Access HDL partitions via uLaunchELF

okay, first things first: hello everyone!

now, i got the HDDOSD as well as BBNAV installed via an image someone else (vash i think?) posted a link to.
then i used richis mini tutorial and kermit with the region-free miniOPL to get my HDL images i installed bootable from the OSD.
now the icon kermit installs may be nice, but with around 30 games its a pretty counterproductive if you try to find a specific game
so i thought, after looking throgh the PP. partitions of the software that came with the image, that copying the icon used by the savegames
to the res folder (and renaming it) might solve my problem and make stuff looking better.

problem now is: neither the "normal" uLE 4.42 nor the hacked 4.40h one can access PP.HDL.* partitions, only PP.* partitions of the preinstalled software
as well as all non-system reserved partitions on the hdd.

my question: is there a way to access the PP.HDL partitions to try the thing explained above, or maybe someone else already tried it and failed?

thanks for any help

 

Hi!

Forget the res folder.
You have to take a hexeditor and modify the partition headers on the hdd with the icons of your choice.
So, hex hacking and fixing checksums. That's the way to get nice icons for your hdd-osd...


Rgds.

 

So your trying to get the HDD-OSD to have more then one Icon for the game used by miniOPL, "res" folder is just for PSBBN and its just a .png file.
This can help, also look at http://www.assemblergames.com/forum...cons-to-HDLoader-KERMIT-Games-on-PS2-HDD-OSD/ It have all the info you need. (on like page 5 or 6, just look and you've see it.)

 

BOOT2 = PATINFO

nuff said...

 

err what?

also, are the beggining of the files relative to the PS2ICON3D? cause i checked the various partitions while searching for my HDL ones and they always have a offset of 0x00 0x02 for the system.cnf

 

Hi!

You'll find all the needed infos in the before listed thread.


Rgds.

 

HDL game partitions have no filesystem. So thinking of the possibility of making APA partitions without filesystem, SONY added a provision to allow for install of KryptoELF files on the "Partition Information" (PATINFO) section. That section also contains the text description shown by the OSD and the display and deletion icons.

MINI OPL is supposed to be used at PATINFO.

But hey explaining the joke takes away half of the fun in it, no ?

 

miniOPL is already set up, all i want (right now that is) is that cosmetical "patch" to have different icons for all games as well as maybe different titles
im reading the mentioned thread right now, i hope i dont mess something up. maybe ill find that offset thingy too...

 

As for icon data we usually get the icons from the game itself (memory card icons work great for that purpose).

But it's your call which icon to use.

The OSD text information for HDD stuff can be either ASCII English or UTF-8 Japanese.

It's a bit confusing because MC files use S-JIS on the description file regardless of it being english or Japanese text.
(Even if it supports ASCII english there, it's frowned upon by SONY and they also prefer the text for HDD titles be in UTF-8 regardless of it being English or Japanese)

 

The HDDOSD supports only UTF-8. The reason why it seems like ASCII is supported is because UTF-8 supports ASCII characters for backward-compatibility.

The old OSD uses SJIS, and you are right about it.

All OSD versions use the same character set, regardless of the encoding used: JIS X 0208.

 

You just need to set your games save icon (from MC, copy it to usb by uLE) to the start of the "display icon" of that photo, make sure to edit the length to the length of your new icon. (Length is hex size of icon, in reverse order)
Hope that can help you.

 

okay, last question before i start actually writing the icons to disk, for the icon.sys file, am i limited to title 0 and title 1, or is there a number of titles i can add (up to a fixed number of 16 maybe)?

 

From what I know... so I may be wrong, yes you are limited to two.

 

ugh, okay, another question now: the format of the icon.sys file of the MC saves is binary, apparently it also tells which icon to use for default view, copy and delete actions. is there map like the one vash posted where i can check which icons i need to copy (and maybe also copy the size ) over to the HDD?

EDIT: okay, found the locations of the list, copy and delete icons (thanks to a quake 3 save), ill deal with the sizes.

now another thing worries me, how much space is left after the icon put by the kermit ODEM until when the game starts? (i scrolled a few sectors but it looks like they were empty, still i want to be sure as its size is 33688 bytes and almost all of my games icons go over 40KB

 

You just need to edit the icon length on the PS2ICON3D and make sure to set the delete icon's starts to the right offset. (I used a icon that's 740kb and all was good... that's the biggest icon I've seen.)

 

okay, got the icons/titles modded (looks cool ). now the very last thing (even though its offtopic) is: are games that have been made bootable through the HDDOSD still bootable via normal OPL (including the options set there) or does miniOPL get launched if i try to boot the game (and resets my settings)=

 

Mini OPL and normal OPL have nothing to do with each other. So don't worry you can launch them even with HD Loader if you feel like.

 

A mini hdloader (direct loader) would be great due to the fact there are a few rocking games that doesn't work with opl or the mini of it.


Rgds.