Tito from Macho Nacho Productions recently released a video showcasing software for the PlayStation 2 that replaces the boot OS with one modeled off the Japanese-only PlayStation Broadband Navigator (PSBBN) menu. This has a really nice looking menu for launching games from your hard drive and is even compatible with POPStarter, however installation requires Linux and it doesn’t have some of the features of the standard FreeMcBoot / Open PS2 Loader. Check out the video for the details with more thoughts below the links:
PSBBN: https://github.com/CosmicScale/PSBBN-Definitive-English-Patch
Support the Dev: https://ko-fi.com/cosmicscale
First, I have to praise CosmicScale’s awesome work – This full translation, along with the ability to run games from your PS2’s HDD via a really nice menu is a huge accomplishment. There’s also a ton of cool features, like setting up a dedicated partition for emulated PS1 games (POPS), a MiniDisc music transfer option, access to translated versions of the old PSBBN software and a bunch more cool stuff.
All that awesomeness is enough to suggest anyone who’s a PS2 fan watch Tito’s video, but there are a few things to point out. First, as Tito shows, this needs to be installed via Linux. Tito shows how to install Linux on a Windows PC to complete the installation, but there’s got to be an easier way. How about creating a lite Linux boot from a USB stick and having everything via a simple user interface like RetroNAS? I guess that might be more complicated for some people, but whenever I hear the “L” word, I expect lots of typing in the command line…and that’s exactly what this requires. Maybe someone else in the community can step up and help build an easy installer? That said, after installation, everything seems to run really smoothly, so in the long run, it’s a small hurdle to jump over.
Also, for me personally, I mostly launch PS2 games via RetroNAS over my home network. While you can just launch OpenPS2 Loader from PSBBN, it’s menu doesn’t support network loading at the moment – So if your setup is the opposite of mine and you mostly load games from your PS2 HDD and only occasionally load from the network, it’s a great choice. Also, you should still be able to launch games from a MemCardPro, however I imagine it works the same as the original PS2 boot software: The memory card would boot into FMB, bypassing the new software altogether. Which is totally fine, but it would be cool if that integration was eventually added as well.
So, my first impressions of CosmicScale’s PSBBN translation / upgrade is it looks awesome and it’ll probably be what I eventually load on my PS2, however I’ll stick with my usual setup for now, as it’s already working pretty perfectly. I’ll absolutely be keeping an eye on PSBBN and am following CosmicScale for updates!
