What can I do with a 9000X model?

[*~*]

Where I live, I'm limited to buying a shiny new 9000X Slim model or a piss-stained, plastic-baggied pre-owned pre-9000X model from EB Games.

Personally, I'd really prefer a brand new Slim PS2, and one without the power brick. I'm not looking to chip it either. Are Swap Magic Discs the only way to go? Can SMD's boot homebrew?

[dlanor]

Where I live, I'm limited to buying a shiny new 9000X Slim model or a piss-stained, plastic-baggied pre-owned pre-9000X model from EB Games.

Personally, I'd really prefer a brand new Slim PS2, and one without the power brick. I'm not looking to chip it either. Are Swap Magic Discs the only way to go? Can SMD's boot homebrew?

SwapMagic can boot homebrew, and has special support for doing so either from a USB drive or from a normal PS2 MC, without having to do any destructive 'disc swapping'.

I have an SCPH-90004 console myself, with datecode 9C and bios v2.30 which makes FMCB use impossible. On this console I use a SwapMagicCoder v3.8 disc to boot uLaunchELF (aka: uLE) from MC, and then use uLE to launch any other homebrews I need, including ESR for the cases where I want to run a game in the form of a burned DVD-R disc (still without destructive swapping, thanks to using ESR instead).

But the most convenient way of running backup games now is to use "Open PS2 Loader" to run them either from a USB drive or from a networked PC, accessing the virtual disc files over LAN.

All of this and much more can be done with the very latest PS2 model, without using either FMCB or modchips, relying on SwapMagic only for the initial boot, but on uLE and other homebrews for everything else.

Still, there are some things for which an older console is better, such as using them with CodeBreaker for example. On the slim consoles from SCPH-750xx and later that became impractical, as CodeBreaker will freeze if any USB device is connected on those models, and for the latest SCPH-900xx model it is impossible to use CodeBreaker at all (it just won't work).

Best regards: dlanor