Play import games without ripping to ISO

[terminater78]

Im not sure if this is where I would post this or not but I was wondering if there is a way for me to play my imported games from Japan without ripping to ISO format and then patching them with ESR disc patcher. I have been searching around google and other forums and have come across nothing except the possibility of using Swap Magic. I currently have the free mcboot installed and all the stuff that came with in the newbie pack.

[dlanor]

Im not sure if this is where I would post this or not but I was wondering if there is a way for me to play my imported games from Japan without ripping to ISO format and then patching them with ESR disc patcher. I have been searching around google and other forums and have come across nothing except the possibility of using Swap Magic.

If you want to play the games from a physical disc, then the only known non-modchip ways are to either use ESR with burned backups or to use disc-swapping like with Swap Magic.

Using any pure software method to make the PS2 'accept' an original disc from another region is simply not possible, since the region checking is not done by PS2 software. It is done by unchangeable firmware in the CDVD drive, and there is NOTHING we can do to change that.

All we can do is to circumvent this region checking by either of two methods:

1: ESR patching tricks the CDVD drive into 'believing' that a backup disc is a DVD-Video movie, for which it is not the CDVD drive's responsibility to check anything else.

2: Disc swapping tricks the CDVD drive into 'believing' that a region and validity check made for the pre-swap disc is still valid after replacing that disc with another one.

I currently have the free mcboot installed and all the stuff that came with in the newbie pack.

Assuming that you did your install recently, this means that you should have OPL (== Open PS2 Loader).
And if your FMCB install is too old to have that, it is still quite simple to add OPL to an existing FMCB setup.

With OPL you can run both backup and out-of-region games from various non-disc media.
But doing so does require you to somehow rip the disc content for storage on those media.

So I'm afraid we have no solutions that satisfy the conditions you stipulated in your post.

Best regards: dlanor