PS2 Classics Manager received an important update which I would like to tell you about.
But first, answers to common questions posted by you in the comments. First question – which firmware PS2 Classics runs best on? Personally, I use Rebug, and the author of PS2 Classics – Rogero 4.40. It was finally fixed to address reactpsn issues. So now you have a couple firmwares to choose from. Next question – why does PS2 game run in fullscreen mode in my videos? The answer is simple – the games themselves are of course 480p and 4:3 aspect, as PS2 games should be. The magic is done by my TV, which automatically stretches the image to fit best in 16:9 screen. So, if you want PS2 Classics full-screen, don’t forget about your display features. So, with that said, let’s proceed to the new PS2 Classics Manager release. It has two interesting features. The first one is active Memory Card decryption. To understand it, you should remember two savedata files which each PS2 game has and that should be loaded each time you change a PS2 title. I showed that in previous videos about PS2 Classics. So, these files are encrypted and that’s the way PS2 Classics uses them. However, save games in the XMB are decrypted, since that’s how XMB expect them to be. So, if you want to freely copy your savegames through XMB, you have to create two memory cards and name them MC1 and MC2 respectively. Then you can use PS2 Classics Manager memory card export feature to link those encrypted savedata files in the placeholder with decrypted memory cards in XMB. Since I don’t need this feature, that’s all I got to say about it. But I got much more to say about the second advertised feature – encryption of iso PS2 backups right on your PS3. That means intermediate conversion on you computer is not required anymore. Let’s try that. Uninstall old version of PS2 Classic Manager, making sure you have all necessary backups. Download two files – version 1.01 pkg, and update to 1.02. Put it on a FAT32 driver. I also created a PS2ISO folder, and put a PS2 game iso inside it, in this case – GTA Vice City Stories. One more time – you don’t have to convert it to iso.bin.enc anymore. Install the software, Now open PS2 Classics Manager. It will show a warning that since we didn’t create the MC1 and MC2 PS2 memory cards in XMB, the savedata export feature will not be available. Nothing to worry about. Go to Game list only to find our ISO file is not there. It turns out you have to press shoulder buttons on the gamepad until the external HDD game list appears. Select the game and press triangle. In the next menu there is an interesting feature to import splitted files. Since my game image is less than 4Gb, I don’t need so we just press Encrypt and press OK. The console will start to convert your iso file to iso.bin.enc. This is quite time consuming process, in my case it took about 15 minutes. All necessary directories and files will be created automatically. After the process is complete, the converted game will appear in the internal HDD game list. You can’t play from external drive, at least for now. Activate the game and run Placeholder. As you can see, nothing changed, previously activated game has loaded – in this case, Liberty City Stories. This is probably because I activated it using multiman, not PS2 Classics Manager. So launch multiman and activate the freshly converted game from there. Run Placeholder. This time Vice City Stories is launched, as expected. So, you really don’t need to convert anything on the PC anymore.