PS2ESDL iLink and Seagate FreeAgent Xtreme drive

[mark_k]

[I figured I'd create a new thread now PS2EDSL has its own sub-forum, rather than bloat the huge main thread even more.]

I have tested PS2EDSL 0.821 with its iLink plugin and my 2TB Seagate FreeAgent Xtreme USB/Firewire/eSATA hard drive. Apart from no PS2 programs supporting >1TB partitions, this seems to work fine over Firewire. But while PS2ESDL can load the game list over USB, all the games I tested over USB hung at a black screen; see below. (The games load fine over USB with Open PS2 Loader.)

Performance via Firewire is significantly better than USB. Strangely, when I try loading games over USB now (with iLink cable disconnected), it seems most/all just hang with a black screen. Does that happen for anyone else with the games listed below? Maybe the iLink plugin loading breaks the USB-loading code somehow???

I've only tested a few games so far (on a SCPH-39003 console), but here's a summary:

• Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance. This game usually has a lot of "stuttering" when you rotate the view or move through the world. There is still some stuttering running over iLink, but much less than with OPL/USB.
• Midway Arcade Treasures 3. Over iLink: seems to work fine, however the game complains about a corrupt memory card when trying to save. Over USB: hang at black screen.
• Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy. Over iLink: seems to work fine. "Making of" video is almost stutter-free unlike when using OPL/USB. Hang at black screen with PS2ESDL/USB.
• Stolen. This one's interesting! It seems to work fine with PS2ESDL over iLink. Over USB however, it doesn't work with either Open PS2 Loader or PS2ESDL. In summary, Stolen compatibility looks like this:
  PS2ESDL iLink: Works fine
  PS2ESDL USB: Hangs at black screen.
  OPL USB: Hangs at HIP Games logo animation (sound keeps looping)
  OPL SMB/network: Works fine
• Vexx. Works fine, title screen FMV and trailer videos smooth. Once the console hung when I selected a trailer to play, but I couldn't repeat the issue. The game shows a message about no memory card detected initially, which doesn't appear loading with OPL/USB. The game can load and save games okay, it's just the initial message which is wrong. I'm using a non-Sony 64MB card.

After using PS2ESDL/iLink a little, I have some suggestions:

• The ability to choose which connection to use (USB or iLink) would be very useful. And maybe let the user choose the initial/default choice if both USB and iLink are connected. I'm not sure whether my drive works with both USB and iLink cables connected, but I think it might. With both cables connected, I ran PS2ESDL. It loaded the game list via USB (I think). I then unplugged the USB cable and PS2ESDL automatically loaded the game list via iLink. At the moment PS2ESDL always uses USB if there is a drive connected to USB, right?
• In-game reset is sorely needed. My drive spins down when the iLink connection is reset (which happens when you press the console reset button). So in between every game, resetting and running PS2ESDL again causes the drive to spin down then spin up again ⟹ unnecessary wear-and-tear on the drive.
• Some kind of benchmark feature would be good. Not just for showing the difference between USB and iLink transfer rates, but perhaps to differentiate between better and worse-performing USB drives/card readers etc. You could have two transfer rate tests, one reading 2048 bytes at a time, the other a larger amount, say 32KB. (For example, a particular card reader/memory card combination might have higher latency than others, so a benchmark could show that using that with OPL or PS2ESDL wouldn't be a good idea.)

My iLink-related wish list (not just for PS2ESDL):

• Would it be possible to develop a replacement USBD.IRX which supports both USB and iLink devices? Then it might be possible to get uLaunchELF to work with iLink drives.
• It's possible to network (TCP/IP) over Firewire. If support for that could be added to OPL, users could connect their PS2 to their PC with a Firewire cable and load games from a shared folder on the PC. No need to buy a network adapter for your fat PS2.

[SP193]

[I figured I'd create a new thread now PS2EDSL has its own sub-forum, rather than bloat the huge main thread even more.]

Thank you very much!

Performance via Firewire is significantly better than USB. Strangely, when I try loading games over USB now (with iLink cable disconnected), it seems most/all just hang with a black screen. Does that happen for anyone else with the games listed below? Maybe the iLink plugin loading breaks the USB-loading code somehow???

That is strange. I have not observed any change in compatibility at all. Does this happen, even after you remove the i.Link plugin?

By right, nothing should change because only the necessary drivers will be loaded after a game has been selected, and the drivers are provided in groups. That means that if a disk is connected via i.Link, only the i.Link drivers will be retained in memory and loaded during evert IOP reset. The same thing goes for USB device support.

I've only tested a few games so far (on a SCPH-39003 console), but here's a summary:[*]Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance. This game usually has a lot of "stuttering" when you rotate the view or move through the world. There is still some stuttering running over iLink, but much less than with OPL/USB.

Ah, the legendary game that refuses to be run at full speed from most interfaces that are not as fast as the CD/DVD drive.

[*]Midway Arcade Treasures 3. Over iLink: seems to work fine, however the game complains about a corrupt memory card when trying to save. Over USB: hang at black screen.

This is strange. It might be related to this stack overflow/buffer overrun bug in CDVDMAN that I strongly believe does exist... but I can't seem to locate it.

[*]Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy. Over iLink: seems to work fine. "Making of" video is almost stutter-free unlike when using OPL/USB. Hang at black screen with PS2ESDL/USB.[*]Stolen. This one's interesting! It seems to work fine with PS2ESDL over iLink. Over USB however, it doesn't work with either Open PS2 Loader or PS2ESDL. In summary, Stolen compatibility looks like this:
PS2ESDL iLink: Works fine
PS2ESDL USB: Hangs at black screen.
OPL USB: Hangs at HIP Games logo animation (sound keeps looping)
OPL SMB/network: Works fine

Hmm... looks like this game is sensitive towards how quickly data is transferred, either because it has a timeout mechanism or just doesn't call sceCdSync() before attempting to read the data that is read in.

[*]Vexx. Works fine, title screen FMV and trailer videos smooth. Once the console hung when I selected a trailer to play, but I couldn't repeat the issue. The game shows a message about no memory card detected initially, which doesn't appear loading with OPL/USB. The game can load and save games okay, it's just the initial message which is wrong. I'm using a non-Sony 64MB card.

The fact that some of the game's functionality has been affected is not a good sign. It's probably related to the point I mentioned above.

After using PS2ESDL/iLink a little, I have some suggestions:[*]The ability to choose which connection to use (USB or iLink) would be very useful. And maybe let the user choose the initial/default choice if both USB and iLink are connected. I'm not sure whether my drive works with both USB and iLink cables connected, but I think it might. With both cables connected, I ran PS2ESDL. It loaded the game list via USB (I think). I then unplugged the USB cable and PS2ESDL automatically loaded the game list via iLink. At the moment PS2ESDL always uses USB if there is a drive connected to USB, right?

Currently, PS2ESDL uses device priorities. The built-in device drivers will always be loaded first, which means that USB device support will be loaded first. After that, it starts loading plugins in the order of their filenames (e.g. extension0.plg will be loaded before extension1.plg).

However, the device that ends up getting selected as the source device really depends on how quickly the driver to initializes the device and gives PS2ESDL access to it.

[*]In-game reset is sorely needed. My drive spins down when the iLink connection is reset (which happens when you press the console reset button). So in between every game, resetting and running PS2ESDL again causes the drive to spin down then spin up again ⟹ unnecessary wear-and-tear on the drive.

Ah. As usual, I can't do this now. D:
This and VMC seem to be the most important features that are still missing from PS2ESDL.

[*]Some kind of benchmark feature would be good. Not just for showing the difference between USB and iLink transfer rates, but perhaps to differentiate between better and worse-performing USB drives/card readers etc. You could have two transfer rate tests, one reading 2048 bytes at a time, the other a larger amount, say 32KB. (For example, a particular card reader/memory card combination might have higher latency than others, so a benchmark could show that using that with OPL or PS2ESDL wouldn't be a good idea.)

Hmm... why not? Sounds like a good idea. But I can't implement this now, as I'm busy with a number of other projects at the moment.

My iLink-related wish list (not just for PS2ESDL):
Would it be possible to develop a replacement USBD.IRX which supports both USB and iLink devices? Then it might be possible to get uLaunchELF to work with iLink drives.

It is possible, but it just doesn't make any sense. It'll obviously be better to modify uLaunchELF to support the i.Link port, but I don't think that write support will ever work well as the i.Link FIFOs seem to have a flaw: Byte-swapping cannot be controlled. The IOP will have to re-byte-swap the data in memory, and that causes a lot of overhead.

[mark_k]

I've done some more testing. The problem with PS2ESDL hanging with a black screen for all(?) games over USB happens only with my 1TB partition/2TB drive FreeAgent Xtreme. Loading the same game files from a different 320GB USB drive works correctly. (That's with or without the iLink plugin.)

So there seems to be some incompatibility between PS2ESDL's USB game-loading code and the particular partition layout of the 2TB drive. As I mentioned though, PS2ESDL does correctly load the list of games, it just seems to hang when starting to load a game. Very strange! I tried renaming the iLink plugin just in case that was the cause, but there was no difference. (And seeing as games on the same drive/partition work fine over iLink and with Open PS2 Loader over USB that's probably not the cause of this strange problem.)

I gave details of the working 320GB partition in this thread (2TB partition not recognised by OPL, PS2ESDL or uLaunchELF). In case it's relevant, here's info on the 1TB partition I'm using.

# disktype /dev/sdd

--- /dev/sdd
Block device, size 1.819 TiB (2000398934016 bytes)
DOS/MBR partition map
Partition 1: 1.000 TiB (1099511595520 bytes, 2147483585 sectors from 63)
  Type 0x0C (Win95 FAT32 (LBA))
  FAT32 file system (hints score 4 of 5)
    Volume size 1.000 TiB (1099243126784 bytes, 33546238 clusters of 32 KiB)

# fsck.vfat -v -n /dev/sdd1
dosfsck 3.0.9, 31 Jan 2010, FAT32, LFN
Checking we can access the last sector of the filesystem
Boot sector contents:
System ID "MSWIN4.1"
Media byte 0xf8 (hard disk)
       512 bytes per logical sector
     32768 bytes per cluster
       128 reserved sectors
First FAT starts at byte 65536 (sector 128)
         2 FATs, 32 bit entries
 134201344 bytes per FAT (= 262112 sectors)
Root directory start at cluster 9713177 (arbitrary size)
Data area starts at byte 268468224 (sector 524352)
  33546238 data clusters (1099243126784 bytes)
63 sectors/track, 255 heads
        63 hidden sectors
2147483585 sectors total
Checking for unused clusters.
Checking free cluster summary.
/dev/sdd1: 380 files, 9713175/33546238 clusters

About Stolen: testing with the 320GB USB drive, PS2ESDL loads it but hangs at the HIP Games logo screen with sound looping, the same place as Open PS2 Loader hangs.
Midway Arcade Treasures 3: I couldn't get OPL to load that at all over USB (it hangs with black screen after a copyright message screen, if I remember correctly). So I can't say whether the same memory card issue is present with OPL.

But for Vexx, I tested again loading it two times over USB (from the 320GB drive) and twice over iLink. Both times over iLink, it initially showed a memory card not found type message. Selecting Retry the game detected the card. Both times over USB, the card was detected first time. Could that be due to faster I/O over iLink? Maybe the game does something like this? Init card, read data from disc, try reading from card. If my non-Sony card initialises slower than an official one, that could explain why Vexx doesn't detect it first time when loading over iLink.

Currently, PS2ESDL uses device priorities. The built-in device drivers will always be loaded first, which means that USB device support will be loaded first. After that, it starts loading plugins in the order of their filenames (e.g. extension0.plg will be loaded before extension1.plg).

However, the device that ends up getting selected as the source device really depends on how quickly the driver to initializes the device and gives PS2ESDL access to it.

Ideally that's something which could be changed in future. For example I'd like to have both a USB drive and iLink drive connected for testing. (OPL can't use the iLink drive of course.) I think PS2ESDL will mostly default to USB, especially as the iLink drive is a 3.5" 7200rpm which takes several seconds to spin up/become ready.

[mark_k]

I've been experimenting some more with having both USB and iLink drives connected. It's worth mentioning that my USB drive is actually a removable drive; an RDX dock with a 320GB cartridge. It acts like a generic removable drive. That's important because it seems PS2ESDL's removable drive support isn't perfect yet.

With empty USB dock and iLink drive connected, starting PS2ESDL it just hangs at a black screen. The iLink drive spins up but doesn't seem to be accessed. So PS2ESDL doesn't fall back to access the iLink drive if the USB dock is present but empty. Loading a cartridge in the USB dock didn't "un-hang" PS2ESDL.

Next test was with a cartridge in the USB drive. On starting PS2ESDL the iLink drive spins up but PS2ESDL loads the game list (and games) from the USB drive. That's as expected given the current preference for USB over iLink. If, after PS2ESDL has loaded the game list from it, I eject the cartridge, PS2ESDL doesn't fall back to reading the game list from the iLink drive. If I insert the cartridge again, trying to start a game PS2ESDL hangs at the "Loading..." message.

Final test was again with a cartridge in the USB drive. On starting PS2ESDL it loads the game list from USB as mentioned. If I unplug the USB cable however, PS2ESDL does fall back to reading the iLink game list and loading games from there.

So in summary: PS2ESDL does fall back to reading the game list from the iLink drive if the USB drive is unplugged, which is good. But it doesn't fall back if the cartridge is ejected.

[SP193]

I've been experimenting some more with having both USB and iLink drives connected. It's worth mentioning that my USB drive is actually a removable drive; an RDX dock with a 320GB cartridge. It acts like a generic removable drive. That's important because it seems PS2ESDL's removable drive support isn't perfect yet.

Actually, it's been always like this since you first told me about this issue: There is no detection for the removal of media. The USB Mass Storage Device driver was originally not designed for that.

I might try to do something about that if I start working on the USB Mass Storage Device driver. Currently, it's the same driver that is used in all other homebrew software that have been released since 2009 or so.

With empty USB dock and iLink drive connected, starting PS2ESDL it just hangs at a black screen. The iLink drive spins up but doesn't seem to be accessed. So PS2ESDL doesn't fall back to access the iLink drive if the USB dock is present but empty. Loading a cartridge in the USB dock didn't "un-hang" PS2ESDL.

It could be that the USB Mass Storage device driver crashed because it doesn't expect the media to not be present. :/