[svenmullet]

If you have a BD drive that won't read discs due to dead laser, you've been out of luck as far as booting certain backups that require a disc inserted, right? Well, on MFW 3.55 DEX, there is a way to circumvent this. Set "Blu-Ray Disc Access" to "BD-Emulator (USB)", set "Boot Mode" to "System Software Mode" and make a working BD Emulator drive on a pendrive. Install a small game to it (doesn't matter what the game is, it just needs to be a valid drive that the PS3 recognizes and mounts on the XMB. I used Fallout3 ~7GB) Boot Multiman and load a game as usual. It replaces the BD-Emulator icon with the game you selected, and the game should boot fine without a BD disc inserted!

[Persian McLovin]

Brilliant Sven, this should help a lot of people out well done!

[Ada Love Lace]

it was one feature Cobra have implemented on their cfw, The other directly related from DEX might be loading your game from internet connection. Since i don t have this dongle i can be wrong so correct me please.

Thanks to svenmullet nice finding and explanation it s now available for everyone. See if you can spread this info with adding picture or video or try as news.

[Ghost-man]

This is actualy how I have been playing my games for a while The only difference is that my "Boot Mode" is set to release and it works just the same and I can run the game on the pen drive beeing emulated. I use PAIN 1.3GB.
Batman Arkham City is one that I'm playing right now using this method.
But nice share svenmullet, well done. This will help alot of people with the same problem I had until I converted to DEX.

[svenmullet]

More interesting stuff:

In Target Manager, connect to your target (the PS3), then right-click on it and click "Set File-Serving directory (app_home/)...". Navigate to your backups folder on your PC, and select one of the base directories (with PS3_GAME and PS3_UPDATE folders, and PS3_DISC.SFB) and then navigate to app_home/PS3_game icon on the PS3. Voila! The game icon appears there. of 15 or so game backups, I've not gotten any to actually boot properly, but a few show promise; Fallout 3 gets to the "Installing Tropies" screen, then locks up, and Battlefield 3 (after editing the PARAM.SFO to 3.55) gets to the Loading screen but stays there and won't boot. I think with a bit of R&D, this will be the backup loading of choice on DEX. (network loading of game backups)

[rotaga]

I have a broken bd-drive too, and I was just to go crazy, because I wouldn't be able to load backups via Multiman. But then I realized it was possible through dex bdemu feature. I can't understand why it is impossible to use /app_home/ps3_game with dex firmwares, even if I'm not an expert I'd like a technical explanation.
Then, will it be possible to include the BDEMUv2 feature with future DEX CFWs?

[zideeq]

Is it possible to implement this feature into 3.55 CFW? I don't want to switch to DEX because it doesn't look noob friendly

[Mistawes]

Interesting findings svenmullet, I got games to work from Target Manager.. They need to be converted to Fself's and then they work fine. There are a couple that won't work for me, but I think it's because I didn't get all of the sprx files.

When there are .sdat files, they also seem to not work but maybe it's just coincidence.

One of my testing games was Race Driver : GRID, wouldn't work until I decrypted the EBOOT.BIN hex edited DEV_BDVD to APP_HOME and then fself it. After that, it worked great!

[sandungas]

Originally Posted by svenmullet If you have a BD drive that won't read discs due to dead laser, you've been out of luck as far as booting certain backups that require a disc inserted, right? Well, on MFW 3.55 DEX, there is a way to circumvent this. Set "Blu-Ray Disc Access" to "BD-Emulator (USB)", set "Boot Mode" to "System Software Mode" and make a working BD Emulator drive on a pendrive. Install a small game to it (doesn't matter what the game is, it just needs to be a valid drive that the PS3 recognizes and mounts on the XMB. I used Fallout3 ~7GB) Boot Multiman and load a game as usual. It replaces the BD-Emulator icon with the game you selected, and the game should boot fine without a BD disc inserted!

Good trick
About this size... have you tryed erasing all the files inside USRDIR folder ? (all but EBOOT.BIN)
This will generate a valid disc image of a minimal size (valid for the XMB)

And i said "valid for the XMB" because you are not going to boot it, so this is enought
Also... the EBOT.BIN is ONLY loaded when you press "X" over the game icon to boot it.... so you can even replace this file with a 0kb dummy (with the same name)

This will give you a disk image smaller than 5mb
If you want to use the rest of the space of your pendrive to store something... you can fake a disc structure that installs .pkg and add a good collection of your favourite homebrew

Edit:
Hmmm, better idea... there is a "flag" inside ATTRIBUTE (inside main PARAM.SFO) to "remove" the main icon in XMB game column (only the secondary icon with the .pkg's list appears in XMB game column)
This is used to make discs that only contains install .pkg's... this is a good way to avoid the crash if you try to boot the main game (that has been erased)

[b3wii]

Originally Posted by svenmullet If you have a BD drive that won't read discs due to dead laser, you've been out of luck as far as booting certain backups that require a disc inserted, right? Well, on MFW 3.55 DEX, there is a way to circumvent this. Set "Blu-Ray Disc Access" to "BD-Emulator (USB)", set "Boot Mode" to "System Software Mode" and make a working BD Emulator drive on a pendrive. Install a small game to it (doesn't matter what the game is, it just needs to be a valid drive that the PS3 recognizes and mounts on the XMB. I used Fallout3 ~7GB) Boot Multiman and load a game as usual. It replaces the BD-Emulator icon with the game you selected, and the game should boot fine without a BD disc inserted!

@svenmullet thanx for the important info!

the thing i did not understand was this part "make a working BD Emulator drive on a pendrive" but i figured it out:

you have to use ps3gen to generate a valid ps3 image of a game.

so i downloaded PS3GEN 3.30 and used kung fu panda 2(BLUS-30634) to create the image.

these are my ps3gen settings:











if you click on build and get err_no=00052100 this probably means that your image(game) is to large for your pendrive

have fun