Solution To The Ps2 Limitation Hard Drive Issue

If they made a PS3 edition most of this ps2 garbage would go out the window. By this time, most of those who hold on to their ps2 is because they stick with sony, which for the most part, means they probably own a ps3 as well, and if money is or was an issue, they probably own a slim (myself as an example), which cannot play FFXI at the moment.

the game's engine is based on the ps2, the game would require a new engine (which isn't going to happen, unfortunately) so until this changes whether or not they "support" the ps2 nothing will change for the people who use the other versions of the game.

the ps3 and 360 would then become an issue, as their hard drive partition space is actually smaller than the ps2's, hilariously enough.

It would be a simpler fix though for those who want more content to actually increase the partition size, also to clean up the game code itself but hey we could talk about it all we want SE will do what they want.

PS2 has more than an 80gb hardrive? cuz my PS3 has that...if PS2 had that much room there wouldn't be an issue..

Need to get me one of them 250GB PS2's

Yeah, Dreamcast is pretty much amazing. You could rig it(with only a boot cd) to play roms like a year into its release. Portable awesomeness if you don't own a laptop.

edited my post: meant partition space, and yeah the partition for XI on the ps3 and 360 is smaller than the ps2'd HDD...

check edit: and it still isn't the issue

idk what partition space refers to then..i dont own a 360, and idk what that means in relation to a PS3

it's a computer term, you can have multiple partitions on one hard drive, it basically seperates the drive into multiple parts.

the partition allowed for XI is about 10gb, the ps2's hdd size is 40gb

it's about the same for the other two systems as well, the partition anyway...

if they were to drop one console to "fix" the issue they'd have to drop them all, it's not a real solution.

It would be a better idea to clean up the game code, which they can do from their end and not have to worry about legal issues regarding partition space. Granted that alone wouldn't free up much space, however it would improve the game for everyone, less lag, glitches etc.

If they did something like compress the parts of the game on your drive when they aren't needed anymore like storyline progression you don't need access to those old c/s's anymore on the fly, they should be super compressed, the only time they'd be needed again is if replaying them, which it would slow it down then.

On another note: speaking of c/s's I wish they'd allow one to skip the stupid avatar c/s's it's annoying as balls.

I have a 250gb hdd on my xbox so not sure what you're talking about

Unfortunately for your rather confident attitude, you are wrong.

This.

As for the OP, no.

because you are ignorant of what the word "partition" means

school yourself:

wiki on partitions

(edit: I need to learn to not post from my gf's computer...)

Not really since I was talking about the size of the actual hard drive size. School yourself. I have a Master's in computer science, Microsoft certified with my own shop. So do me a favor before you go running off at the mouth know your facts. I can expand my FFXI partition to take up my entire 250 gigabyte hard drive if I so desire. Lol at people trying to be computer savvy!!

As far as I know SE only has legal rights to use 10gigs of your hard drive or the ps2/3 one regardless of how much space it has. If they could use all the space they wanted then this aspect wouldn't be an issue since there is still over 20gigs on the PS2 HDD.

I don't know what SE can or cannot use but you can easily expand if you would like.

I don't really care what you SAY you have as it's irrelevant as you're obviously too ignorant to understand the basics of what a partition is and that as long as SE can't increase the size of it the actual size of your hard drive (above that size) is irrelevant.

lol@people talking about stuff they know nothing about.

They need to offer the game for PS3, as a download or disc for PS3. Then I would drop playing on PS2 most likely.

They can't port it to PS3 unless they revamp the game and up the native resolution of the game (480p currently) would need to be increased to 720p for Sony to give it the thumbs up, that's why whenever you see a game being ported to the PS3 it's been remade in HD.

PS2 is a MIPS based system (an custom Toshiba made R5900@295mhz core as CPU and an R3000@37mhz as sub CPU) and the PS3 is based on IBM Power PC (The CELL BE is a IBM Power PC plus *EIGHT* slave high performance Toshiba CPUs called SPE) and while both systems DO RELY ON RENDERING GRAHPICS using their CPUs, the PS3 has something that is closer to a REAL PC GPU (Reality Synthesizer, which is based on a Geforce 7 GPU) than an "slightly smart but blazing fast" frame buffer controller which can do some 3D to 2D conversion (PS Graphics Synthesizer chip).

What this mean ? Complete rewrite of the game source code would be required for porting it to a new platform.

This might be too tough of a nut for Square-Enix to crack. -_-;

i always thought the rsx chip was based off the 8 series nvidia gpu's, since it has cuda capabilities. hence the reason it can run folding@home and used to be able to run gpugrid, both of which require atleast an 8 series card.

I'm pretty sure Folding@Home runs on the PS3's CPU. The RSX chip was supposed to be similar to a Geforce 7950 GT if I recall correctly.

And the PS2 HDD limitations aren't physical space related...the thing is mostly empty.

Read above.

I have friends who use it on their PS3, as they have original models that played PS2 disc.

I have heard a lot of people say they would be intrested in this kind of thing. That they wished that when 14 came out, it was 11, but with new graphics, new expansions, new jobs, races etc. But for PC only. Giving players the option of starting anew, or transfering there character over to the re-done game. It would be a hell lot of work but it would sure put a bunch of new life into this tired game.

Its not a bad idea, its just not one that will ever happen.

I have used a PS3 to play the PS2 version of FFXI myself. The only things I have to say about it on a PS3:

You can play it on any resolution the PS3 supports, because it will upscale the video (transparently) so the PS2 game does not even know what is happening...

The PS2 sound hardware is emulated and poorly, at that. So the sound SUCKS if you use headphones. If you play with the TV speakers you can't really tell the sound is off besides some odd/off sound effects.

It's exactly the same thing as playing on a real PS2, save the two minor details I mentioned above.

To simplify the HDD doesn't belong to SE, think of it as renting public storage and SE is the person renting the space and the HDD is the storage building. It doesn't matter that the spaces next to their block are empty, they still can't use them with out renting it.

I play on a PS2 and the thing that caused the issue last year, was they never OVERWROTE the old content with updated content/patches, they would simply mark it as "old crap don't use" and download a new file. Well that ended up filling the HDD partition after a while, if you did all the updates live over the years.

On the PS2 FFXI was PRE-INSTALLED on the HDD, so I could not wipe and re-install, since all of us had no original disks. Luckily, they made a fix and now here we are again. The complete version to date in a PS2 from a fresh install seems to be only a cpl of gig. I think it is more internal machine code that is the limiting factor.

I am curious, did they release the numbers of how many ppl play on PS2 from the platform survey a couple of months ago?

I don't really recall as to what they said caused the issue, but I never had the issue and I've never reinstalled my ps2 version. Didn't have trouble with the PS2 or PS2 on PS3 update.

I have all my original discs, only the 360 ones aren't all usable since the thing likes to eat discs, so that's only your fault.

The limiting factor is the partition size and the game engine being based on the PS2, not the ps2 itself. It would require an entire recoding of the engine from scratch to upgrade past this limitation and quite frankly it's probably not going to happen. (however with the upgrade of X it may be possible to an extent).

No and why would they? they can easily tell who plays on what, the survey was kind of a joke really.

It was something to do with being unable to defragment the ps2 hard drive but can't remember all the details.

If you format and install from the discs, it will install about eight and a half gigabytes of data on a 10GB chunk. Then it will download almost a gigabyte from the server, which varies on the kind of disc you use to install. If for example you use one of the collection discs it will want to download something around 15k files which is about two gigs of data. The collection discs come with the bare minimum from each expansion.

SE did a big public disservice not explaining correctly the problem they had with the updater.

It boils down to the fact that they used to download ALL the update files with a different name (like the example below)

File to be updated:
dancer.enc (grahpic engine for the character creation screen)

Files on the harddrive after update is downloaded:
dancer.enc
dancer.enc.tmp2

In the last phase of the install the POL program would delete the older file and rename the .tmp2 with the name of the older file, making it valid and in place of the older file.

This process has two problems:

It fragments the filesystem (and there's no means to defrag it, FYI)
It requires that the filesystem has at least the exact same size of free space as the size of the update as the temporary space will be only freed at the end of the install process as the updater gets rid of the older files and rename the new ones to take over the place of the older ones. (This is the deal with the error people had back then)

The problem is that the PS2 now only has about 800 MB of free space in the game partition.
And no, there is no old useless files on the PS2 game partition.

If there were any, formatting and fresh installing would solve the problem on all cases as they said it would but I did it myself and it was still screwed up for me. Funny enough only some systems had the issue.

I suppose that with the cases that reinstall solved the issue, it had to do with the amount of chars that were been logged to the system:
The USER folders with macros and map markers is stored within FFXI partition and each character that had been logged to the game on that copy of the client will leave a folder there...