About 6 months ago I picked up a Japanese region PS2 slim while on holidays for $60. I also grabbed a bunch of games. I knew these games weren’t in english, but it couldn’t be that hard to play a game in a foreign language (right?). I was wrong. I was very wrong.
So how could I run these games in English? - OPL!
OPL supports loading games from a variety of methods, but I was most interested in loading them over Ethernet from an SMB Share. I’ve already got SMB running on my home-lab Mac Mini1, so I decided to give it a go. I spent a few hours fiddling with the PS2, but I could not get it to authenticate with my Mac. Turns out, the PS2 doesn’t support SMBv2 or SMBv3, only SMBv1 & the version of macOS I’m using outright refuses to allow any SMBv1 connections. I ended up setting a Raspberry PI up to serve games on a public Samba share from an external SSD. This worked, but some games outright refused to run over the network - but they’d run perfectly fine off of a USB.
I ended up not using the PI for ages because most of the games I wanted to play had major issues when loading over ETH. It was super tedious though to do everything over USB and games with music, voice acting or cutscenes stuttered like crazy! This is because the PS2 only has USB 1 ports… So the USB ports are slower than the disk.
I ended up just dealing with it, almost contemplating buying a DVD burner and burning the english versions of these games to a new blank disk. I’m glad I didn’t though, because through someone’s offhand comment I found a solution.
MODE 1!
All the games that stuttered or crashed when loading large files miraculously worked! Turns out by setting Mode 1 on a game you tell OPL to prioritise accurate reads over anything else. Load times might be a bit slower but at least it loads.