Can FMCB Work on, and be Installed From a PSX?

[BradicaL]

I have been searching for a PlayStation X. What is the average price you guys pay for them? I want the 250GB model.

[xpa12]

Well mine cost £250 but was free postage, which ended up costing the seller £80! but i had to pay £50 customs fee's and buy a step down (or up, cant remember) transformer, which was £35.

Think there are a few on ebay, but not sure what they are going for.

[BradicaL]

Yea I was looking on ebay and there is a lot ranging from $300 to $800 Canadian. Can you upgrade hard drive eeasily? Or is firmware in the HDD?

[xpa12]

I've not had the unit long, however i read a thread on the HDD and it didnt appear easy to upgrade, there was a guy who cloned his HDD which worked fine, but he then tried to expand the partition and it just didnt work. Plus there was an issue with initial spin times, which meant some HDD brand/models would not work regardless.

Its not really like you can use the TV tuner properly because i'm pretty sure its setup for Japanese signal, and not digital. So 250gb would be fine for me

Wish I could read japanese, as i cant understand most of the menu settings!

[BradicaL]

I know lots of Japanese people. I will get them to see if there is engligh setting when I get mine.

[xpa12]

I know for certain that there is no english setting, sorry! But knowing people who know Japanese is awesome!

DESR-5xxxx do not work with the PSP link, which the newer DESR-7xxxx systems do, which i did not know when i bought mine - just in case you decide to go for it and get one.

[dlanor]

Right, after having to pay $25 shipping and then £15 customs, I finally have Swapmagic 3.8 Coder.

The CD version does not boot, I don't know if its my lens or the disk, but i'm not all that bothered because the DVD version works!

Good. I wasn't sure if it would due to the differences between such a PSX and normal PS2 consoles, so it is very good to have this confirmed.

I copied the boot.elf into the memory card, renamed to 'swapmagic.elf' as suggested by dlanor (Thanks!) and presto, works fine! So now i can boot ELF files on my PSX!

That is great, but in future if you describe this again, please use the correct spelling with all capital letters, so that no one who reads it is misled.

After booting Swapmagic for 4 or 5 times in a row (just to test things), the PSX decided it would not boot from USB or MC, or even the disk, and goes straight back to the dashboard.
A simple restart of the console fixes this problem though.

That's a bit weird, but still harmless, if a simple power-cycling corrects it.

However I cannot get ESR to play my patched disks, as it just gives a pink screen? Could this be the games themselves, or prehaps the patch program that I used? I used 'ESR disc patcher GUI v0.24a' and tried FFX PAL and FFXII NTSC-USA.

Actually this could be due to a problem with disc type detection, and recognition of the ESR patch. Some other users have reported such a problem as frequently affecting their consoles when booting with SwapMagic, and just recently I saw it for the first time on my own v18 console. (But then the problem disappeared again.)

I'm not sure what causes it, but apparently the checking of the ESR patch sector fails occasionally so that both uLE and ESR consider the disc to be a DVD-Video movie disc.

You can check this for yourself when running uLE configured with "Disc Control: ON", as each disc inserted then gets its type displayed in the top left corner in main menu mode.

Normally the indication for an ESR disc should be "Stop Disc == ESR DVD (off)" which says that the disc is recognized as having the ESR patch, but the ESR driver is currently not active, so the real disc content can not be read by the uLE FileBrowser. It is in this state that you could use the "MISC/PS2Disc" command of uLE to launch the game, with automatic invocation of ESR.

If you instead run the 'mcard' variant of ESR, or the GUI variant using its "Launch App" command, you will come back to uLE with a different indication of "Stop Disc == ESR DVD (on)", meaning that the disc is still recognized and that the ESR driver is now active, so that the real game content can be inspected in the uLE FileBrowser.

But when the sensor bug strikes you will only get the indication "Stop Disc == DVD Video" with ESR driver off, or "Stop Disc == PS2 DVD" with ESR driver on. And for both those cases it will be impossible to launch the game or for uLE to read game content.

I am not sure if this is what is happening to you, but if you make a few tests with uLE as described above, you should be able to see if my descriptions match your problem.

If so, then it is possible that some patch to both ESR and the checkesr modules of uLE and FMCB may be needed, to fix this problem for you and others that boot with SM3Coder.

In any case, such problems will definitely not affect your ability to run backups from other media using Open PS2 Loader. And for an SM3Coder-booted console that is really the best choice anyway, as you can then leave the SM3Coder disc in the tray at all times, even when playing a game. This is what I do with my v18 console.

Also does FMCB have an ELF file that loads into the main menu (as in when it is used on normal consoles) as i cannot seem to locate one which would boot in uLE.

The real FMCB menu is not available as any elf, and it can only be invoked when properly installed to your console by the FMCB installer, which is not the case on your console, if I've understood you correctly.

On systems where it is installed we can invoke it in various ways, such as by using the uLE command "MISC/PS2Browser". But where FMCB is not installed this will only open the normal Sony menu, without any custom additions.

HDL says "incompatible ps2 version", but all the other apps boot fine

Who needs HDL anyway, when you have OPL, though I'm unsure if you'll be able to use it for IDE HDD (it is very similar to HDL in that usage, and v0.6 did not yet have any IDE support anyway). But you should be able to use it with USB and LAN.

Best regards: dlanor

[indrora]

This...
is...
awesome!

[unclejun]

xpa12, have you tried running the FMCB installer on the PSX?

[noetikos]

xpa12, have you tried running the FMCB installer on the PSX?

from the following,

I copied the boot.elf into the memory card, renamed to 'swapmagic.elf' as suggested by dlanor and presto, works fine! So now i can boot ELF files on my PSX!

After booting Swapmagic for 4 or 5 times in a row (just to test things), the PSX decided it would not boot from USB or MC, or even the disk, and goes straight back to the dashboard.
A simple restart of the console fixes this problem though.

indrora was able to copy over the renamed swapmagic.elf which was formerly named boot.elf (uLE or FMCB.elf ??) to his mc by using sm 3.8 coder but the psx was unable to load any elfs via usb, mc, or even the by the disc.

"if" he's unable to boot elfs via swap magic (it is the only method to run hombrew on his PSX) then its somewhat uncertain of the possibility to run the fmcb installer.

it will hard to see if a homebrew dev would want to spend his resources to get a PSX to hack and to modify the current version of FMCB (and other PS2 hombrew). who knows....