uLaunchELF opening emulators written to DVD or CD?

[leoekellvy]

I am wanting to put on my PS2 Slim with chip matrix uLaunchELF to run emulators for SNES, NES, MEGA, MASTER and Atari, but I've been reading on some sites than the PS2 Slim is a bit tricky to accept some USB Drives, so I wonder if If I were to save games on DVD or CD, uLaunchELF would run the emulators?

[dlanor]

I am wanting to put on my PS2 Slim with chip matrix uLaunchELF to run emulators for SNES, NES, MEGA, MASTER and Atari,

This is a common purpose for which many use uLE on these consoles, mostly with USB as the main storage medium for the emulator ROMs and other files as well (gamesaves, snapshots, savestates).

but I've been reading on some sites than the PS2 Slim is a bit tricky to accept some USB Drives,

That is total nonsense. All PS2 consoles have less general USB drive compatibility than a modern Windows PC has, but this is a property common to all PS2 models and not in any way specific to the slim models.

It is true that the slim models have a slightly different internal hardware design for the USB interface, and some commercial programs (such as CodeBreaker) have device drivers that can not cope with this difference. The same also goes for PS2 Linux, since it relies on Linux device drivers for USB that were designed in a way specific to the old hardware, causing them to work badly with the new USB interface on the newer slim PSTwo models. But those problems are 100% due to lack of proper adaption to the new hardware in all those device drivers.

The normal PS2 homebrew device drivers do not have any such problem, so normal PS2 homebrews work equally well on all PS2 and PSTwo models, and if a USB drive is compatible to any such model (when using such drivers), then it has the same compatibility to all the other models too.

Some older device driver versions did have quite bad rate of compatibility to modern USB drives, but the current drivers are really quite good in this. Nearly all my USB drives work fine with these drivers. Except one which has a 'Floppy emulation' partition, which makes it fail with all PS2 device drivers. (and that partition is impossible to 'unformat' or hide in any way.) But that is clearly an abnormal USB drive. Similar failure is also certain for any USB drive which refuses to accept standard FAT32 formatting. And if any PC 'file-packing' format is used then this must be removed before the drive can be used with PS2 homebrews (this includes the 'U3' packing system included with many SanDisk drives).

so I wonder if If I were to save games on DVD or CD, uLaunchELF would run the emulators?

If you have ROM files stored on such CD/DVD discs, then uLE will be able to load those ROM files from those discs, provided only that your modchip never goes to 'sleep' and stops making the bios accept burned discs as if they were pressed. Many Matrix chips have an idiotic 'auto-sleep' feature which ruins this functionality (to prevent modchip detection by some games).

I strongly recommend using USB drives rather than burned discs, having used both successfully myself both with and without modchips (using FMCB+ESR on mod-free consoles to boot DVD-R discs).

Best regards: dlanor