GrimDoomer recently released a Beta version of a heavily updated and more streamlined version Open PS2 Loader (OPL).
If you guessed PS2 you were correct. I now have fully working LBA48 support in ps2sdk which allows for HDDs > 2TB in size (up to 128 PB w/exFAT), and multi-partition support. Still lots of testing to do but I now have fully usable 16 TB HDD in my PS2 https://t.co/mS8U0WepaD pic.twitter.com/T0NFRgUHUd
— Ryan M (@Grimdoomer) February 28, 2023
GrimDoomer had 2 goals when coding this new update. The first was to be able to use any size hard drive in the PS2, and second was to make the process of adding games to that hard drive a simpler process. He succeeded in accomplishing both those goals.
Without boring you with the technical details, GrimDoomer has enabled the use of ExFAT formatted hard drives with OPL which wasn’t possible before. And with this new capability, ExFAT formatted drives allows us to use capacities up to a theoretical limit of 144 PetaBytes. Drives of that size do not exits, but this near limitless upper bound means we can use any commercially available hard drive inside the PS2. In my video I use a 16TB drive, but there are larger 20TB drive available that will work as well.
Additionally, we are also now able to simply drag and drop game ISO files to the hard drive and do not need to rely on third party applications for that process. This is quite frankly just as exciting, if not more, than the ability to use any size hard drive. Prior to this update, you needed to utilize third party apps which can be a bit confusing to use and not the most user friendly. The ability to drag and drop the ISO files directly onto the hard drive is something that many folks will be able to do since it’s very intuitive.
Now one thing I would like to mention during my personal experience with this update has to do with the method of connecting the hard drive to my PC. I bought a Sabrent 3.5 inch hard drive enclosure that cause many issues with this update. Long story short, this enclosure was making the every hard drive that I tested use 4k sectors. OPL is incompatible with 4k sector sizes and instead needs the hard drive to be set to a 512 sector size. So definitely do not purchase that hard drive enclosure. What I did instead was connect the hard drive directly to a SATA port on my PC’s motherboard and didn’t have any issues using that method.
To test out this beta version of OPL check out the video linked above for the process. The beta can be downloaded from GrimDoomer’s GitHub and more information about this can be found on his post on PSX-Place.
