Tired of your favorite PlayStation 2 games taking forever to load? Want a simple way to protect the hundreds (perhaps thousands) of dollars invested in your PlayStation 2 game titles? A subversive yet useful piece of software dubbed "HDAdvance" is the answer.

A Little Background
In the beginning, there was HDLoader. A supposed copycat, HDAdvance indeed appears eerily similar.  At the time this article was written, HDAdvance was our tool of choice as the HDLoader folks had gone underground only to resurface recently with a new website. Regardless, the features and functionality of both products are practically identical.

Simple and Effective
Preparing a PlayStation 2 (PS2) for use with HDAdvance is easy. Take a standard ATA/IDE hard drive (up to 120GB), attach it to a PlayStation 2 Network Adaptor, and slide the contraption into PS2's expansion bay. Insert the disc and load the software. That's it.

HDAdvance's simple menu provides the expected options for imaging, running, renaming, and deleting your PS2 backups. The process of imaging a disc to the hard drive is often time-consuming due to the relatively slow speed of the PS2's optical drive.

Odds and Ends
HDAdvance isn't perfect. It didn't work with every title we tried, but most worked flawlessly. For troublesome titles, compatibility modes are provided in a menu accessible via the "select" button. As far as software quality goes, we found HDLoader better than HDAdvance as it contained fewer obvious bugs and loaded noticeably faster.

Blatant piracy issues aside, HDLoader/HDAdvance provides the tools PS2 owners can use to protect their investment while supercharging their gaming experience. What PS2 owner wouldn't like to eliminate their favorite game's long load times? I thought so.