i have a samsung cd-rw plus dvd-rom. now i have heard a bunch of ways how i can back up my games with a cd burner. one of them being that i have to delete a bunch of things from the image file to get it to fit on a cd-r, now i dont like the idea of that. i have also read the recordnow max solution saying all i need is a dvd-rom, well i have that as u can see^ but it doesnt work. so i guess my questions are, do i need a dvd burner to back up the full game? and what is this stuff about mod chips and start up discs? and thank u to the ppl that answer this.

I'm new too but I thought I would share what I've learned so far. You do need a dvd burner, yes. Most of these ps2 files are so huge they won't fit on a cd-r so you have to use a dvd-r. I have a cd/dvd burner combo. To burn the dvd you're going to need to download a program to get it on your harddrive and then onto the dvd-r. I have heard Nero, Alcohol 120%, Fireburner, RecordNow, or DVD Decrypter are supposed to work for this but that is where I run into trouble because I can't figure out how to use these programs(I'm not good with this techie stuff).

From what I've been reading you need a modchip or some kind of fix and some kind of switch disk(like swap magic and I've heard gameshark is supposed to work with the old version of ps2) so that your ps2 will be able to read the disc and won't realize that it's a backup.

Here's a website I found about how to do it without the modchip and just gameshark but it won't work for me because I have the new slimline:

http://www.i-hacked.com/Game-Systems/Playstation-2/How-to-burn-and-play-PS2,-and-PSX-games-on-your-PS2-without-a-modchip.htm

when i try to start the extraction on the game an error pops up that says"error:Unable to analyze disc layout Illegal track type encountered"????????