My impressions of the HDAdvance
(I know there's a topic about this already, but it's more to do with the HD Loader (which is practically the same thing) and a little more with were to get it and whatnot.)
A while back my girlfriend and I bought the HDAdvance discs because the thought of having our Playstation library on a hard drive was very appealing. I was also interested because I still get annoyed at long load times (Stuntman, I'm looking at you!) Plus, I love weird gray market tech type things.
Having got our discs, we realized we didn't have a spare hard drive sitting
around, so the HDAdvance just gathered dust for a while. Long story short, recently I managed to get an old 60GB IBM Deskstar from a friend in exchange for some work on his computer, and after a trip to Gamestop to buy a used Network Adapter (also required to use the HDA,) I was finally ready to go.
In the package you get two discs and a Xeroxed sheet of cryptic instructions in Engrish and Japanese. For the most part, the instructions aren't necessary, but there is one feature they completely left out that is kind of important. I'll get to that later. One disc is for loading CDs, the other for DVDs. From the bottom, either could be confused for a Swap Magic disc, as they have the same weird bands which I'm assuming is why an un-modded PS2 will read them.
After you get your hard drive installed, you fire up the PS2 with one of the HDA discs in and it ask if you want to format the drive. Once the drive is
formatted, you are on the main screen. On the left is the space where your games will be listed. The right corner shows the following options: Run, Convert, Delete and Rename.
Run should be pretty self explanatory. When you have games loaded, you highlight the game and then choose run (or you can just select it and hit X.) Delete, of course, removes a game from the drive and Rename allows you to rename it. Convert is what you choose to load the game and it's fairly straightforward.
The one thing to keep in mind, and here's the real reason for the two different discs, is if you are loading imports, you're still going to need a flip top or mod chip. For regular games, you can just hit the button for the drawer and because the PS2 reads the new TOC, it doesn't matter which HDA disc you start out with. For imports, you're going to have to swap them out, so if you're ripping a DVD game, be sure you loaded the HDA DVD disc.
Anyway, that's the basic rundown of what it's all about. It's really pretty easy to use and for the most part it works well. With something like this that is doing something the hardware and software designers clearly did not intend, it's kind of impressive just to see the thing working at all.
However, there are a few problems. First of all, loading games is a pretty slow process. This is probably due to hardware limitations in the PS2 or Network Adapter. Fortunately, you can hook your PS2 hard drive up to your computer and use a program like HDL_dump or WinHIIP to transfer your games much faster (and you can use this method for imports if you have no way to load them on your PS2.)
If you want to load a dual-layer DVD game such as Gran Turismo 4, you're going to have to use the PC loading method because HDA doesn't read the second layer. You also may have to load some other games via the PC as they seem to be compatible with the loader, but for some reason they won't load from the PS2 drive.
The back of the packaging claims 95% game compatibility, but it seems lower than that. Out of my collection of 20-some-odd games, I found two that flat out won't work, one that I had to load off the PC and patch to run properly, one that's missing music and another that locks up for no apparent reason. The games that work, do work beautifully and usually feature a slight improvement in load times.
That something important not mentioned in the manual may help compatibility on some games. It is a modes menu that can be accessed by highlighting a game and pressing select. For the record, here is what the modes supposedly do (I found this on another board):
And that brings me to completely unsuprizing point. Customer support on this thing is non-existant. Fortunately, there's a sizeable number of users out there with websites, message boards and game compatibility lists. Apparently HDAdvance is nearly the same as HD Loader, so information for one applys to the other.mode 1 = slower hdd access
mode 2 = enable dvd9 flattened to dvd5 support
mode 3 = flush hdloader from ps2 memory upon loading game.
Overall, I'm digging the HDAdvance. It's pretty cool to have my PS2 collection all on a hard drive, well, the games that work at least, saving wear and tear on the PS2 and the games. I also appreciate the shorter loading times and not having to swap discs to play imports. I'm hoping that with the next-gen gaming machines, someone might get smart and make this an official, and more compatible, feature because even though it's not perfect, the HDADvance is still a pretty beautiful thing.
Reply With Quote
