WinHIIP V1.4 beta 3 PC->PS2 HD

[GadgetFreak]

The updated V1.4 Final has many improvements including Erase/Format options, Print image list, Boot File name editing and significantly improved batch options for installing/extracting images.

WinHIIP is an HDL image installer written by me over the last 4 weeks. It is written completely in VC++ and uses no external programs. It allows you to list, add, delete and change settings for images on a PS2 hard drive connected to your PC. You can batch add images from files or one at a time from your PC CD/DVD drive. The image files can be in any of the common image file formats (iso, cue/bin, nrg, mdf/mds, gi).
I hope I am not breaking any rules but the release thread for this is on another site : http://forums.psxforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=22748
It was released there as I was not aware of PS2-Scene at the time and now it is easier for me to have only the single release point to handle questions & bug reports.

[b081]

Could you, please, explain what the purpose of the status column? I've tried WinHIIP 1.3 & 1.4 and both display "Invalid" on some of my games, which, BTW, are working pretty well (games were installed with the competitor Windowz installer :-) ).

[GadgetFreak]

Could you, please, explain what the purpose of the status column? I've tried WinHIIP 1.3 & 1.4 and both display "Invalid" on some of my games, which, BTW, are working pretty well (games were installed with the competitor Windowz installer :-) ).

It is because the "competitor" does not setup the games exactly the same way as HD Loader does. For instance HDL puts a copy of the Compatability Modes, Boot File Name, Display Name, Partition Sector & Game Size in both its Settings partition & the Game Partition. When I decoded HDL's partiton & settings format I made sure that WinHIIP installed identical information. If your games installed with the other installer still work then it is because the other installer does not set all of these fields up and HDL does not check its own data that well, and I went too far

I don't consider my app to be a competitor to anybody, I'm not in a competition, I have just written a util which I needed and thought other people might use so I posted it

[ruffnutts]

Its a great app!

[stu]

thank you!!

[fuc847]

curious about the "options" (there are like 32 numbers or so). I believe these are "enable mode 1 2 3" for the original HDL. BUt i wondering why there are 32+ values? (modes?)

Is this some kinda breakthrough so that we can play previously non-incompatible games?! ;D

plz explain gadget freak

awsome SIMPLE user friend tool btw

[moditripit]

the orginal post, the creator of WINHIIP said he added the whole 32 bits of compatibilty just in case of future expansions of hdloader

http://forums.psxforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=22748

[b081]

GadgetFreak, since you've already have some sort of a PS2 file system driver, do you consider making a tool to copy files to/from common PS2 partitions (__boot, +whatever, PS2MENU Saves)? Also, you could add an option to create such partitions and to set up the file system. That would be a pretty convenient way to move around ELFs, ROMs, whatever I think.

[GadgetFreak]

GadgetFreak, since you've already have some sort of a PS2 file system driver, do you consider making a tool to copy files to/from common PS2 partitions (__boot, +whatever, PS2MENU Saves)? Also, you could add an option to create such partitions and to set up the file system. That would be a pretty convenient way to move around ELFs, ROMs, whatever I think.

I haven't actually used the PFS file system for WinHIIP as the HDL Partition's don't use it, it's a custom format. The HDL Settings partition uses it but the files are always in the same place so I cheated and just go to the appropriate location and make the neccesary changes. I do have all the info on the PFS and have half written the code to R/W with it, but had stopped when I realised I didn't really need it for WinHIIP. Perhaps when I have WinHIIP more complete I will revive the code and write some kind of explorer add in.
The custom partition is one of the reasons why an FTP server on the PS2 is not such a straight forward option for transferring images.

[b081]

I see. I have my observations on the "file system" HD Loader uses. I suspect the first 4MB of the main partition are predefined by Sony (for PS2 browser and, possibly, PSBBNav HDD handling), but since I live in Europe (and it looks like we're not going to get the PS2 HDD this year), I have no way to verify this hypothesis. The rest is 1:1 ISO image (2048 bytes per sector). And, according to my experiments, HD Loader doesn't really care about the information in the "Settings" partition.

BTW, since you're not using a file system driver, how did you solve the problems with file size growing? That doesn't affect file contents only, but (journalling) file system metadata information (file size, nodes, ...). How did you solve the checksum "issue" (I have suspected, that the 2nd or 3rd dword were a checksum; don't remember anymore :-) ) in the gamelist.log?