Sony PlayStation 2 + OPL 1.2 Grim Doomer edition (CD vs DVD directory)

[phoenixdownita]

If you have a PS2 you would know of Open PS2 Loader (OPL or OPNPS2LD).

Grim Doomer in a beta branch enabled Block Device support for the HDD with ExFat support and 64bit clusters aka you can connect big hard drives (think 16TB, gpt of course as mbr tops at 2TB) exFat formatted (so each ISO can be bigger than 4GB limit of fat32).

Because it’s handled as a block device you can just drag and drop your ISOs like you would for USB or MX4SIO solutions but with the added speed and much larger capacity.

So far so good.

 

OPL in Block Device mode expects certain top level directories (it creates it for you if not there) … in specific ISOs goes into either the “CD” or the “DVD” directory.

It’s not been easy to find which games are CD as at time small ISOs (less than 650MB) happens to be DVDs instead…. anyway reading around it seems there’s no real difference on which directory you put the ISO.

 

Well I found out the hard way that is not true, in specific some games to work correctly require OPL mode 1 (aka “accurate read”) and that behaves differently based on the directory.

 

Game in case is Outrun 2006 Coast to Coast, if you do not enable mode 1 eventually you lose in game music, even the music selection screen becomes silent while flipping through the choices. If you turn on mode 1 then depending where the ISO runs from you either have perfect title background animation and sound (DVD directory) or a stutter-fest (CD directory) …. it makes sense as mode 1 (accurate reads) attempts to reproduce the slow read time of the media which is very different among CD vs DVD.

 

I had many games in the wrong directory that did not really show an issue, it just so happened Outrun 2006 was one of them …. it took me a while to solve this riddle thinking maybe that’s the best I could get (aka either stutter-title or in-game music) … most of the docs wrt OPL CD vs DVD only talk about the game itself being told the media type but no one knowing of any game caring about it …. aka it shouldn’t make a difference.
 

Unfortunately going only by size (say anything less than 650 is CD) is also wrong, there are a few very small games (like <300MB ISOs) that are DVDs (by looking at the box/disc pictures available online as they carry the dvd-rom badge).

 

Weird, but happy that now I can play Outrun 2006 with in game music and no title screen stuttering (the Japanese version is just called Outrun 2 SP and of course shows the same issue even if the title background is far less dynamic) … pity they did not keep the unlockable original Outrun as they already had on the og Xbox version of Outrun 2 …. anyways

 

Edited Saturday at 01:10 AM by phoenixdownita