08/17/2025

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08/11/2025 to 08/17/2025

On Tuesday evening after dinner, Andrew and I drove to Dairy Queen. Andrew got a large Cookie Dough Blizzard and I got a Peanut Buster Parfait. It was a perfect evening, just enough clouds and not too hot, and I was reminded of a long time ago when Irv and Jim Westlie used to bring me to DQ in Minot, ND for treats, they liked Peanut Buster Parfaits as well.

On Thursday, I went to the Drivers Services to deal with my CDL. Ended up dropping my school bus endorsement, exempting my medical requirement, and keeping my Class B and commercial bus endorsement. Because I have an enhanced DL I ended up needing a paycheck stub and Passport. So, after three trips back and forth, one of those trips was to get a printer cartridge, I finally prevailed after three hours. **UPDATE** The DVS sent a letter indicating that I may have not prevailed, more to come. 🪪

Due to already being in a foul mood, I decided to take up a chore I hate, and cleaned our roof off on Thursday evening. Lots of Moss growing on it so Tiffany picked up some solution that we will apply in the near future.

On Friday evening, I completed a retro gaming project that I had been planning for and thinking about during the week. Initially, I wanted to experiment with retro gaming on a Raspberry Pi but decided to try something else first. We have a Play Station 2, model number is SCPH-39001, with various accompanying games. I wanted to see if I could copy the PS2’s BIOS, copy the disk image of the games, and run all of it with an emulator on my MacBook. I know you can download everything off the internet but I wanted to do it legally and have the satisfaction of obtaining my BIOS that I actually own.

The first item I needed was a Kaico Free McBoot 8MB PS2 Memory Card – FMCB 1.966 for PS2 Console which I was able to obtain off of Amazon. Free McBoot contains an application called uLaunchElf v4.4.2d (Used to launch .ELF file applications or copy/paste files between memory cards and USB/hard-drives).

The second item needed was a USB, formatted FAT32, with biodrain, the program that you put on the USB drive that downloads the PS2 BIOS to the same USB drive.

After inserting the Kaico Free McBoot 8MB PS2 Memory Card and USB stick containing biodrain, I booted up the PS2 and successfully obtained a legal copy of my PS2’s BIOS!

I used ImgBurn to convert my PS2 games to an .ISO image on an old Windows computer that still had a DVD drive.

Lastly, I downloaded PCSC2 PS2 emulator onto my MacBook. After loading my BIOS and arranging my games in the library, I found the gaming experience to be perfect. No lagging, graphics are shown as intended, and the controller mapped correctly and has sharp crisp response.

End of blog. Thank you for reading!