Vintage gaming community.
Rules:
If you see these please report them.
if you are looking at previously owned stuff... Don't touch any of the third party memory cards. Look for official Sony 8MB MagicGate cards.
If you're looking for modern solutions, go with a MemCard PRO which should allow you to save your games to SD cards. Then you can backup the SD card wherever you want.
Do you have experience with the MemCard PRO? Would you say it's a full replacement for older memory cards, or should it be used in tandem with an original memory card in slot two.
Full replacement
Full replacement. It virtualizes the memory card as an image on the SD card. That lets you create whatever size you want, and cycle through them as well.
IIRC the second version allows you to manage it via WiFi.
As far as longevity goes, I have been using the same 8MB official MemoryCard from a launch PS2 my dad bought, with no issues ever. If you have a big collection of games you might run out of space eventually, but deleting save files is pretty easy in the system OS.
I bought a separate 8MB official MemoryCard to install FreeMCBoot on a few years back, but I haven't used it to save any files. It should work the same, though, despite having the Homebrew on it.
If you live in Europe you can buy all sorts of MemoryCards at CeX, asking in the counter as they usually don't display them. I guess anywhere else where they sell and buy second hand games they have MemoryCards too.
I haven't tried any third party ones like MadCatz or the new MicroSD ones, maybe someone else can share their experience :)
For FreeMC Boot, would you put it on a secondary OEM Card? Or is it best to just use one card for everything.
Sadly I don't live in Europe, and the chain game stores here don't sell them anymore. But there is lots of local places here that have good return policies / testing of everything before putting it on shelves.
Thank you very much for your insight!
It's recommended that you use a dedicated card for FreeMCBoot.
Good to know that then! I'll look for a MemCard PRO as others suggested when I eventually expand my setup to unify both of my MemoryCards.
If you get a MemCard PRO2, you can put FreeMC Boot on the same SD card that you'll be saving your games to.
The PS2's memory cards really felt like the future to me because they had SO MUCH space.
Of course, on-console storage was the ACTUAL future, which proves yet again that the 3DO was ahead of its time. But anyway...
The PS2 memory cards had so much space that I think I only ever needed two for me and my brother. Probably didn't even need to delete any saves. We had tons of PS1 and DC memory cards, because they'd get full so quickly