Well, I've had swap magic for awhile now and hadn't really used it for anything. I bought it along with those flip-top case mods for the original fat PS2, but the case mod wasn't really needed to do what I wanted to do with it: use it as a media player.
What you need to make your fat ps2 a media player:
A downloadable package called the noobie package and ULaunch program
A USB flash drive
Swap Magic
PS2 Network Adapter
PS2 Memory card with 1.5mb space on it
The noobie package is a set of applications with an auto installer. You should be able to find tutorials on sksapps.com for more information.
When you install the noobie package to your PS2 memory card, the PS2 system will autoboot to the new program interface, free mcboot, with a selection of menu options. I recommend getting a newer version of SMS (simple media system) for better features and support.
The most simple way to use the media player is to use a ps2 client, like radhost, available here:
http://members.casema.nl/eugene_plotnikov/ - Just run it on the media server pc, setup the ip of the ps2, and then set the public folders you want to stream music, movies, and pics to.
Yes, there are several other steps, but this is just the basics..
So, how does all of this work? If I would have had this player like five years ago, it would have been considered nice, but it's a very basic media system, and if you use the radhost program, you can only use 1 PS2 system to play the media files, as it only has a place for 1 ip address. The latest version of SMS also supports samba, but I had trouble getting it to work through vista. It's probably a vista issue, and eventually, i'll probably try it from win xp or 2000.
I've heard that you can actually use this setup to play games hosted on your other PC(s) as well. So far, I haven't found out how. Other free programs out there will let you run games from a usb drive or even an IDE hard drive, with install and format features built in to the programs.
As of now, this is just something for me to mess around with. Not all codecs are supported, and HD isn't supported either.
