IMPORTANT NOTE FOR UDPBD USERS : VMCs (and this update by extension ) will NOT work unless the games on your server are stored on an exFAT formatted drive. I was not aware of this requirement when I made the video, or I would have mentioned it.
I have a question for you that I can't find answer to. I'm not sure YT will allow me to post it tho as my account is shadowbanned. I've been thinking about MX4SIO lately as my console is 77003 and I can only do OPL+SMB server for the best transfer speed, but those have some really kinky problems. Anyway, my question is: Would the current homebrew SDK for PS2 allow combining "virtual" multitaps + MX4SIO? This would ultimately allow for using an standard SD card without the need to give up the memory slot as we'd have combined SDcard + ps2memcard in one place, in one slot I thought about how it'd work in a design sense of things, we'd need to multiplex the SD card data vs the ps2 memcard one, but I'm not sure if it is possible with the current SDK developments. Could you give some insight if this would be viable thing?
Virtual mulit-taps might be possible, but I really have no idea. I imagine doing something like that could result in a number of compatibility issues though.
I have a 6TB arriving today to give the project a go (finally!). I’ll format it to exFat and get into the weeds. EBay permitted me by agreement that I could sell free McBoot cards on eBay (modding and mod hardware is very legal here - it’s to have the right to protect your original disc by using a back up). They pulled the rug out from under me a few months ago, and as it supplemented my disability pension - they don’t know what the heck your project is lol. May I ask your permission to sell pre-made drives with this project? I have every North American released PS2 and PS1 games among NTSC-J and PAL games, tons of roms for different emulators, lots of modded consoles in the house and I’ve been building up a fairly large collection for the sake of saving games from disappearing into oblivion. I’ll be loading the drive with every NTSC/US game, and I’ll try to help with the artwork if that still needs contributions (I saw in one of your videos that no one had done so as yet). I’m getting by financially from my pension so I have all the time in the world to get right into the weeds with this one. It’s by far the best PS2 mod so far, you’ve done a fantastic job and very grateful. Thanks mate 🙂
As I think about XEB+ and I open TH-cam I see this...I love the effort your putting into this and I'm glad fmcb isn't the only soft mod option out there
Awesome work sync! I've been adding what I test to be working on the wiki alongside some others since you opened the wiki. I am very glad you worked on this. Your plugin literally replaced my previous setup in its entirety thanks to your hard work and my games work better without fuss! Congrats, thanks, and happy new year brother! 🎉❤
You notice how each memory card group has an identifier that follows the format of a PS2 title ID? Well let's just say there's a very good reason for doing that.
I have two 6TB drives arriving this week and will be getting right into this awesome project you've started. I intend to contribute any way I can ( = Great work. Thank you for this.
I'm getting an error when trying to toggle to UDPBD advanced "The program was unable to find an ExFAT volume or partition" Is it only possible to have VMC's on ExFATs?
I'm not sure why that would be an issue. I've been testing the UDPBD software on windows and it works fine. I've been using an exFAT USB drive to host the games. It just never occurred to me until your comment that exFAT may be a requirement.
I already did that in the last update. There 's a collection of widescreen patches on my GitHub you can drop on the USB drive and load with Cheat Device.
I'd prefer an in built code list of actual cheats rather than the WS/Progressive only. Or a least a file we can import containing the cheats. Wishful thinking i know.
@@ogxboxmike That's totally possible, someone just needs to take the time to do it. Cheat collections exist for OPL currently. The codes should be the same, they just need need to be converted to the Cheat Device format, and named correctly for the plugin to load them.
@@sync-on-luma Yeah, a LOT Of work in other words lol. I really hope someone takes on the challenge or even just makes a tool to make it simple for the end user. If I had the skills I'd jump in and give it a go myself :)
I need to learn how to develop custom IRX modules before I can attempt to add IGR. It's, at the very least, time consuming, and probably also difficult.
This is a great job you are doing and I am grateful for it. I'm interested in one thing about the future. Eye-toy games are not supported at OPL, do you see any possibility that neutrino will eliminate this?
AFAIK the only thing that would cause a compatibly issue, regardless of backup loader, is if you were loading games off a USB drive. The loader has to overwrite whatever USB driver would normally be used in order to read the game data. I don't have an EyeToy, but I recently got a SingStar microphone adapter, and that works fine when loading games from HDD. I don't know why the EyeToy would be any different.
Thank you my friend you have my respects 👍 I have some issues recently I have a japanese PS2 and works very well the first try but I don't know why suddenly games stops working, only black screen when I launch a game I won't do nothing since I play last time and is weird because the games works on OPL, I delete XEBPLUS copying again all xmas your neutrino launcher and even rebuilt list and nothing, I download this last update and the same thing nothing only black screen after neutrino loading screen, I won't know if is the model of the ps2 because is a 15000 japanese model early's models but the first time works. And another issue since the first update the GSM app not working for me, including the version you show on the last video.
So two questions: 1) What device are you loading games from, and 2) When you get the black screen, does the console reboot after a minute, or does it just sit there forever?
@sync-on-luma 1) from USB. 2) stay on black screen, I know when works shows a boot screen with some some code on the top left corner but now only stay in black. It's weird because since I play it works very well even I include PS1 and a retro emulation everything fine, suddenly stops working.
@@harrymason6654 That means the game is being loaded but it can't start, which usually means a corrupted image file or bad dump. There are some games that need specific compatibility flags set in order to boot, and titles that don't match your console's region can be particular about the boot logo setting.
@sync-on-luma but on the first time it works well and now the games are working on OPL without problems. This problem only have with that specific model, on other PS2 fat and slim was working good even with time.
I'm honestly not sure why everyone keeps using OPL manager. It's not designed to work with this plugin. You're meant to grab a complete OPL artwork pack and extract the whole thing to the ART directory on the USB drive. There are several on archive.org and at least one on GitHub, and all of them use 64x64 disc art AFAIK.
Is there a way to cache the game wallpapers somewhere? Scrolling through the list seems slow on these videos. The whole screen constantly changing while you try to read the text is a bit annoying, and in OPL menu it was just a part of the screen somewhere in the corner. Maybe heavier shadow over the title list?
The artwork IS cached somewhere. That's why it takes a couple seconds to stream in instead of almost a full minute. The limiting factor is USB 1.1, which is dog slow. You can go watch my earlier videos on this topic if you want to see how much effort it took to get the menu to a usable level of performance when displaying artwork.
@@sync-on-luma i saw them and the amount of effort seems massive, but what about PSP-looking variant, where it only shows lowres previews with a logo of the game? If even 480p pictures take that much time through a slow USB 1.1, that could theoretically feel snappier. Or, alternatively, keeping previous game's background image while you scroll and loading new one only when you wait for about 1 second, would allow to just scroll faster focusing on the text, for the cases when you already know what game you want and you just wait to get to the middle of the list
PSXMemcard appears to be a PlayStation 1 memory card, so it won't work with my plugin. I can't speak to how well it might work with a POPSY-X or other similar plugins.
If you're wanting to load games from it, I can't really say without testing myself. If it works like an MX4SIO while in PS2 mode and is compatible with the same driver, then it should work fine. The video you linked appears to show it emulating a USB drive though. I have no idea how they pulled that off, but if that is what's actually happening, and it doesn't rely on something like a custom fork of OPL, it could be huge for XEB+ as a whole.
@@sync-on-luma Thanks, I will buy 1 piece for testing and feedback what happend. Another question about POPSY-X, what do you think is it possible to modify that plugin to work similar as yours (run PSX VCD files directly from HDD/SSD)?
It might be, I've not looked into it. At a minimum it would need to be modified to incorporate something like the list system used in the neutrino launcher. Beyond that it depends if the POPS backend can support devices other than USB and takes launch arguments that can be passed in from XEB+.
I discussed this in my neutrino Launcher FAQ video, but no, not easily. The two solutions I'm aware of are to either come up with a hardware mod or develop a custom IRX module that can do the IGR injection. The first involves either reverse engineering a modchip or developing anew one, and the second I still need to learn how to do.
@sync-on-luma I think irx module with be better as there is no physical possibilities to reset console as far as I'm aware with switch without hdd spindown which is what I'm most worried about. Maybe it's possible to adapt OPL IGR implementation?
Were you thinking of implamementing apa jail to be possible launching both ps2 and ps1 games? I've managed to do that by installing PSBBN English patch 2.0 Which uses apa jail so both exfat and apa partitions are existing And I'm launching ps1 games through pops loader through xeb+ too. Btw really thank you for your commitment to the project you he just gave me that spark I needed go dig into ps2 again 😁
PS1 support is out of scope for this plugin. You might be able to launch PS2 games from the exFAT partition of an APA jail drive, but I've not tested that.
@@sync-on-luma okay, popsloader does the job so far and yes plugin works fine with apa jail, games are working without issue and simultaneously I have apa partitions for PSBBN and pops to load ps1 games.
Do you know if or when xbe+ will have the ability to ready other devices besides usb? I use a iflash2ps2 and would love to use multiple sd chips. Thanks for all you work!!!!
I can't set up gsm for ps2 at all. because this neutrino XEB absolutely does not support GSM in any way, unlike the standard OPL. UDPBD speed is good, but watching pixel ladders without 1080i support, which is provided by standard GSM in OPL, is crap.
IMPORTANT NOTE FOR UDPBD USERS :
VMCs (and this update by extension ) will NOT work unless the games on your server are stored on an exFAT formatted drive.
I was not aware of this requirement when I made the video, or I would have mentioned it.
I have a question for you that I can't find answer to. I'm not sure YT will allow me to post it tho as my account is shadowbanned.
I've been thinking about MX4SIO lately as my console is 77003 and I can only do OPL+SMB server for the best transfer speed, but those have some really kinky problems. Anyway, my question is: Would the current homebrew SDK for PS2 allow combining "virtual" multitaps + MX4SIO? This would ultimately allow for using an standard SD card without the need to give up the memory slot as we'd have combined SDcard + ps2memcard in one place, in one slot I thought about how it'd work in a design sense of things, we'd need to multiplex the SD card data vs the ps2 memcard one, but I'm not sure if it is possible with the current SDK developments. Could you give some insight if this would be viable thing?
Virtual mulit-taps might be possible, but I really have no idea. I imagine doing something like that could result in a number of compatibility issues though.
I have a 6TB arriving today to give the project a go (finally!). I’ll format it to exFat and get into the weeds.
EBay permitted me by agreement that I could sell free McBoot cards on eBay (modding and mod hardware is very legal here - it’s to have the right to protect your original disc by using a back up).
They pulled the rug out from under me a few months ago, and as it supplemented my disability pension - they don’t know what the heck your project is lol.
May I ask your permission to sell pre-made drives with this project? I have every North American released PS2 and PS1 games among NTSC-J and PAL games, tons of roms for different emulators, lots of modded consoles in the house and I’ve been building up a fairly large collection for the sake of saving games from disappearing into oblivion.
I’ll be loading the drive with every NTSC/US game, and I’ll try to help with the artwork if that still needs contributions (I saw in one of your videos that no one had done so as yet).
I’m getting by financially from my pension so I have all the time in the world to get right into the weeds with this one.
It’s by far the best PS2 mod so far, you’ve done a fantastic job and very grateful. Thanks mate 🙂
The dedication you are putting into this project is truly admirable.
Great work, I won’t be able to enjoy it myself, but love to see there are people out there still doing this stuff.
You are the absolute best! I am trully happy to support you by yt memberships. Thank you!
nice to see someone in the ps2 community who has attention to detail, nicely done !
the Houston Texans really picked the worst possible date to finalise their uniforms
Yeah, I noticed that detail when I was editing. I wish I'd seen it sooner so I could have put a joke about it in the script.
Technically it’s the second worst date lol
As I think about XEB+ and I open TH-cam I see this...I love the effort your putting into this and I'm glad fmcb isn't the only soft mod option out there
Another amazing video, thank you...
Oh and happy new year.
Awesome work sync! I've been adding what I test to be working on the wiki alongside some others since you opened the wiki. I am very glad you worked on this. Your plugin literally replaced my previous setup in its entirety thanks to your hard work and my games work better without fuss! Congrats, thanks, and happy new year brother! 🎉❤
Glad it's working well for you, and your contributions to the compatibility list are greatly appreciated.
Great job, God bless you and happy new year
And again - Well done !
Man ... all that research 🙈
I just saw it on the Discord, nice 👌
It will be cool if Memcard Pro had this feature of crosssave
You notice how each memory card group has an identifier that follows the format of a PS2 title ID? Well let's just say there's a very good reason for doing that.
@sync-on-luma true, and good work on all of this, Ps2 apps have been mostly dead compared to OG Xbox
I have two 6TB drives arriving this week and will be getting right into this awesome project you've started. I intend to contribute any way I can ( =
Great work. Thank you for this.
No problem.
I'm getting an error when trying to toggle to UDPBD advanced "The program was unable to find an ExFAT volume or partition"
Is it only possible to have VMC's on ExFATs?
I'm not actually 100% sure, but it wouldn't surprise me if that's the case.
I'd ask @MegaBitmap He's the one who's been developing the UDPBD stuff.
@sync-on-luma Damn. I'm using updbd on Windows
@@sync-on-luma Actually, after updating. It's completely borked for me now unfortunately.
I'm not sure why that would be an issue. I've been testing the UDPBD software on windows and it works fine. I've been using an exFAT USB drive to host the games. It just never occurred to me until your comment that exFAT may be a requirement.
@@sync-on-luma Well, dang. No VMCs for me then.
awesome work maybe another thing to obsess over are automatic widescreen and progressive scan cheat codes
I already did that in the last update. There 's a collection of widescreen patches on my GitHub you can drop on the USB drive and load with Cheat Device.
I'd prefer an in built code list of actual cheats rather than the WS/Progressive only. Or a least a file we can import containing the cheats. Wishful thinking i know.
@@ogxboxmike That's totally possible, someone just needs to take the time to do it.
Cheat collections exist for OPL currently. The codes should be the same, they just need need to be converted to the Cheat Device format, and named correctly for the plugin to load them.
@@sync-on-luma Yeah, a LOT Of work in other words lol. I really hope someone takes on the challenge or even just makes a tool to make it simple for the end user. If I had the skills I'd jump in and give it a go myself :)
very cool :)
Dude, is it really hard to make an igr Path mechanic? It would be really good
I need to learn how to develop custom IRX modules before I can attempt to add IGR. It's, at the very least, time consuming, and probably also difficult.
This is a great job you are doing and I am grateful for it. I'm interested in one thing about the future. Eye-toy games are not supported at OPL, do you see any possibility that neutrino will eliminate this?
AFAIK the only thing that would cause a compatibly issue, regardless of backup loader, is if you were loading games off a USB drive. The loader has to overwrite whatever USB driver would normally be used in order to read the game data.
I don't have an EyeToy, but I recently got a SingStar microphone adapter, and that works fine when loading games from HDD. I don't know why the EyeToy would be any different.
@sync-on-luma I might try it as soon as I get my ps2 from my parents. Thanks for the reply
Cataloguing these sports cross saves is the Odyssey of the PS2😂😂Please don't torture yourself with cross save for POPStarter🤣
Thank you my friend you have my respects 👍
I have some issues recently I have a japanese PS2 and works very well the first try but I don't know why suddenly games stops working, only black screen when I launch a game I won't do nothing since I play last time and is weird because the games works on OPL, I delete XEBPLUS copying again all xmas your neutrino launcher and even rebuilt list and nothing, I download this last update and the same thing nothing only black screen after neutrino loading screen, I won't know if is the model of the ps2 because is a 15000 japanese model early's models but the first time works.
And another issue since the first update the GSM app not working for me, including the version you show on the last video.
So two questions: 1) What device are you loading games from, and 2) When you get the black screen, does the console reboot after a minute, or does it just sit there forever?
@sync-on-luma 1) from USB. 2) stay on black screen, I know when works shows a boot screen with some some code on the top left corner but now only stay in black.
It's weird because since I play it works very well even I include PS1 and a retro emulation everything fine, suddenly stops working.
@@harrymason6654 That means the game is being loaded but it can't start, which usually means a corrupted image file or bad dump. There are some games that need specific compatibility flags set in order to boot, and titles that don't match your console's region can be particular about the boot logo setting.
@sync-on-luma but on the first time it works well and now the games are working on OPL without problems.
This problem only have with that specific model, on other PS2 fat and slim was working good even with time.
That sounds like the out-of-regoin issue I described before. Try changing the boot logo setting.
Simply amazing! Question on cd covers. Is there a way to force opl manager to download lower res covers ? Or a complete alternative to oplmanager ?
I'm honestly not sure why everyone keeps using OPL manager. It's not designed to work with this plugin.
You're meant to grab a complete OPL artwork pack and extract the whole thing to the ART directory on the USB drive. There are several on archive.org and at least one on GitHub, and all of them use 64x64 disc art AFAIK.
@sync-on-luma was not aware that full packs exist and didnt even try to search for it. Thanks!
Is there a way to cache the game wallpapers somewhere? Scrolling through the list seems slow on these videos. The whole screen constantly changing while you try to read the text is a bit annoying, and in OPL menu it was just a part of the screen somewhere in the corner. Maybe heavier shadow over the title list?
The artwork IS cached somewhere. That's why it takes a couple seconds to stream in instead of almost a full minute.
The limiting factor is USB 1.1, which is dog slow. You can go watch my earlier videos on this topic if you want to see how much effort it took to get the menu to a usable level of performance when displaying artwork.
@@sync-on-luma i saw them and the amount of effort seems massive, but what about PSP-looking variant, where it only shows lowres previews with a logo of the game? If even 480p pictures take that much time through a slow USB 1.1, that could theoretically feel snappier. Or, alternatively, keeping previous game's background image while you scroll and loading new one only when you wait for about 1 second, would allow to just scroll faster focusing on the text, for the cases when you already know what game you want and you just wait to get to the middle of the list
That logo idea isn't bad. I may look into that.
Congratulation, this VMC feature is missed a lot.
I would like to ask can I use now the PSXMemcard hardware for XEB+ ?
I planning to buy it...
PSXMemcard appears to be a PlayStation 1 memory card, so it won't work with my plugin. I can't speak to how well it might work with a POPSY-X or other similar plugins.
@@sync-on-luma The GEN2 already supports PS2:
th-cam.com/video/dojCf0nmDvY/w-d-xo.html
If you're wanting to load games from it, I can't really say without testing myself.
If it works like an MX4SIO while in PS2 mode and is compatible with the same driver, then it should work fine. The video you linked appears to show it emulating a USB drive though. I have no idea how they pulled that off, but if that is what's actually happening, and it doesn't rely on something like a custom fork of OPL, it could be huge for XEB+ as a whole.
@@sync-on-luma Thanks, I will buy 1 piece for testing and feedback what happend. Another question about POPSY-X, what do you think is it possible to modify that plugin to work similar as yours (run PSX VCD files directly from HDD/SSD)?
It might be, I've not looked into it. At a minimum it would need to be modified to incorporate something like the list system used in the neutrino launcher. Beyond that it depends if the POPS backend can support devices other than USB and takes launch arguments that can be passed in from XEB+.
awesome
Is IGR possible?
Pretty annoying that I need to power off console every time I want change game, back to xeb+ would be nice 😁
I discussed this in my neutrino Launcher FAQ video, but no, not easily.
The two solutions I'm aware of are to either come up with a hardware mod or develop a custom IRX module that can do the IGR injection. The first involves either reverse engineering a modchip or developing anew one, and the second I still need to learn how to do.
@sync-on-luma I think irx module with be better as there is no physical possibilities to reset console as far as I'm aware with switch without hdd spindown which is what I'm most worried about.
Maybe it's possible to adapt OPL IGR implementation?
Were you thinking of implamementing apa jail to be possible launching both ps2 and ps1 games?
I've managed to do that by installing PSBBN English patch 2.0
Which uses apa jail so both exfat and apa partitions are existing
And I'm launching ps1 games through pops loader through xeb+ too.
Btw really thank you for your commitment to the project you he just gave me that spark I needed go dig into ps2 again 😁
PS1 support is out of scope for this plugin. You might be able to launch PS2 games from the exFAT partition of an APA jail drive, but I've not tested that.
@@sync-on-luma okay, popsloader does the job so far and yes plugin works fine with apa jail, games are working without issue and simultaneously I have apa partitions for PSBBN and pops to load ps1 games.
Do you know if or when xbe+ will have the ability to ready other devices besides usb? I use a iflash2ps2 and would love to use multiple sd chips.
Thanks for all you work!!!!
XEB+ should support other devices when version 1.0 is released. That's supposed to happen "eventually".
Would it be possible/difficult to have/make/select different lists that would be "synced" to different SD cards?
Not explicitly unless you use multiple USB drives. Though there might be a hacky workaround I haven't thought of.
Amazing work! Does anyone know if XEB supports pad emulation?, can ps1 games be upscaled through GSM?
I can't set up gsm for ps2 at all. because this neutrino XEB absolutely does not support GSM in any way, unlike the standard OPL. UDPBD speed is good, but watching pixel ladders without 1080i support, which is provided by standard GSM in OPL, is crap.
So when would I expect to see the very horrible attempt at PSP emulation?