This is going to be an odd post…an old guy promoting an over-priced object for a gaming system only kids should by rights have any interest in.

We have a PlayStation2. We specifically bought the PlayStation2 because the old man (yes, me) wanted to play one game, which he received as a gift - 24: The Game. Since it was only available on PS2 (co-produced by Sony), I had to have one. Fortunately, through my wife we have “a guy” so we got a great deal on a mildly-used one. Of course, since we’ve owned it we’ve acquired more games than you can shake a stick at (just today I was laughing at my nine-year-old playing Sitting Ducks, an old PS2 game given to Katie by a friend of Annie’s that is so cute and silly it had all of us crying with laughter), but it’s 24: The Game that gets the Friday-night weekly workout.

A while back, a glitch in the save mode had me literally lose the entire first half of the game, as if I had never played it. I had to do some research on the Net, and find the built-in “cheat code” that allowed me to play all missions so I could reclaim my scores on those (there’s still one I haven’t re-done). Then my daughter lost a game save for one of her games, to much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and I decided something needed to be done. (More after the jump…)

Now understand the PS2 slimline has USB ports, so you’d assume you could just throw a flash drive into the thing and back-up your saves…but of course not, since that would mean people wouldn’t need to spend $30 for an 8MB (yes, MEGA BYTE, when 8 GIGI BYTE flash drives are available for around the same price) Sony-branded memory card. It isn’t that the machine couldn’t, it’s that it was specifically programmed not to handle any USB-based memory. The entire game is designed so everything you want to do with it requires a tithe to Sony. (Had Bill Gates thought of this, he would have engineered MS-DOS so no one could write a program in it without paying a fee, and the Apple // would be the dominant computer system.)

So I did some (stop me if you’ve heard this before) research into the system, and ways to back up game saves onto a flash drive. And that can be harder than you think, since when you walk into this world you are in a place with really intelligent children who couldn’t string together a coherent sentence if you held a gun to their head, with the “power” on the boards to kick, ban, and generally muck with users without challenge. Please understand I am talking about a minority, but it requires one to not only tread gingerly as not to bruise delicate egos in the formulative stages (think Star Trek’s “Charlie X”), but also quickly learn a new vocabulary where something like:

“…it might be more easy to upload the exploit-cd (iso/cue/bin) to the ps2-hd (connect ps2-hd to a free IDE-cable on your pc and use WinHIIP to copy the cd-image onto the ps2-hd). Then run the exploit offa the hd and it install inta the mc (faster than the whole network thing, less flexible tho’)”

…actually makes sense. Understand, there are articulate people in “the scene,” thank heavens, but some of the brightest are also close-to-incapable of actually explaining anything.

At any rate, there are some home-brew programs out there that will allow for backing up game saves, but they all require a swap disc or some other exploit to function. (English translations - “swap disc;” a hybrid disc made of, apparently, a legitimate PS1 game disc used as a bootstrap to load the software. Like I said, Sony worked really hard to lock down the Playstation so no one could do anything they didn’t approve of and receive payment for.) And I gotta tell you, I’m getting way too old to screw around with bent credit cards and other nonsense just to open the disc holder of the PS2 so I can swap discs without letting the machine know the door is open.

Then I read about an over-priced ($70) 32MB memory card with a single difference that makes it worth the premium. A built-in USB port. Yes, you heard right…a memory card with a built-in USB port.

So, if I understood the way this thing was designed, I could copy the game saves from the 16MB card we’re currently using over to the Memor32 using the PlayStation’s built-in browser, then bring the Memor32 over to my desk computer, connect it through USB, and copy the game saves onto the computer for safekeeping. Anything goes wrong with the copy on the card, a quick trip to the computer would allow me to restore said game save in no time.

I admit I put off buying the thing (it’s expensive when compared to other memory cards, and with all the fun stuff going on around here, i.e. a nine-year-old and Annie’s medical bills, we’re being a little careful on extravagances right now), but some “found-money” that coincidentally totaled $73 dollars and a quick discussion made us decide we should do this.

The first problem was…finding someone who sold the thing. There are dealers all over the world who market this memory card, but I couldn’t find one in this country. I don’t know why, whether Sony has them browbeaten, they aren’t interested, or what, but nuthin’. I found a place in Canada, http://modchips.ca that seemed to have a good reputation (FWIW, they proved it to me when I ordered the Memor32 on a Sunday, and they shipped the next morning), and we were off on an adventure.

The following Friday I received the package (shipped Monday, went through Canada, got hung in Customs, wound through the USPS, and still made it here in less than a week), and opened it up to find…the memory card and a cable. No software. At all.

A lesser man might have trembled, but I simply went to my computer, hit http://www.memor32.com/ (the home of the company selling the cards), downloaded the software suggested, and was off to the races…er…sorta. As usual, the instructions never match the real-world, so it took a little experimentation to properly install everything. Let me run through the steps that worked properly so future generations don’t need to experience my minor frustration (and please mentally update these instructions for later available versions of the software and drivers):

1. Take your Memor32 card, plug it into your PlayStation2, enter the browser, and allow the PlayStation to format the card. You can also copy anything from an existing card to this new card (I strongly urge you to put the Memor32 into slot #1, and your old card in slot #2 - more on this later.)
   

2. Download the Software; get SaveGameManager v1.2, along with the CDM Drivers from Future Technology Devices International Ltd.’s website.
   

3. Unpack the “CDM 2.04.06 WHQL Certified.zip” to a folder; suggest the Desktop, since you’re going to need to find it. The directions say, “run the installer,” but there isn’t an installer to run.
   

4. Connect the Memor32 card to a USB port on your computer. Windows will throw up the driver-needed wizard - tell it to look for the driver in the directory where you unpacked the drivers above. You’ll need to do this twice - just do it, trust me. It’s loading drivers that allow your computer to think it has a serial connection to the card…if it helps, think of the Memor32 card as a modem.
   

5. Install the SaveGameManager v1.2 - this does have an installer.
   

6. Run the SaveGameManager, and you’ll see the game saves you copied above. Feel free to save them all to your hard drive (they will end up, assuming defaults, at “C:\Program Files\Memor32\Ps2Saves” - it awkwardly does not allow you to choose the target directory, although you can “Export” game saves to a user-selected directory)

Seriously cool stuff here…the game saves are now stored on the hard drive, so if anything goes wrong, they can be restored easily. And future game saves, as well as updated ones, can just as easily be transfered routinely. No more wailing because the Katester needs to start all over at the beginning of one of her games!

But…and this is important now…there are some other major advantages to this particular memory card, advantages that require a trip to a less-well-lighted area of the Internet…

See, there’s this software called Memento. It was designed to be used as a “modchip,” one that deosn’t require soldering or swapping discs. This is important for those of us, like I said, too old to to be using bent credit cards to swap out discs, but is not only not the only use for this software, but not even (to me) the most important. Memento uses some interesting tricks (I am only beginning to understand how it works) to trick the PlayStation2 into allowing it to run.

Remember I mentioned that Sony locked-down the game console really well? Well, those kids that do swap disk and other exploits have also created some self-designed software…problem is, for unmodded (that is, unaltered) systems, it was hitherto impossible to actually run these applications. Some of them are pretty cool. One of them I have fallen in love with - SMS.

SMS is a media player for a modded PlayStation2. Doesn’t sound like this would be a threat to Sony’s revenue stream, what with the PlayStation2 already playing DVDs and all, but the company appears more interested in complete control, so allowing a mere user to install a media player is simply out-of-the-question. Until you understand the power of the Memento BOOT folder, that is. By changing the name of the SMS .elf file (an .elf is to the PS2 as an .exe is to Windows) to, in my case, BOOT2.ELF, and then installing it into the BOOT directory of the Memor32 card (easily accomplished; create the folder in “C:\Program Files\Memor32\Ps2Saves” and after populating transfer it to the Memor32 card with SaveGameManager), the power is released. By holding the R2 shoulder button down when starting the PS2, the machine immediately runs SMS. And now things get really cool…

All I have to do is copy video files from my computer (it handles downloaded or recorded .avi files, recorded .mpg files from my Hauppauge tuner card, and frankly everything else I’ve thrown at it excepting Flash video) onto a flash drive, plug it into the PlayStation2, and SMS instantly recognizes it. The cool thing here is I can play video all day and all night with no moving parts - no wear-and-tear on the DVD motors, no tape to tear, no moving parts whatsoever.

I’m sorry, I think that is seriously cool.

Of course, the Memento software also allows for video game backups, something normally impossible without taking your machine apart and soldering in a modification chip. I mentioned I play 24: The Game almost every Friday night for a little while, and that disc is starting to show its age. But now I can, and have, made a legal backup of the disc that I use instead of the original…if I scratch or otherwise hurt the copy, I can make another from the original disc, now stored safely in the video cabinet. And, I won’t be losing any more game saves from the card, since every few days I hook the Memor32 up to my computer and back up the saves.

I realize this card was originally designed for the elite (l33t in scene parlance) gamer, one who swaps discs and trades games, but let me tell you, this old guy has found it well worth the money, even at almost twice what I spent for the used Playstation2 in the first place. And it’s going to come in seriously handy while Annie’s recuperating next month…I can load bunches of television and old films on an 8Gig flash drive, give her the wireless controller, and she can watch whatever she wants.