We’d better keep an eye out for them in the future.

What ShinkanTrain said. The last a read about it, the PS2 only switches into PS1 mode on a trigger from the optical drive subsystem, and then most of the memory and other hardware used to run homebrew is deactivated. AFAIK no-one’s yet found a way to trigger the change in software and keep the connection to wherever you’re loading your game from.

I believe that on certain revisions of the console, MechaPwn can overcome the protection, but you still need a “Playstation 1” CD in the drive to actually run something, as ShinkanTrain wrote.

Probably because it’s pretty slow, and the custom drive format used by the PS2 isn’t very flexible; game images have to be in one continuous block, and blocks can’t be moved. You can overwrite one game with another, but only if it’s the same size or smaller. So if you delete games off in the reverse of the order you put them on you’re fine, but otherwise you’re going to leave empty “holes” of wasted space.

Having tried both a USB3 drive adapter and downloading over Ethernet, I’ll say that Ethernet was way slower for me.

The average copy time on the adapter was about 30 minutes, but over Ethernet it took 3-4 times as long.

I have a 2TB SATA HDD in my PS2 fat. AFAIK that’s still the maximum storage size possible with the FMCB/wLaunchELF software. I believe that an unmodded original network adapter should be able to take up to a 512MB IDE drive, but I’d have to double-check that.

I used to use a third-party “network adapter” (they usually don’t have Ethernet, just an HDD connector) with SATA support, which still works fine (it seems like most brands stopped working properly after a certain homebrew software version), but later I bought an official adapter (IDE/PATA) and a SATA conversion kit (a kit specific to the PS2 network adapter, not a standard IDE-SATA converter, which sometimes work with the PS2 and sometimes don’t) so I could try network stuff.

I don’t think it was worth it, but these days it’s probably the way to go since there no longer seems to be any way of telling the non-working aftermarket adaptors from the working ones; the companies making the bad ones just started putting the brand name of the one still working adapter on their products.

If you have a relatively powerful computer or phone, and your library only contains games from the console’s top 100 or so, you’re probably right.

You can run games directly over Ethernet, which I believe can run at close to full speed. Some people have made dedicated little server devices for this out of cheap single-board computers like a Raspberry Pi; I think one guy may even have been selling a finished product like this for a while.

And to be really picky, the first version of the slim actually has IDE HDD support onboard like the original network adapter, just no physical connector (you have to solder one on yourself).