A Must Have For all PS2 owners.
Written: Feb 26 '01 (Updated Feb 26 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Ultra Quick and Loads of Space, Small and well built too.
Cons: Only a need for maths.
The Bottom Line: If you play games, you must have it, simple as that. And you can't find anything which will last and work as well as this Sony version.
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| MichaelHatton's Full Review: Sony 8MB Memory Card PS2 |
I bought my PS2 a few weeks ago, and had a game with it too. And for the last week I'd been trying to play a game, but since I had no memory card, it was pointless playing the game through fully to reset the console and start all over again, so I decided to plump into my Gran Turismo 3 cash and buy the Memory card, luckily I have around £35 left over, for the up coming game GT3.
Once I had the memory card, i carefully cut it out of its plastic cover and inserted it into the console. The console told me it was unformatted and asked if I wanted to format it, I suppose this is so you can save games, so I did. The PS2 saves its own system setup on the card too, but it’s fairly small.
Anyway I went into the game and started playing; the first time I saved it was all over within a second, much faster than the PSOne's memory speed. A view back at the browser screen shows that data is saved in a 3D image file, with my game Ridge Racer V I had a little bouncing car, it'll be different for each game though.
Games have a memory size labelled on the back of the case, with my game it was about 416Kb, which is around half a megabyte, so you have 7.5 Mb left over. And the system config save is around 16Kb.
The design hasn't changed, apart from a sharper edged corners, and loads of logos and writing, such as MagicGate, for the speed. I'm sure it would last forever, and it owuld take the highest of falls without fall apart. The only thing is that it sticks out further than the controller, but only a little, and it does cost a lot. But still the origional memory card retailed for the same amount five years ago (1995-1996/7).
So basically if you have a game for your PS2 you just have to have one of these, you won't be checking the time when saving or loading, its almost instant, and there's plenty of space too. You can’t play a game properly without it.
The Way It works
The idea behind the new memory card over the last one from Sony is that it is no longer separated into 15 blocks it is separated into 8000Kb of data storage. This means that simple save which may only use half a block and therefore waste some space are reduced by a high amount. Even Gran Turismo on the origional PlayStation took up 5 blocks of data, those blocks may be full they may be 4.5 blocks or may be 4.1, so the wasted 0.9 block is never used again, perhaps this is why Gran Turismo 2 took up 4 blocks.
Each game carries a memory size, these can range from basic timetables or level data taking a mere 20Kb to the larger files of Ridge Racer V which hold the car setup details how many races you've ran and the Time trial times which take up a larger 426Kb. At an average of 300 - 400Kb for each game you could get around 20 - 27 game saves. It really depends on the games you play. Some people may get 50 games saves if they prefer simple games like Puzzle games, while other people who play car saving and tune up, games such as Gran Turismo 3 were you could only get 16 game saves.
Still once you reach the final 100Kb, its up to you to use it as full as possible, even then you'll have a hard time to fit a game into the last 5- 20kb of data.
How Many Saves?
If you take an example such as Gran Turismo 2, on the origional PSOne memory card it would use 4 blocks, that's about 250Kb of data from the 1000Kb (1Mb) of available data on that card, and you get 100 cars to put in your garage, plus all the time table data and all the additional part you buy for each car. So GT3 could easily beef up the size to 500Kb, and you'd get more than 200 cars plus all the track records or tune up parts on to the cars, and that would take up 6.25%, leaving a whole 15 car racing game saves of the same size, which the car game saves will be of different size of course.
In short you get plenty of storage form the 8Mb of data storage. Even if you play huge RPG's all the time, they don't take up space as with Final Fantasy VII on the PSOne it took up 1 block that’s less than 67Kb, if they use the same storage size (which will consist of simple things: level, position equipment etc..) for other RPGs on the PS2 you'd get a whopping 119 game saves!
OK, OK, all games will vary but these are nice stats, right?
Recommended:
Yes
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MichaelHatton
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Location: Darlington, England
Reviews written: 192
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