The Energon Pub

Alright here's the deal:

My wife thought she'd suprise me for my birthday and buy me a copy of Marvel vs. Capcom 2 off ebay. My birthday's not for a month but she wanted me to test it to make sure it worked before she left feedback. She got it for PS2, and our PS2 is a 39001 model, fullsize, hard drive bay and all. The system has NEVER had a problem before, but it would not read this game! The drive made some horrible sound effects and gave me a "disc read" error. Just to make sure the PS2 didn't fail, however, I popped in Wipeout Fusion right afterwords, and sure enough it fired right up no problems. I tried every single game we had and they all fired right up yet this game would not!

The only weird things i notice about Marvel vs. Capcom 2 is #1. its a purple disc, #2. Its a compact disc instead of a DVD, and #3. Its got a spiral pattern all over the disc surface like someone tried to buff it. I was convinced that was the cause of the problem! Well the guy refused to give our money back, and we've been fighting with him for a day. He's convinced we are just trying to scam him because we read how MvC2 was coming to PSN soon or something, which we never even brought up.

Today my wife had to run a couple errands so just to make sure we were completly legit, she took the game to a friends house, who has one of the new PS2 7000 "slim" models. She stuck it in her friends PS2, the game fired up and worked fine! WTF? Why would the 70000 model read it but the 39001 model not? Especially since the game's older than both PS2's!

Can someone explain that for me? Looks like we may upgrade our PS2 soon if I can't figure this one out!

I can answer this one.

Your full size PS2 suffers from the dreaded disc read error problem. This affect some of the older models of the ps2 where after a while it will become unable to read any cd based game such as most of the launch titles MVC2 and the Lego games. By the way all cd based ps2 games have that deep blue/ slightly purple colour on the bottom. There are various methods to remedy this if you look around, but seeing how cheap ps2s are at the moment i would recomend purchasing a cheap second hand unit manufactured after 2003 (the full size unit with the built in IR) as units made after this don't suffer from this problem.

Yep, just as sniper said, your classic PS2 has DRE syndrome. Before you buy a new PS2-slim, you may want to consider popping your old one open and cleaning the lens a bit. That may give you a temporary fix.

But new PS2's are very affordable, replacing it may be your best option. Or, if you've the money to step up some, get a new PS3 and buy Marvel vs. Capcom 2 through the PlayStation network when it's released. And, yes, new PS3's are capable of playing PS2 games. All that's required is that you download the PS2 data from the PlayStation store and hey-presto, there's your backward compatibility.

Well to make a long story short, we now have a PS2 9000 "Slim" model, silver. After she found all this out, she decided to get me a new PS2 as the rest of my birthday present. She supposively "sold" the game at disc replay and got me something else... thats what I was supposed to believe and then on my birthday on June 2nd I was supposed to be suprised when I opened up a brand new PS2 and a copy of MVC2. However I got some other news on Thursday... she's pregnant! I was freaking out so she gave me my birthday present early...

Whats messed up is before I found out the other news this was the biggest "crisis" in my life. LOL I've calmed down since though, and am actually excited and keeping my fingers crossed that its a boy.

I guess I came into this late, but congrats. I can't help you out on the problem, as I've had problems with it before (on games like The Thing, Half Life, etc.). But I have the fat model too, not the slim one.

And I lost its power cord. Ugh.

Thanks for the congrats, and thanks for the help everyone! As for my old PS2, I'm giving it to my one of my friends, and he and another friend are going to try and fix it. The silver 90001 model is pretty freakin sweet! I really can't believe how much smaller the new ones are than the original...like a quarter of the size!

Cormaster628 wrote:Thanks for the congrats, and thanks for the help everyone! As for my old PS2, I'm giving it to my one of my friends, and he and another friend are going to try and fix it. The silver 90001 model is pretty freakin sweet! I really can't believe how much smaller the new ones are than the original...like a quarter of the size!

How much did you spend? I still can't find my power cord... and it's probably high time I got an upgrade for it. (Are there any other differences to it... other than the size and look?)

Me, Grimlock! wrote:

Cormaster628 wrote:Thanks for the congrats, and thanks for the help everyone! As for my old PS2, I'm giving it to my one of my friends, and he and another friend are going to try and fix it. The silver 90001 model is pretty freakin sweet! I really can't believe how much smaller the new ones are than the original...like a quarter of the size!

How much did you spend? I still can't find my power cord... and it's probably high time I got an upgrade for it. (Are there any other differences to it... other than the size and look?)

Just grab a standard stereo power cable as thats all the ps2 is supplied with anyway.

There isn't much difference between the fat ps2 and the slim unless you want to play the ps2 version of FFXI. The slim will do prog scan for films unlike the older versions of the slim and is easier to mod to play import games.

Its only $99 + Tax right now. When you fire the slim up, it looks and acts just like a PS2. The other differences are:

No HDD Bay, which means no linux or FFXI.
Built in Ethernet, so on-line play gets a little easier. Don't have to go out there and buy a network adapter.

IT is my understanding the first slim models, the 70000 series, had some issues with some older PS2 games, but the 90001 supposedly has fixed all those issues.

So anyway I got a stupid question for PS2 fans. The Parental controls thing. how do you turn that off? I watched a movie on my PS2 and it asked me to choose a password, yada yada yada. I went through the settings didn't see a way to turn them off. Is there a way or am I just going to have to enter "0000" every time?

Cormaster628 wrote:Its only $99 + Tax right now. When you fire the slim up, it looks and acts just like a PS2. The other differences are:

No HDD Bay, which means no linux or FFXI.
Built in Ethernet, so on-line play gets a little easier. Don't have to go out there and buy a network adapter.

IT is my understanding the first slim models, the 70000 series, had some issues with some older PS2 games, but the 90001 supposedly has fixed all those issues.

So anyway I got a stupid question for PS2 fans. The Parental controls thing. how do you turn that off? I watched a movie on my PS2 and it asked me to choose a password, yada yada yada. I went through the settings didn't see a way to turn them off. Is there a way or am I just going to have to enter "0000" every time?

It can be turned off but I forget how to do it. BTW you should choose something else for a dvd player as the ps2 can do some weird things especially when watching foriegn language tracks on dvds usually overriding your audio choice to English despite changing the audio in the menu. Unfortunately the PS3 does this as well.

I typically use my PS3 as a DVD/Blu-ray Player. The PS2 is in my "guy lounge" hooked up to my old 27 inch Samsung CRT 480P set, while the PS3 is hooked up to the 46 inch Sony Bravia 1080p set in the living room. Last night I had a friend come over and my wife was asleep so we watched the movie in the "lounge" as to not wake her up.

I know the early PS2's had some DVD issues, I figured they'd fix it by now. Guess not. But yeah I remember way back when my friend got his first PS2, I was rockin an N64 and a PSone as my main systems, and I remember every time he fired up a movie on his PS2 it would ask for a Parental control password. He set it to "0000" just like me.

Believe it or not PS2 is still somewhat a new system to me. During the 6th gen system war I had an Original Xbox and a Gamecube. My old PS2 was inherited through marriage, so I still don't know how to use it completly yet.