Hopefully this will be the final post about God_of_War_2_USA_PS2-ECHELON

Since the last post: I beat the colossus. Then, at the cutscene where Zeus stabbed Kratos through the heart, the game froze. After that I gave up for a few days.

Today I got my hands on a DVD5 version of the game. I tried loading that to the HD with FastLordBogami. It didn't even get past the title screen.

The only thing I hadn't tried was transferring the game directly to the HDD with WinHIIP. I didn't do this because I didn't have access to my external hard drive enclosure.

I decided to try WinHIIP. I unplugged the DVD-RW drives from my computer, and plugged in the PS2's hard drive. Then, I transferred the original DVD9 image (God_of_War_2_USA_PS2-ECHELON) to the PS2. Unlike doing it over LAN, this only took 20 minutes. It takes about 1.5 hours to transfer the 8 gigabyte DVD9 image over LAN.

I loaded up my game. It worked. I started a new game. It got past the first cutscene, and the floor of the first area was, surprisingly, intact. I was able to save without the game freezing.

Right now I'm in the snowy area around the titan Typhon's chamber. Everything is working.

To sum it up, this is what I believe: The God_of_War_2_USA_PS2-ECHELON release works with the 0.8b version of HDLoader that is patched to be compatible with God of War II. It works by transferring the image from your computer to your PS2's hard drive with WinHIIP. Other solutions that I know of don't seem to work completely.

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Making Progress With This Release

Ok, so using the FastLordBogami software indicated in the aforementioned thread seems to have done the trick with getting the game playable. I had to transfer it twice, though; the first time, the game wouldn't pass the Sony intellectual property screen just before the title screen.

Actually, that's a lie.

The game is more playable than it was before, insofar as I can now save a game. On the other hand, in the very first room, I now have the option of falling through the floor and into a buggy death (this hidden pit takes up about 40% of the first room with no actual indication of boundaries).

Oh, and the game just froze on me during the first cutscene. Hopefully I'll get to see some new content in the game. I've played the first 20 minutes of the game at least seven times now. I've seen the opening cutscene at least twice that amount.

I hope this is helping someone else who's wondering what the fuck is going on with this release!

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More on Troubleshooting the God Of War 2 ECHELON Release

The save thing happens at any save point.

The widescreen mode workaround is now 5 for 5.

Some people are having a similar, but different, save problem where their game doesn't lock up completely; it just takes about a minute for the first save to complete. This problem (my problem) happens before you get to choose your memory card. The screen just goes semi-dark and freezes. I've waited up to 30 minutes with it in this frozen state, so this is different from the memory card problem. I've even gone as far as to download a GoW II save file to see if I could work around the problem by saving onto a save game that's already been created. Didn't work.

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Protips For God_of_War_2_USA_PS2-ECHELON on HDD

• Read this thread; make sure you have a version of HDLoader that's at least 0.8b
• If your game screen goes black during the first cutscene shortly after Kratos gets shrunken, try playing it in widescreen mode (options menu). So far I'm 0 for 6 on Normal and 4 for 4 on widescreen.
• Game freezes for me at the first save point. I transferred it via LAN using HDL Dumb 0.8.3. I hear different transfer methods can be better/worse, so if I can't find my own solution tonight I'll see about transferring it differently or getting an actual non-scene copy of the game.
  

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Protip about cron

If you're trying to use cron to automate a task that's not CLI based (so pretty much anything on the desktop), you're going to need to alter your crontab. The following is an example of how your crontab should look, with the added information in bold:

# m h dom mon dow command
33 12 * * * export DISPLAY=:0 && /home/noah/.scripts/alarm

Information grabbed from this thread.

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I Hate TV

Just making sure everyone knows that.

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What Consumers Cooperation Does:

A Good Read. Can you believe this was published in 1934? Still seems extremely current.

Link

Another Link.

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Happy March; Furious Fingers, Inc.

Wow, it's basically been a month since I last posted here. I can hardly believe it.

If you were looking forward to my posts, I apologize.

My friend Nick has started a pretty funny and "perfectly legitimate" website. If I remember correctly, he plans on getting it turned into a literary magazine at his school.

Posting is hard work!

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