Hello all,

I have just recently gotten a PS2 (SCPH-50001) with a network adapter. I have been modding my personal Xboxes for a while and enjoy playing games from the hard drive, so naturally I thought it would be nice to do the same thing with this PS2.

DANG, it seems to be a lot more complicated than the Xbox mods are.

I guess what I want to be able to do is run the thing just like my Xboxes. In other words, just boot up to a dashboard without having any disc in the drive and select from the menu what game I would like to play.

I have heard about HDAdvance, but from what I understand you must leave the disc in the drive all the time for this to work. If the disc was easy to copy and the PS2 would read the copy, this wouldn't be too bad (I can just see me accidentally hitting the eject button and having it spin out onto the floor), but something tells me it wouldn't be that simple.

So from what I have gathered on these forums I would be better off with a modchip to accomplish these goals. I can solder fairly well, but there seems to be a lot more wires involved on these PS2 machines than current Xbox chip installs.

So that brings me back to my main question: Are there any tutorials detailing exactly how to set up a hdd and copy games to it? What basic modchip would be good for accomplishing this? Or are new folks to the PS2 mod scene better off with the HDAdvance approach?

Many thanks for any/all advice.

Hoyt