What do these homebrew tools do?

[bungholio]

I'm kind of glancing around and not all of these applications explain what they do or what they are for exactly. I know what the emulators do. It's things like ESR, OpenPS2Loader, and whatever else programs there are. Their wiki's don't really say what the applications are for.

I also checked the first post of the "Available Homebrews" thread. I must be unlucky to have clicked 2 random links and ended up with "page does not exist" errors.

Can somebody give me a list of these programs and what they are for, or what you specifically use them for?

[lee4]

which I also could have answer you on CMP.

ESR is PS2 Homebrew software allows you play ESR patched burned backups on unmodded PS2.

OpenPS2Loader is PS2 Homebrew software allows you play PS2 game in Disc image (ISO) format from USB drive, internal HDD and SMB (Ethernet port connect to computer).

I have been using Both to play import games.

[bungholio]

Thank you. That's exactly the kind of information I was looking for. I'm guessing there are a lot more homebrew applications not here. What else is there?

[lee4]

There are dozens PS2 Homebrew software like:

ELF loaders (uLE, etc)
Media Players (SMS, "AVI, mpg, mp3, mp4 audio, JPEG")
Emulators (SNES, NES, Gameboy, Genesis, PSMS, PS1, etc.)
PS2 Game loaders (ESR, OPL, etc.)
PS2 Speciality (FMCB, GSM, PS2rd, etc.)

[bungholio]

I know what the emulators and media players are. I understand the elf loaders and game loaders now too.

I'm curious about what there are for special applications. All I know are FMCB and ps2rd, and I read about Kermit.

My main interest is figuring out a way to copy my codebreaker to my PS2's hard drive since I just bought one.

[lee4]

Legit Codebreaker CD you cant copy the CD

just use CBv92_GSHI_DAY1_ELFLDR version and use uLE to copy to HDD

[dlanor]

I know what the emulators and media players are. I understand the elf loaders and game loaders now too.

I'm curious about what there are for special applications. All I know are FMCB and ps2rd, and I read about Kermit.

Well, the remaining entry of the "PS2 Specialty" items lee4 listed is GSM.

GSM == GS Modeselector, where GS is the abbreviation of the name of the PS2 chip that handles all video mode control, and whose full name is "Graphics Synthesizer".

The basic purpose of GSM is to allow you to enforce custom video modes, regardless of what mode the running software was designed to use (covers both homebrews and commercial games).

In GSM you start by selecting any basic video mode, such as PAL, NTSC, HDTV modes, VGA modes, and then tweak it to fit your monitor/TV best. When you are satisfied with such a setup you can store it in a user mode array capable of holding 16 such setups, so you can quickly reload any one of them in future sessions. And a special role is reserved for the array slot with index 0, as that one will be auto-reactivated in every future GSM launch (unless undefined). That last feature is mainly intended to help those with VGA monitors boot directly into a visible mode (PAL/NTSC give no visible VGA output).

Whatever mode you have active when you exit from GSM (normally restarting uLaunchELF), will be enforced for the remainder of this boot session, in all other softwares regardless of what video modes they try to set. (Unless they somehow manage to crash or bypass the resident GSM driver.) The main exception from this enforcing is that you can still relaunch GSM and choose another video mode which will then take over as the 'enforced' mode, since the new instance of GSM overrides and replaces the old one.

When you sum it all up, the above means that GSM replaces all old methods for PAL/NTSC mode switching in playing out-of-region PS2 games, but also that it has many other uses that no (or few) other softwares ever allowed on the PS2. Those include the booting into VGA mode mentioned before, and the ability to force almost every game into at least one of the available HDTV modes, as well as the ability to perform PAL/NTSC mode switching even for PS1 games.

Some of these things have been done by programs such as "Xploder HDTV Player", but all such programs have been far more specialized than GSM, never allowing the fully integrated homebrew use that GSM was designed for.

You can find the main release thread of GSM in the same forum as this post, most likely just a few threads up or down from it (at present anyway).

Best regards: dlanor

[bungholio]

I should have asked this the instant you posted it Lee4, but do you have a link to that file?

That video mode tool sounds useful too. I never knew I could run any region of game with any region of PS2. I never really cared until I realized Siren 2 wasn't released in the US. Using that GS tool, I could probably make that game work now if I decided to order it. Thank you two.