I softmodded my PS2 during the comedown of an LSD fueled all-nighter yesterday, and today I cleaned up my mess and now everything works perfectly and its really nice. I also wrote a page or so of a research paper I'm meant to be working on for English. Played some Odin Sphere and MGS2. The issue I think was with my hard drive being too fast, or something about the gamestar sata adapter, maybe both, and I fixed it by changing the DMA settings of the games in OPL from the default UDMA 4 to MDMA 0, MDMA 1 or MDMA 2. Everything I've tested with those DMA settings works, and anything UDMA just flat out doesn't, other than SkyGunner.