About the white squares and towers in the PS2 startup screen

In the PS2 startup screen, if you have a memory card inserted, usually there will be some white squares and towers in the startup screen.

Actually, this is how your PS2 logs how frequently you play games in a row.

Did You Know Gaming explained this once. However, it was only partially true.



They do represent games, but the way how it works is different than what they explained.

The way how it works is this, according to the test I did:


 * 1) When a new game is played, it "logs" it into the Your System Configuration file in the memory card (that's why you won't see them when you don't insert a memory card, as it just can't save the config), and generates one square at a random area in the startup screen.
 * 2) When that same game is played a few times sequentially, the square turns darker, and then it "transforms" into a small tower. The more you play it in a row, the taller it will be.
 * 3) When a different game is played, it generates a new square, which repeats the sequence 1 and 2 mentioned above.
 * 4) At one point, it may make another square, even if you keep playing the same game sequentially, which will make the previous tower stop going any higher. It still repeats the sequence 1 and 2, and this happens randomly.
 * 5) Sometimes all the squares and towers vanish for some reason. The cause of this is unknown, but it just makes the startup screen boring again. However, you can just filling it up again as usual by playing some games again and allow it to log them.

You can basically "trick" the logger, so that it will make a square transform into a tower and then increase its height. To do this, simply load a game, and then when it gets into the game, just reset the console. Do this multiple times and it will eventually transform into a tower and then its height will increase, until it decides to generate another square. Be sure to allow it to load the saved data before doing this, if present, otherwise it may corrupt your save file.

Here's a screenshot of it taken from PCSX2 on my PC. TBH I just used the trick above to make them taller, and generate more towers. I currently have 8 games, which should've made the squares and towers 8 in total. However, they vanished at a point, and I used the above trick instead to "farm towers", by only using 2 games (Black and Battlefield 2 Modern Combat).



I used to have a slim PS2 back in late 2007 that generated these squares and towers. It just looks kinda amusing for me since it makes it look less boring as those generates randomly in different places and everyone has a different set of them.

Some of the models can't generate the towers (i.e. stuck on white squares only), and worse, can't even generate the squares. This happened to me on my old fat PS2 (forgot which model it was), where it only generates white squares. Might be related to the BIOS not supporting it, or just plain buggy.