Updating the SMAP driver in OPL (Improved auto-negotiation + DMA support)

[Mr Edge]

No IGR problems here, but one time it gave me error 300 on startup. Got error 300 again on reconnect, so I gave up and relaunched it. It hasn't happened since, during 2 hours of testing. Both errors occurred after a long delay (i.e. OPL was timing out on SMB connect). Might just be a fluke, unless other people report it happening.

I can't comment on the autoneg thing as I've never had a problem (that I'm aware of anyway.) Was there supposed to be a way to force the duplex settings in this version? Cause I'm not seeing any options to do that.

Without mode 2 the top speed is consistently a little bit slower than in 0.9, although it's probably not noticable in practice, except for cases where the FMV streaming is just barely able to keep up. With mode 2 it actually seems to have a slightly higher top speed.

The steady transfer rate looks to be about the same in all cases.

Stuttering problems were neither alleviated nor aggravated, for my small sample of tests.

Tested using with the provided binary.

[RandQalan]

I've had this happen to me a number of times when my OPL versions are mismatched. Hence why whenever I rebuild OPL, I end up having to really "update" it, if you catch my drift ...

The renamed OPL in my IGR path (i.e. MC0/IGR/BOOT.ELF) has to be "updated" ...

The renamed OPL in my Codebreaker path (i.e "CB_launch.elf" in HDD://__BOOT) has to be "updated", too ...

I think it is because I do not have a path defined

but now it is working for me too

[Bat Rastard]

IGR works fine here ...

Was there supposed to be a way to force the duplex settings in this version?

No, that's from doctorxyz's repo. SP193 must've built this binary from the mainline ifcaro branch, hence its exclusion ...

[SP193]

No IGR problems here, but one time it gave me error 300 on startup. Got error 300 again on reconnect, so I gave up and relaunched it. It hasn't happened since, during 2 hours of testing. Both errors occurred after a long delay (i.e. OPL was timing out on SMB connect). Might just be a fluke, unless other people report it happening.

I can't comment on the autoneg thing as I've never had a problem (that I'm aware of anyway.) Was there supposed to be a way to force the duplex settings in this version? Cause I'm not seeing any options to do that.

Without mode 2 the top speed is consistently a little bit slower than in 0.9, although it's probably not noticable in practice, except for cases where the FMV streaming is just barely able to keep up. With mode 2 it actually seems to have a slightly higher top speed.

The steady transfer rate looks to be about the same in all cases.

Stuttering problems were neither alleviated nor aggravated, for my small sample of tests.

Tested using with the provided binary.

This made me check.. and yes, OPL uses its OWN DEV9 module.

Please try this build instead, although I haven't tested it at all :

Downloads/links
OPL with DMA support (mk2) - binary: Download OPNPS2LD-DMA (Mk2).ELF from Sendspace.com - send big files the easy way
OPL with DMA support (mk2) - source code: Download open-ps2-loader-dma (mk2).7z from Sendspace.com - send big files the easy way

Please note that this build might also result in sightly better HDD performance.

EDIT: About the missing options, I don't know what happened to them. :/
(But with this driver, you shouldn't need to tweak with the speed and duplex settings at all, or the problem wasn't solved)

[RandQalan]

@SP193 The mk2 has a lockup for VMC on SMB mode for me tried 5 different games and same without VMC works fine with well you get it

K maybe not just tried a different game do HD and SMB share the DMA settings

figured it out watch using hide network mode 8 for SMB of this

[SP193]

@SP193 The mk2 has a lockup for VMC on SMB mode for me tried 5 different games and same without VMC works fine with well you get it

How about the performance? I don't know about why VMC support is broken, but it could be a bug within VMC support itself. -_-"

[RandQalan]

Performance is nice it loads games faster and runs smooth with mode2 enabled and HD games work faster too it is mode 8 that is causing the problems with VMC guessing it is also hiding the VMC SMB that causes lockups

[SP193]

Performance is nice it loads games faster and runs smooth with mode2 enabled and HD games work faster too it is mode 8 that is causing the problems with VMC guessing it is also hiding the VMC SMB that causes lockups

This is all good, but I'll now be paying attention to weird/faulty behaviour as I did tweak with the integrated DEV9 driver. I really hope that I did not break anything...

Thank you for testing!

EDIT: I don't see how compatibility mode 8 would even work actually.

IRX modules can only have one instance of the ID field, and CDVDMAN already has the "cdvdman" ID field. There probably never ever was a "dev9" module registered in RAM, although I would certainly like to be proven wrong here, since it'll mean that leaving mode 8 enabled or disabled should have no effect. D:

Even if it actually does something, "cdvdman" is longer than "dev9". Wouldn't it overwrite something after the end of "dev9", causing corruption? D:

[RandQalan]

Honestlly I really do not know all that

But I do know Phantasy Star will not work for SMB without mode 8 because it always looks for connection to PS server when booted so it somehow works but on yours not sure but like I said it only locks up with mode 8 on and VMC enabled So to play PS you would have to do without VMC

What is strange is not all games have that same problem

Big edit what the frack sorry now it is working with mk2 for me maybe something on PC side was interfering man what a dumb mistake

another update and a big one this is the first version that has run Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny the way it should be only very slight slow down all most none
and for people that try FF12 turn down UDMA on HD to 2 at least that is what works for me to stop skipping FMV

[SP193]

Oh yea, one more thing guys: As this new SMAP driver supports multicasting (like the Sony SMAP driver does), your consoles' MAC address will be slightly different when this driver takes control of your SMAP hardware.

This means that if your PC was previously connected to your console (before running OPL) while running some program that uses the older homebrew SMAP driver (e.g. PS2LINK, uLaunchELF etc), your console might become temporarily unreachable as your PC will still have the old MAC address in its ARP table. You may either just wait it out (Probably about 30s) or manually clear the old ARP entry with the arp -d command. Those who know about ARP will most likely know what I'm talking about here.

If your console was not previously running anything that uses the SMAP hardware, you don't have to care about this. But I'm here to warn those users who are launching this OPL build via things like PS2LINK or a SMB share/the host: device.

Honestlly I really do not know all that

But I do know Phantasy Star will not work for SMB without mode 8 because it always looks for connection to PS server when booted so it somehow works but on yours not sure but like I said it only locks up with mode 8 on and VMC enabled So to play PS you would have to do without VMC

What is strange is not all games have that same problem

Big edit what the frack sorry now it is working with mk2 for me maybe something on PC side was interfering man what a dumb mistake

another update and a big one this is the first version that has run Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny the way it should be only very slight slow down all most none
and for people that try FF12 turn down UDMA on HD to 2 at least that is what works for me to stop skipping FMV

So in other words, whether mode 8 is enabled or not doesn't actually affect VMC?

I'm glad to know that there has been a positive improvement in performance for at least you so far.

(So please, I'll like to get more reports from the general public, so that we can reach a conclusion for this project... and hopefully a commit into the main OPL repository in due time)