Playstation 2 External Storage Device games Loader (PS2ESDL)

[SP193]

EDIT 2010/05/08: Added link to the official compatibility list
EDIT 2010/11/14: v0.800 Open Beta was released.
EDIT 2010/12/01: Added some photographs and videos of PS2ESDL v0.800 OB.
EDIT 2010/12/14: Uploaded PS2DCDMP v0.98A.
EDIT 2010/12/20: Uploaded PS2DCDMP v0.98B (See the downloads section of this post for details).
EDIT 2011/01/05: Updated the guide. A new guide with colour pictures was uploaded.
EDIT 2011/02/02: PS2ESDL v0.810 released.
EDIT 2011/03/21: PS2ESDL v0.811D-I (PS2ESDL with iLink/IEEE1394 support) and PS2DCDMP v0.98C released.
EDIT 2011/06/21: PS2ESDL v0.820 and PS2DCDMP v0.99 released! Read this post for more information: http://psx-scene.com/forums/f19/play...tml#post841723
EDIT 2011/06/22: PS2ESDL v0.821 has been released! ISO9660 disc image game list blanking bug fixed.
EDIT 2011/06/28: Official skinning guide uploaded! (Documents advance skinning options).
EDIT 2012/02/29: iLink plugin v0.98H released! http://psx-scene.com/forums/f253/pla...tml#post957292 (Playstation 2 External Storage Device games Loader (PS2ESDL))
EDIT 2012/09/26: Some links are temporarily down.
EDIT 2012/10/06: Restored download links

The downloads/links section is located at the bottom of this post.

Hi all,

The Playstation 2 External Storage Device games Loader (PS2ESDL) is my own Playstation 2 game loader, and it supports external devices (Currently only USB devices).

I started on this project in March 2009, and am now making it's first official release (As an Open Beta).

I continued it's development after it's *termination* in January 2010 - because other game loaders that support USB devices really cause some games that stream their videos to really perform really badly.

Nobody has to use it - after all, OpenPS2Loader is already able to do what my loader can do, but I completed it for my own personal achievement, and because I wanted to play my anime games with LESS FMV stuttering.

How to use this
Official guide: - Playstation 2 External Storage Device game Loader (PS2ESDL) -

Official skinning guide:
Official skinning guide: http://ichiba.geocities.jp/ysai187/P...nningGuide.htm

New! 2010/11/21: How to make compatibility reports if your game isn't listed in the compatibility list (Or was tested with an older version of PS2ESDL):
Send me a PM (Or send a e-mail message to my e-mail address: ysai187@yahoo.com) with these information in this format:

<game's full title> <disc ID> - <status> <Options tried> <V/M/IG/LT performance ratings>

V/M/IG/LT performance ratings -> Video/Menu/In-Game/Loading Times performance ratings 

1 = worse, 5 = best, 0 = failure/not passable, S = Exceptionally good, - = Not applicable

Examples:
Triggerheart Exelica Enhanced - SLPM-55052 - Working - 3/5/5/4
Rosario to Vampire CAPU 2 - SLPM-55189 - Working (Use a 32-sector cache to kill video stuttering) - S/5/5/5

---------------------------------------
Update 2010/12/01 - Added some photographs and videos of PS2ESDL v0.800 OB:

Photographs (Click to open an enlarged version in a new browser window):



From left to right:

1. PS2ESDL v0.800 OB (Displaying a list of games with 6 of them written in Japanese and one written in English)
2. Gameplay of Triggerheart Exelica Enhanced
3. The main menu of Triggerheart Exelica Enhanced
4. A part of it's opening video.
5. Another part of it's opening video.

Some videos of me running some of my games (Thanks to JNABK for helping to get these to work right!):
Videos removed due to the new site policy. They all show old footage of the capabilities of the obsolete PS2ESDL v0.800 OB anyway.

From top to bottom:

1. Metal Slug Anthology [SLUS-21550]
2. Rosario to Vampire Capu 2: Koi to Yume no Rhapsodia [SLPM-55189]
3. Sugoi! Arcana Heart 2 [SLPM-55147]

All of the videos demonstrate PS2ESDL's ability to display game titles that are written in Japanese.
When I launch the game, the game list shown has 6 game titles written in Japanese and 2 game titles written in English.

Additional notes:
PS2ESDL v0.821 supports only the PS2ESDL v1.22 game format! If you are using an older format (E.g. for PS2ESDL v0.810 and older), please use the upgrader utility.

Downloads/Links
PS2ESDL v0.821: http://www.mediafire.com/?g514yl2n7r2940p
IEEE1394/Firewire/iLink plugin/extension for v0.820/v0.821 (v0.98H): http://psx-scene.com/forums/f253/pla...tml#post957292 (Playstation 2 External Storage Device games Loader (PS2ESDL))
PS2ESDL official homepage: - Playstation 2 External Storage Device game Loader (PS2ESDL) -
PS2ESDL official game compatibility list: PS2ESDL compatibility list
PS2DCDMP v0.99 + Upgrader (v1.20 to v1.22) + FixCRC utility: PS2DCDMP_099+Upgrader.7z
PS2DCDMP homepage: - Playstation 2 External Storage Device game Loader (PS2ESDL) -
The "sister" post where I posted about this too: New PS2 game loader: New PS2 game loader: Playstation 2 External Device game Loader (PS2ESDL)

PS2DCDMP is PS2ESDL's own native game installer. Check out the link to PS2DCDMP's homepage for more information.

The source code to all software listed in this post can be found on PS2ESDL's homepage.

If anyone wishes to link to the file(s), please just link to the home page.
If the link(s) goes down, I'll try to re-upload the resource(s) somewhere else.

That's all for this extremely long, cluttered and complicated post.

[yoshi314]

Sector compression support. I used LZO, but I did not include that in this release as I broke it. So I just disabled the compression stuff. So add your compression and replace the LZO lines with your decompressor's.

ooh, interesting.

i kind of wondered why didn't hd loader or usb advance have it? does it make a big performance hit ?

UDPTTY, patched to work with IOMAN.

what is that, a network debug console ?

[SP193]

i kind of wondered why didn't hd loader or usb advance have it? does it make a big performance hit ?

It depends largely on the game. I tested on one game, and found that 70% of the sectors can be compressed with LZO to almost 1% of their original size. Maybe it's not accurate, as PS2DCDMP only calculated the average compression rate per percent increment.

But yea, it should have quite an impact. With speed increases and irregular transfer rate, timming issues may occur for certain games (The first hacked HDLoader with UDMA support had such a problem). Hence a system to even out the transfer rate time may be needed, but not implemented in PS2ESDL. Should not be too hard to implement though.

I suppose that "older" loaders don't have compression is because it makes their code heavier, and you need a proper sector index system (Or how would you address sectors that have irregular sizes after compression?). Such a system is already implemented in PS2ESDL (But the sector addressing part of CDVDMAN may be damaged, but should be easily fixed). Also, it may also be that their programmers want to avoid licensing issues.

what is that, a network debug console ?

Yes.

Funny why many "modern" PS2 programmer seem to have forgotten about UDPTTY (To me at least). It's actually the driver for printf() support. The OPS2L programmers use another module of similar functionality I believe, but they do not call printf().

UDPTTY was written by mrbrown, and is included with it's source in all recent PS2SDK revisions.

Usually, calling printf() like you would on a PC would not do anything on a normal PS2. UDPTTY would redirect stdout to a puklink compatible console.

[yoshi314]

i was mostly interested in an ability to implement lzo into hdld_svr - i wonder how would that compare to rle, which is supposedly implemented since around 0.7.0 in there somewhere (i'm having a hard time navigating hdld_svr sources ) . timing is not that critical there.

having it as an option in cdvdman itself would be interesting as well.

hmm i never knew about udptty. will have to check that out sometime. i'm just trying to get started with ps2 programming, though.

[j4m3s]

did somebody tried this? did it worked? cant compile it..

[SP193]

Compilable. I compiled this with a generic PS2SDK setup (Compiled with revision 1664, and won't compile with the old GSHI PS2SDK builds).

Also, I don't think that it can be compiled on those PS2SDK setups that were modified to compile OPNUSBLD, or uLE...

Can you post any log messages here and your PS2SDK version if you still can't resolve your issue? I just dug up my SP2ESDL work files and compiled it again 2-3 days ago...


Also, please note that the PS2ESDL revision released here is more-or-less non-functional. It can load ELFs, but not run them properly for some weird reason (EE crash?)...

But the CDVDMAN and CDVDFSV modules are completed (Similar to OPNUSBLD's modules, but with more functions emulated and completed).

Potential features of a "newer" PS2ESDL revision (Internal testing so far, but may be released in the future as a complete program):

I am now writing a "new" IOP core (Totally no EE core in RAM during game runs) ... plus no "hacking". The IOP core is designed to work along SCE's BIOS features (Or loopholes for some) without force... by exploiting the way the PS2 resets the IOP.

Also, I've modified USBHDFSD to remove write support, and FAT12 support. So USBHDFSD got reduced in size from 48KB to 31KB.

[uchihasasuke000]

I Thought your project was terminated? so you'll gonna be contributing a "new" IOP core for the OPL or you'll gonna revive your PS2ESDL?

[yoshi314]

Also, I've modified USBHDFSD to remove write support, and FAT12 support. So USBHDFSD got reduced in size from 48KB to 31KB.

why was it in there (fat12) in the first place? isn't that a filesystem designed for floppy disks?

[SP193]

I Thought your project was terminated? so you'll gonna be contributing a "new" IOP core for the OPL or you'll gonna revive your PS2ESDL?

It is officially "terminated". I can't commit any constant amount of time or effort to continue. But in some of my free time, I still take out my old code and play around with it (It has, although is a failure, been my biggest and best programming project after all).

If I do release a new core, it will be for PS2ESDL and available for the programmers of OPL to use. Right now, I need to test my theory on how this system works.

The theory behind this:

rom0:UDNL supports a IOPRP image list. Therefore we must replace the REBOOT module in IOP memory with a 100% rom0 compatible (No game IOPRP image contains a REBOOT module) that tampers the IOP reset command line to append the path to our replacement IOPRP image containing a modified IOPBTCONF, CDVDMAN, CDVDFSV and REBOOT (Hence REBOOT will load itself recursively).

REBOOT is the module responsible for receiving IOP reset requests from the EE.

However, for some reason, I can't reset the IOP with a image from mass: ... anyone here knows why? Reseting the IOP with rom0:EELOADCNF works fine... grr.

The full command for such a reset would have been something like "rom0:UDNL mass:/PS2ESDL/IOPRP_TMP.IMG". This is to install the replacement REBOOT module on the first run.

why was it in there (fat12) in the first place? isn't that a filesystem designed for floppy disks?

You're not totally correct here. FAT12 was designed and used for disks <=32MB in size. Hence it was used as the dominant filesystem for HDDs, floppies and diskettes for any pre-4.0 DOS OSes. But why there was FAT12 support in USBHDFSD is quite beyond me.

Maybe it's there to support the <=32MB USB thumb drives, but those are too small to install any PS2 game on (Plus FAT16 works fine on such drives).

A little offtopic here but...

I still think that FAT32 is the best filesystem for such USB loader projects. FAT32 is known to have quite good performance (Plus it supports drives up to 2TB), and most versions of Windows supports it out-of-the-box (Hence easiest for inexperienced users to setup such drives).

[yoshi314]

it's pretty harsh to call it a failure. after all, it was a learning experience; wasn't it?

or some reason, I can't reset the IOP with a image from mass:

usb timeout? i don't know whether it exists on ps2, since it detects devices pretty fast, but still...