A few newbie questions about SMB game installation...

[evilpaul]

I've got a PC with a pretty good amount of storage, so I decided to rip all my PSX games to BIN/CUE so I could play them on it a while ago. Since the single CDs take next to no time to decompress from 7z files I zipped them all up and realized I still had a TON of space left.

So, I ripped all my PS2 games.

I can't play them on my sad Athlon XP CPU via emulator (no SSE2/SSE3/SSSE3/etc), but I figure I'll upgrade to something modern someday. I've got a PS2 fat (US launch day!) that can barely read discs anymore, so when I happened upon info about Free MC Boot I was quite intrigued and managed to install it to my MC.

So, the "Holy Grail" of what I'd like to be able to do is play PS2 games that are ripped to my PC's HDD over my network, play FFXI from my PS2's Official Sony HDD (it's sad, I know), and play PSX games from my PC with ePSXe (which is another topic entirely and which I won't bother people with since I already can).

But the SMB support is something that still has me confused and I've been looking for info on it for a bit now. I've got games installed to a 120GB Seagate HDD that I've been using with HDL. But that can't fit all of my games, and I'm dumb so I can't get HDL Dump to work, so physically swapping HDDs (and turning off my PC to plug it in) sucks.

So, let me start with my dumb questions... Do I need to use an actual partition on my PC that's SMB shared to host games on my PS2? The iso2usbld.exe sounds like it will work inside directories on existing partitions, but I'm a little hesistant to just write up a batch file pointing it at my storage drive not knowing how it actually works. I can make a VHD file on that drive and mount it in Windows 7 as a partition if needs be, but I don't want to lose/restore a buttload of stuff not knowing what I'm doing.

My other question, is could I just decompress my PS2 games and share them via SMB as .ISOs and use them that way? (I really don't know how the whole USB Extreme format thing works.)

[nemesis01]

Sharing via SMB does not require the use of a partition, any old folder will do and sharing .ISO images will not work (not in any official builds anyway as of yet) so use iso2usbld or USBUtil to install the games into whatever folder you choose.