How to get the MX4SIO working on your PS2 with FMCB v1.996?

#MX4SIO #PS2 #FMCB1996

I am a big fan of solid state storage solutions for the ageing consoles and comoputer systems us retro computing and gaming enthusiasts still like to use to this day. And the PS2’s optical drive isn’t the best and lots of units won’t read optical media anymore unless you refurbish the optical drive. But even with a dead optical drivethis allows you to still play games on the PS2!

For quite some time now it was possible to run games from an IDE/SATA HD using a network adaptor. HDLoader was a bootable PS2 disc that allowed unmodified regular PS2s to install games to the HD. And with a proper network adapter you can also run games from a NAS – but you needed to run a different kind of software for that: FreeMcBoot and OPENPS2Loader – the latter replaced the functionality of HDLoader and expends on it. You can also use an USB stick with games, but as the PS2 only uses USB 1.x that option really is very slow for actual PS2 games.

A solution that works on both FAT and SLIM PS2s with or without network adapters in place is a rather nifty SD card interface built into a PS2 memory card form factor called the MX4SIO that allows you to run software off an SD card with a special versions of FreeMcBoot and OPENPS2Load. This is much faster than using OPENPS2Load with USB with performance is about on par with using IDE or NAS with the PS2. FMV works and loading times are quite normal.

It works with unmodified PS2 systems, but you need to make sure to put the units in the correct PS2 memory slots. Excellent for those PS2 Slims – although there me be a version of the Slim where FCMBoot doesn’t seem to want to work.