PlayStation Memory Card Maintenance and Fixes
The Sony PlayStation 2 or PS2 requires a PlayStation memory card to save your game progress, although the console allows you to play thousands of games that are made specifically for the PS2 and the original PS. The main thing to understand is that you will need to delete saved games periodically or transfer them to another card, to give you enough space to save a crucial in-game progress. For this reason, it is always good to have an extra card that is free of used memory blocks, if you can keep them properly maintained. This means always consolidating, deleting or copying games over to make enough room on one card to hold a current game you need to save.
If you insert the card into one of the two memory slots on the front of the console, you can turn on the PlayStation and browse the contents of your memory card. When you select the “browser” on the startup menu, selecting the memory card icon will show you the contents of your saved games, listed by icon. You can view the details of the saved games or scroll through them with the directional pad on the controller.
If you want to copy or delete one of them, you can press the “x” or you can copy or transfer files from one memory card to another, if you insert a second card into the second slot. Occasionally, your PlayStation memory card might become corrupted and it will act like it has a mind of its own. The reason for this is that it is possible you used products that required codes and unlockables through Pro Action or Gameshark, but these can corrupt existing files that have nothing to do with their files, besides the ones that do.
You will need to go through the corrupted memory card and delete the corrupted files, in order to be able to use that memory. The problem is that it is difficult to ever repair them. For this reason, you may want to avoid these “unofficial” devices, but you can complete the process by deleting the files you know are corrupted and you may need to be suspect of ones that aren’t related. Once you have completed the process of maintaining your PlayStation memory card and deleted corrupted files, you can press the circle to return to the “browser” and load your game.
You will see the disc icon after the game has completed loading and you will need to read the instructions to find out about saving the game, since there are thousands of them to consider, but most of them are similar. By keeping it properly maintained and using the recommended devices, you will suffer from fewer corrupted files and have plenty of space to save your in-game progress. It is possible to find memory cards in a variety of sizes and a 32MB is becoming a popular choice, compared to the 8MB, for obvious reasons.
