This page is under construction.
I started doing this NOT for piracy reasons. It all started with me getting a corrupted save with Soul Calibur III (something a lot of people experience with that game).
I ended up purchasing a copy of "Action Replay MAX" to help. It came with a 16 Meg memory card, and software that let my PS2 work with my 128 Meg USB thumb drive.
I found out I could copy save files from my PC to my PS2 memory cards. I then learned about the Memory card exploit.
The exploit cause some sort of error with the PlayStation 2, allowing you to run a program off the memory card. That program was a file manager. It allowed you to install other programs on the memory card.
One of the coolest programs is called "HD Loader". It lets you copy games to a hard drive in the PS2 to play from. Game load a LOT quicker from the hard drive than the CD/DVD they originally came on.
With the HD Loader, I ran into issues of space. I learned how to "shrink" games then. Several games have "dummy" files on them that take up space on the disc. These dummy files "push" other files to a different physical location on the CD/DVD, where they are read faster. On a hard drive, they aren't needed.
I had to learn how to copy modified images of games to the HD Loader, since it complained about the game not being on a PS2 disc.
A lot of this was copied from various web forums.
I found lots of info, but ran into problems.
Some things worked, some didn't. I didn't understand why some things worked, and why some things didn't.
As I learned more about what I was doing, I became increasingly frustrated.
I couldn't find tools and programs I wanted. Lots of 404s, down web servers, bad info. Some of the programs were the wrong version.
One of the most frustrating things were the people themselves that I was getting this info from. Some didn't know what they were doing. Some didn't know how to describe what they did. They left out steps, the version of the program they used, download links, and other information that made doing simple things difficult. It also seems like half the people who write information for other people to use don't even have a middle-school level of education. Incredibly poor grammar and spelling made it hard to read what some people were saying.
http://www.ps2hd.com/list/ - list of hard drive compatible games.
http://www.ps2-scene.org/ - ps2 related
Here are some files.
NOTE: THESE ARE MOSTLY OUTDATED. Always make sure you have the most up to date files.
http://xenomorph.net/data/ps2/cdgenps230.zip - used to rebuild a PS2 ISO
http://xenomorph.net/data/ps2/exploit.zip - pre made PS2 exploit file (contains 800 game TITLE.DB). use Action Replay MAX to install. (MAX format)
http://xenomorph.net/data/ps2/hddfrmt11.zip - hard drive formatter tool. can be used to remove a directory after a bad game install.
http://xenomorph.net/data/ps2/hdinstall.zip - hdl_dumb. old version of Hard Drive installer. (0.8.4)
http://xenomorph.net/data/ps2/hdloader-0.7e.zip - old version of HD Loader.
http://xenomorph.net/data/ps2/soulcalibur3_2.0_usa.zip Soul Calibur 3 "2.0" patch/fix. this is for the USA/NTSC version of SC3. Soul Calibur 3 1.0 has a save-corruption bug. this is supposed to fix it. copy the files from your SC3 disc to your hard drive, replace the files with the ones in this zip, rebuild the ISO with cdgenps230, then load it onto your hard drive with hdl_dumb.
/sc3_savebug/soul_calibur_iii_file_corruption.txt - text file with info on the SC3 save bug.