I recently joined the awesome club of “burning my own damn PS2 games so I don’t have to shell out like eighteen bucks to guys who are pirating the things anyway” and there has been much rejoicing. However, I’ve hit a bit of a blunder.
I’ve just downloaded what seems to be Ar Tonelico, though what I have are in fact 56 files numbered from 01 to 56 and an unnumbered one with a .sfv extension. I suppose this is some sort of file segmentation like with partitioned .rar files, but I’ve no idea what to do with these things or what program to use, and the only FAQ I found is in Dutch (Which I can’t read). Help?
I just found it and it’s slightly more intelligible than before since it mentions a program I could use, but I’d still like to know what exactly these things are before I blindly follow the instructions pictured there.
Wait, I think I got something. I had a hunch so I tried sticking .rar at the end of the filenames and extracting. Turns out they in fact seem to be actually just a bunch of rar partitions without their correct extension filenames. I’ll try to stick .r00, .r01, etc in each one…
EDIT: This is some tedious shit.
EDIT2: I’m a moron. Made it work in another less tedious way. This game better be worth it. Sorry for wasting your time.
Yeah, that entire FAQ is just talking about how it’s a file verification thingamabob and the virtues of not having corrupted MP3s. Just download that WinSFV program to check wether any of the real files are corrupted. Unfortunately I have no idea how to burn the actual game, so sorry.
It’s okay, don’t worry about it. Once I figured out they were all actually .rar files it wasn’t that hard to get them to cough up a simple regular .iso. Already burned and working.
Though it does make me wonder why they all had the extensions missing.
SFV just gives title information and key information about the splitrar. Its useless. Stupid people claim it can “be used to rebuild corrupted rars”, but this is not the case. A corrupted rar can only be rebuilt when enough of the file is complete that the rar program can guess what the missing areas are by looking at the encryption key used on all the other rars. An SFV has nothing to do with this, you could do it if you had all the files (though not all neccesarily complete), and no SFV.
What an SFV actually does is just tell you the bytes in each split…which is info the .nfo would give you anyway (iirc you can open them in notepad) :\ Why SFVs are included with releases is beyond me.
When you get a splitrar, just open the first rar, the rest open on their own. Splitrars are also a stupid “scene” thing that, in my opinion, shouldn’t be done anymore. They were done when people were using f-servs to get their ISOs. If the f-serv drops out, would you rather the entire ~700mb ISO be corrupted? Or just one 50mb piece? It also allows you to queue up only some of the files. They’re useless now that everyone uses torrents, which have corruption protection built in, but they’re still in the “<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_(warez)”>Scene Rules</a>”.
Extensions get changed depending on how the RAR software does splitrar naming. You should only be opening the first anyway.
EDIT: And since its PS2 games you’re talking about, and you seem new, just remember to ALWAYS burn as slow as possible, and to use -R media rather than +R. Unless you’re using a Hard Drive or something.
I’ve know about splitrars for years, what threw me off was that the files weren’t associated with Winrar, or anything else. They looked like a bunch of indistinguishable format-less junk, and I had to guess that they were actually .rar segments by opening through WinRAR.
Thanks for the info on SFV.
I already burn everything at 4x (The lowest it can go) but what exactly do R- and R+ mean and why is one better than the other?
-R is the original, created in 1997 by the DVD alliance, or whatever their name is. +R is an offshoot, that has no real benefits, its just an alternative, kind of like HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. The PS2 is better at reading -R than +R, i used to know why, but i forget now :(. You should always use -R media though, you’ll get far better load times, and less coasters.
Even though the PS2 reads minus better than plus, one is not necessarily better than the other. The reason you don’t know the difference is because its very easy to create a hybrid drive that can read both plus and minus media. You know the difference between HDDVD and BluRay because its hard to create a hybrid drive, thus the schism between the media is greater.
I think +R was also the first to get Double Layer media, though this doesn’t matter because the cost of a Double Layer disc makes the technology pointless.
EDIT: I believe the PS2 is better at reading -R media because -R was the only format around when the drive for the system was designed. I have nothing to back this up, but i think i remember reading it somewhere. Honestly though, just always use -R, you won’t care why you’re getting the performance gains, just as long as you get them
