to use a program to patch the game ISO before you burn it. This program is called ESR disc patcher GUI (v0.24a.) What this program does is put a fake VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS session on the ISO as the first session. Then it moves the game to the second session on the ISO. Here is a link for this program.

http://www.aoinamida.com/fmcbesr/ESR_di ... v0.24a.zip

(It is also available for other systems as a java program from http://ps2-project.org/ps2p/includes/wi ... ?title=ESR)

Seoncd, yes, you just have the card in the system when you power it up. This causes an overflow which triggers McBoot to execute from the card. (As I understand it) Then when MCBoot is done, the disc is read and the exploit kicks in. It sees the disc as a DVD Video but the memory card exploit tells the machine to run a program from the memory card instead of the DVD player software. The system check sees the disc as a DVD Video which is allowed by the system. Bypassing the software check of the system. This program loads instead of the DVD player though and when you hit boot game. This then makes the PS2 read the second session and boot and play the game.

(This software literally takes the place of the DVD player software for the system, but only during the MCBoot process. It is not perminant. The DVD player software can be executed from the expanded system menu and does work with MCBoot loaded. But will not automatically work.)

The only real things you need to do is make sure you've patched your ISO's before you burn them and make sure the memory card is in the unit. There is no need to rig sensors or make any mods to your system in any way.

-Taskforce

I'd just like to point out that from my experience, powering up the system with a memory card slotted in can be
very very bad, unless this MCboot thing takes a whole card to function and the data access for the program
doesn't harm the card physically.
Just a warning I thought shouldn't have gone unsaid.

Never ever had an issue starting a PS2 up with a memory card inserted ever. And I've been using PS2's since they were $299 way back in the day. So I don't know what kind of problems you've had but after using many PS2's and many varied models I can say it must be something with your specific unit because it certainly hasn't been a problem with any of ours. And we've had at least 10 units around here over time.

Now I'm not trying to make light of your situation. I can understand if you've had these issues and you are frustrated, but I did want to offer a counter to it that I never had this happen and this is after many many PS2s of varied models.

Oh no, I know you aren't diminishing what happened to me. Taking it this way didn't even cross my mind, don't worry ^.^
But we have a saying here sort of like "A boiled cat is afraid of cold water" so haha.
But I'm glad its something isolated. A lot of people bash Sony for a lot of reasons
(even myself concerning the outrageous overall approach the PS3 took) but its undeniable the PS1 and PS2 were successful.
So I was just giving my input in order to avoid possible problems.