HD Homebrew Project Feature Requests

[barf]

This thread is for suggestions wishes for HD Homebrew Project.

Suggestions already observed:

• Network source
• USB source
• Emulators to run as part of HD Homebrew Project
• SMS to run as part of HD Homebrew Project

[romz]

SMS to run as part of HD Homebrew Project

What does it mean? Does SMS need a virtual CD/DVD media or a virtual memory card?

[barf]

I do not really know at this time, I just made a list of what I read in different threads.

I would picture most of them to run as iso images myself,
I do run SNES-Station and PGEN as iso images in HDLoader,
but if it could also execute ELFs I assume that might be what was in the suggestion.

My personal excitment is the potential of running Downhill Domination from HDD :-)

[donutman]

my suggestion is that someone moves on from this memcard stuff(dont get me wrong, i'm in love with it) and start with the actual "playing games off of hdd" concept

[Polo35]

Originally Posted by donutman

my suggestion is that someone moves on from this memcard stuff(dont get me wrong, i'm in love with it) and start with the actual "playing games off of hdd" concept

You maybe didn't really understand how hombrew projects work, so i'll explain you:

One day a guy have an idea and want to see it working on his favourites machine ( yup favourites, because there is lot of other great plateform with better cpu/ram ), so he work at side of his real life 1 year or more to have a result, which is not all time near what he firstly though.
So he restart writing codes to improve his idea, but something happen in his life and the project have to wait...
For how many time ? He don't know. Maybe a year, or more... Sometime project just dead like Altimit, Ps2OS, ... , but sometime it survives, and restart growing.

I think hd hombrew project is at this step, Romz have his own real life at side of ps2 scene, we have to thank him for all time he pass to write codes he released here.
And don't forget everybody though hd hombrew project was dead some month ago.

So, why not doing it by yourself instead of saying nothing ?

Best regards

Polo

[hikarutilmitt]

I agree, any progress is good progress.

Also, a suggestion that may or may not be possible for HD Homebrew:

-exiting the game back to the game selection screen via some user-specified key combination
-if the above is possible, turning off the system the same way and/or via the game selection screen
-forcing a game into 480p mode even if it doesn't support it internally, but not the crummy way it "works" for the Xploder HDTV Player

[romz]

Originally Posted by donutman

my suggestion is that someone moves on from this memcard stuff(dont get me wrong, i'm in love with it) and start with the actual "playing games off of hdd" concept

The "memcard stuff" is "adrenaline" for the project. The project was almost dead since most people didn't believe that they see anything usable someday. You can find an example there: http://psx-scene.com/forums/ide-hdd-...saves-hdd.html

[micpet1997]

Originally Posted by hikarutilmitt

I agree, any progress is good progress.

Also, a suggestion that may or may not be possible for HD Homebrew:

-exiting the game back to the game selection screen via some user-specified key combination
-if the above is possible, turning off the system the same way and/or via the game selection screen
-forcing a game into 480p mode even if it doesn't support it internally, but not the crummy way it "works" for the Xploder HDTV Player

I agree with the implementation of these suggestions if possible

[barf]

Originally Posted by hikarutilmitt

I agree, any progress is good progress.

Also, a suggestion that may or may not be possible for HD Homebrew:

-exiting the game back to the game selection screen via some user-specified key combination
-if the above is possible, turning off the system the same way and/or via the game selection screen
-forcing a game into 480p mode even if it doesn't support it internally, but not the crummy way it "works" for the Xploder HDTV Player

Well these are from my expectations all optional fun stuff, and fully achievable if you find the right person to implement it,
the exiting has been queried for a long time and it is very strange that it has not yet been made; in let’s say HDLoader,
perhaps it’s related to the fact that there is a poweroff function and not really an easily accessible softreset function?

[dlanor]

Originally Posted by barf

Well these are from my expectations all optional fun stuff, and fully achievable if you find the right person to implement it,
the exiting has been queried for a long time and it is very strange that it has not yet been made; in let’s say HDLoader,

No, that is not at all strange, since implementing this as it is always described (appx "exiting back to the GUI") is in fact completely impossible, since there is no way to keep a GUI program resident while playing generic PS2 games. Many games use virtually all available RAM of both the EE and the IOP memory spaces, so keeping a GUI program intact in RAM during such games is simply not possible.

The only generic way to get back into a game-launching GUI for normal PS2 games is thus not by "exiting back" to it, but only through a complete reboot of the console, repeating all the steps that were required to launch the GUI in the first place.

So the only real improvement of having a 'soft' way of triggering such a reboot would be to relieve the user of the necessity of twice touching the reset button (once to turn the console off, and then once more to turn it on again). Most other delays and procedures would have to be identical to the first launch.

Best regards: dlanor

[luisito]

Originally Posted by dlanor

No, that is not at all strange, since implementing this as it is always described (appx "exiting back to the GUI") is in fact completely impossible, since there is no way to keep a GUI program resident while playing generic PS2 games. Many games use virtually all available RAM of both the EE and the IOP memory spaces, so keeping a GUI program intact in RAM during such games is simply not possible.

Well, something has to be kept in memory in order to still work from hdd, so at least on the iop side some code is still working, isn't it?

Originally Posted by dlanor

So the only real improvement of having a 'soft' way of triggering such a reboot would be to relieve the user of the necessity of twice touching the reset button (once to turn the console off, and then once more to turn it on again). Most other delays and procedures would have to be identical to the first launch.

Yes, but it's not only that. If i'm not mistaken, when using hdloader you must press reset button some seconds to turn off the ps2 (and power off the hard drive). If this could be avoided somehow (this power off/on cycle), it would be more "friendly" on the hardware, i think.

I don't have any idea if the resident part of hdloader, while on a game, can "reset" the console by itself from a poweroff handler, if a poweroff handler can exit without powering off the console, nor if a already powered hdd can mess with the loading of some irx or whatever, so this is only pure speculation

[romz]

Originally Posted by ****ito

Well, something has to be kept in memory in order to still work from hdd, so at least on the iop side some code is still working, isn't it?

EE side typically has (AFAIK, it can be removed with Mode 3 in the HD Loader) resident code to handle IOP updates and it replaces real C/DVD modules with HD loader's modules. I think it is possible to add more code to start an ELF when it's possible to hold EE resident code (AFAIK, some games clear memory to remove Action Replay, GameShark, CodeBreaker and other similar software). However, such feature (return to game selection) can affect game perfomance in some cases. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that PS2 hardware and external perpherials (USB devices, for example) will work fine after that. I remember OPM's demodiscs asked to reset console after playing the certain games while the other demos provide an option to exit.

Originally Posted by ****ito

Yes, but it's not only that. If i'm not mistaken, when using hdloader you must press reset button some seconds to turn off the ps2 (and power off the hard drive). If this could be avoided somehow (this power off/on cycle), it would be more "friendly" on the hardware, i think.

HD Loader will turn off the console after single button press. You just need to wait for a couple of seconds.

[barf]

But is there a softreset like there obviously is softpoweroff? ( hdl_dump 192.168.1.10 poweroff )

That way games could be patched in their menues to have reset as one of the options.

[romz]

Originally Posted by barf

But is there a softreset like there obviously is softpoweroff? ( hdl_dump 192.168.1.10 poweroff )

That way games could be patched in their menues to have reset as one of the options.

A generic power-off handler looks like this:

void power_off_thread(u_long arg)
{
 int stat;

 /* waiting for power-off event */
 WaitSema(arg);

 /* closing all PFS files */
 devctl("pfs:", PDIOC_CLOSEALL, NULL, 0, NULL, 0);

 /* turning off DEV9 (Network Adaptor) - for new versions of DEV9/HDD modules */
 devctl("dev9x:", DDIOC_OFF, NULL, 0, NULL, 0);

 /* turning off console */
 sceCdPowerOff(&stat)
}

AFAIK, there is no function like sceSoftReset() in official SCE's libraries so games are unable to reboot console by themself. I believe there is a way to perform a software reboot but it requires knowledge of system hardware registers. It's a DEV9 module who writes some values to hardware registers to disable "reset" button so "reset" button just generates INUM_CDROM interrupt instead of instant reboot.

[barf]

Originally Posted by romz

A generic power-off handler looks like this:

void power_off_thread(u_long arg)
{
 int stat;

 /* waiting for power-off event */
 WaitSema(arg);

 /* closing all PFS files */
 devctl("pfs:", PDIOC_CLOSEALL, NULL, 0, NULL, 0);

 /* turning off DEV9 (Network Adaptor) - for new versions of DEV9/HDD modules */
 devctl("dev9x:", DDIOC_OFF, NULL, 0, NULL, 0);

 /* turning off console */
 sceCdPowerOff(&stat)
}

AFAIK, there is no function like sceSoftReset() in official SCE's libraries so games are unable to reboot console by themself. I believe there is a way to perform a software reboot but it requires knowledge of system hardware registers. It's a DEV9 module who writes some values to hardware registers to disable "reset" button so "reset" button just generates INUM_CDROM interrupt instead of instant reboot.

I remember from the days of C64 and Amiga asm that we could crash the system by putting some odd values in interupt pointers, but for those machines there were also system functiont that handled softreset.

That must be similar to what your describe.

[romz]

Originally Posted by barf

I remember from the days of C64 and Amiga asm that we could crash the system by putting some odd values in interupt pointers, but for those machines there were also system functiont that handled softreset.

That must be similar to what your describe.

I mean it could be possible to reboot console by using system registers but I doubt anyone (except for system designers or guys who made modchips) knows much about those registers. A DEV9 driver writes some 32-bit values to the registers and "reset" becomes unavailable while system fan starts to spin faster.

[c0rderr0y]

Built in cheat device

[ssjkakaroto]

What I really would like to see is compatibility with other ELF's, so that we could run ULE or HDL with the virtual memcard running. I know there's a memory restriction but if you guys could overcome that it would be awesome!