Once upon a time, memory cards were simply for saving your progress and little more, but in 2025, these once-popular accessories have been given a new lease of life thanks to the modding community.
A team of coders have created the Multi-Purpose Memory Card Emulation (MMCE) protocol, which allows games to be loaded directly from new 'smart' memory cards, such as 8BitMods' MemCard Pro 2 and the open-source SD2PSX memory card.
Our friends over at Macho Nacho Productions have created a brilliant video summary of how MMCE works, but in short, this new system allows your smart memory card to alternate between save data and game data, allowing you to boot games from a MicroSD card using Open PS2 Loader and then have individual 'virtual' memory cards for each game.
When you next boot up that game, the memory card automatically finds and loads the associated virtual memory card, making the whole process seamless. What makes this even more appealing is that no modifications are required to your PS2 console to get this working, and it runs on both the original PS2 model and the slim version. All you need is a compatible smart memory card, a MicroSD card and a computer (the latter being used to set up the correct file structure and copy over games).
MMCE is supported by the MemCard Pro 2, the SD2PSX and certain variants of the original MemCard Pro. You'll find detailed instructions on how to enable it in the video below.