Ok today was actually a bit of a nightmare. A specific two hours were a complete fucking shitshow for me. So, I bought Need for Madness Underground 2, probably the best racing game for the PS2. I got it from CeX after I started feeling better. (update, I feel a lot better from about 3 PM today). I originally went to CeX to return a game because they gave me the wrong disc, but I bought it in South Shields so they just said to return it there. Anyway, I picked up NFS:UG2 for £15 which is currently a bit of overpay actually, but it's in alright condition (aside from the damn disc) so I don't mind. I was just amazed I found 5 copies in CeX honestly. I got home and tried it in my PS3. Turns out, most PS3's do natively support PS2 games, but my model doesn't which isn't ideal. Instead of getting my PS2 out, I decided to do some research on what I could do.
My PS3 may not natively support PS2 games via the disc alone, but it was capable of running PS2 games. I decided that I was going to use an .ISO file instead. Now, these .ISO files cannot exceed 4 GB when they are on a FAT32 drive (which my external drive was formatted to). Need for Speed Underground 2 is... 4.06 GB large. This means that I had to split the .ISO if I wanted it to run. But, and I don't know why on earth this didn't work, it simply did not want to split. I tried my PS3 ISO Tools tool and that just simply did not split the .ISO file. I presumed it was because it was only about 60 MB that it was trying to split so it saw it as negligible (even though it shouldn't have). I then tried PowerISO, but the latest version didn't have the .ISO splitter tool. I then tried a few other programs, none of which worked. I then tried Winrars splitting tool, but it was splitting them by their archived size, not by their actual size. Winrar also actually just refused to acknowledge the additional 60 MB that I was trying to cut off from the 4 GB. It was genuinely a frustrating experience for something that really should be so simple. After all, I've done this before with a bunch of PS3 games that were well over 4 GB.
After a whole 2 hours of trying to get this ISO split and get it working on my PS3, literally going insane in the process, it finally split. For some reason, I tried the PS3 ISO Tools again and it just split it for me, no problem. Like what the fuck? Why couldn't it have done that in the first fucking place?! Well, it did it. And I put it on my PS3 and my PS2 Manager still wouldn't detect it for some bizarre reason. So then, I went and booted it directly through MultiMan which actually worked and the game booted.
And now is where it makes all of this a (somewhat) waste of time. You see, PS2 Manager is an emulator. MultiMan just runs the .ISO from the PS3 hardware with no emulation. Without the emulator detecting the game, I can't use the emulator. And since the system has no support for PS2 games, it struggles to run them well. I made a car, went into the career mode and I was getting about 10 FPS just idling which fucking sucks. It was unplayable, especially for a racing game.