Important Question Regarding BIOS Files (ATTN: MODs & ADMINs)

[JMC47]

Being careful against piracy and proactive can be very difficult. When someone has more than 3 bios from their PS2s (I have 2; my slim and my phat PS2) it can probably be assumed that they're pirating the bios, or getting the games. Getting a PS2 bios is actually difficult; it was a pain in the ass for me to get my bios from my phat PS2! If I didn't have my slim PS2 to actually install stuff to the memory card, there's a good chance I would have never gotten my bios out of my phat PS2, at least the way I was trying to do it.

Anyway, there are a few solutions I can think up to actually help the issue. I don't think we want users to turn to piracy, especially when they already have the games and the consoles, but just can't get the bios!

1: A reverse engineered Bios. NO$PSX did this. Not sure how feasible it is for a PS2; probably exponentially harder.
2: HLE the Bios. Again, this is likely difficult, but it is something that a lot of other emulators do.

Something else I was thinking about...

3: Maybe not show the extra bios files in the emulator log?

That last one is likely the easiest solution to prevent false positives, but you also won't catch as many people with downloaded bios' as well. Would it be an out of sight, out of mind type of deal (I don't think Sony or anyone else could be mad if you had no idea they had extra bios files) or would it cause potentially more issues by not being on top of pirates? I don't know, but I felt like it had to be brought up.

[Blyss Sarania]

@BioFusion -
Well, I appreciate that you took the time to understand our position. I haven't followed the Facebook mess(although I was aware of it), but I imagine most of them are not aware of the delicate position that being an emulator developer can be. The fact that an emulator such as PCSX2 can be used for piracy can make things somewhat hairy as you can imagine. Emulators are legal(in the U.S. where I am, and more importantly in the U.K. where this site is hosted), but there are certain constraints on that, especially with one that requires a BIOS file like PCSX2 does. So while as with the witch hunting thing we don't go out of our way to expose every pirate, when one exposes themselves, or gives us good cause to believe it so, then we have to act.

@JMC47 - as far as a reverse engineered BIOS, it was tried (with FPS2BIOS), and it didn't get very far.

[Nobbs66]

PCSX2 was running stuff before the BIOS ever ran, by using HLE I believe.

[Blyss Sarania]

Running homebrew through HLE and running commercial games through HLE are two different beasts though.

[Akio]

Many times they just posted the pictures showing multiple BIOS files.

[JMC47]

The people who posted pictures of downloaded bios files/tons of bios files go above and beyond to out themselves as pirates. Stuff showing up in a log is a bit different. More people I know than not have PS2s, and tons of games, but very few have the knowhow to rip a bios from the consoles.

As for the reverse engineered bios thing: That's really neat, it's unfortunate it didn't make it anywhere. Hopefully one solution or the other eventually comes to fruition.

[Nobbs66]

I dumped my BIOS in about 5min. it really wasn't that hard to make a swap disc to use for homebrew launching

[JMC47]

For a new slim PS2? Yeah, it was easy. When I was stuck on a phat PS2, it wasn't such a task I wanted to go into.

[Nobbs66]

i did it on my phats

[vsub]

I often see logs with
BIOS rom1 module not found, skipping...
BIOS rom2 module not found, skipping...
BIOS erom module not found, skipping...
and I never actually seen a bios dumper that don't dump those files too.This can probably tell you something.

You can usually tell if the user is using legit bios or not depending on the question asked.