For the folks with DESR(PSX) units at their homes...

haha, nice!

 

my question is will this bring dead HDD units back to life?
or is this just for still working units

 

Atm just for working units... But I somehow managed to make mine boot with a SONY 40GB HDD...

 

Haha ! New breakthrough:

Was able to fix uLE to work with the HDD interface on my DESR-7500 (of course, as usual it's mostly SP193 merit as I just put stuff he made to good use here) and now I can boot PS2 disc games with a bad DVR laser (junk unit), create and delete game partitions.
What I can't do yet is play PS2 games using Open PS2 Loader as it's HDD drivers cause the DVRP device to crash. Working a fix (it's the same bug which prevented uLE from working).

To do:
Automated installer for the uLE/Open PS2 Loader bootable partitions.

Nice bonus: PATINFO boot works at PSX 2.11
(doesn't work at 1.31 because it dislikes non PFS partitions, due to it's tendency to freeze while trying to load graphic assets for information display from a PFS which doesn't exist on HDL partitions... lol)

 

Nice work! I don't own a PSX myself, but I'm very impressed with the things that those at the top of the PS2 scene are doing nowadays.

If anyone has a way to rip a few of the PSX XMB icons for me to use as an example, and point me to the standards for such icons, I'll make a nice OPL icon to match (as I have the font used for the OPL logo on my system). I'm a perfectionist on things like that so I don't want to just approximate it from a video capture, I want it to fit exactly. I'd provide my finished result in RGBA PNG, for conversion as needed. I just don't know the exact standards for the PSX XMB icons (similar format to PS2 MC or HDD icons? completely new format? I don't know).

Also, if there are any other icons that would be handy, I might see about doing them too. Figured that I'd like to help contribute in my own small way.

 

All the resources on the PSX XMB are on plain standard formats such as TGA(Targa), PNG, BMP and the text, XML.

So even translating from Japanese to English it all won't be a issue at all:



So providing you (or anyone else) with dumps is no brainer now.

 

That helps, lol. So, those "system" icons seen in your first post, do you know if the gradient is baked into the icons or is somehow overlaid? If the base icons are just solid color, I can make an OPL icon now that would fit right in (I'm guessing the system icons are 64x64?). If the gradients are baked into the icons, I'd like to see a few of them in their original format to use as a base if possible. No rush or anything, I just want to contribute a little bit to the advancement of PS2-related hacking

I just want any such icons I make to truly look like they're official icons. Makes things look so much slicker

 

OPEN PS2 LOADER and uLE now work on all PSX units. Tested on my DESR-7500. Should work fine on any unit now for sure.

Caveat: It's stuck at LBA28bit so no more than 120GB support on these tools.

 

How do we get this on our units?


Good work guys!

 

Oh wow, Love to get this done to my 5700 someday. I get most of the Japanese but not all of it...
Great work, can dumps now be made as backups of the HDD data? (For data loss, and on SONY HDD)

 

Well, I take back that "Open PS2 Loader is working on all units" because when I boot it directly it gets stuck at a red screen. It might need extra initialization for the 2nd generation DESR units (XPD-005 motherboards).

Also, I could not get booting from PATINFO to work with any of the DESR units. It might be not supported on the DESR XMB.

Edit: Oh how could I forget the problem I was having with the frigging TLB before... Red screen problem solved ... :\

 

Any news? How stable are working uLE and Open PS2 Loader?

 

I was using custom made experimental tools to boot the DESR units from memory card.

Then from that I got a experimental build of uLE working in it.

From that, I was able to make a bootable partition on the HDD and finally from that point on I was able to launch disc games and edit files from the XMB.

Still there's no public tools yet for this and FMCB still doesn't work on the PSX (It has prototype support, but you still can't install it on a normal PS2 to use with a PSX.

Currently you need to run FMCB installer on a PSX to make another PSX install so it's like the egg and chicken dilemma. I already sent a idea to SP193 on how to overcome this limitation. SP193 recently committed a update to the PS2 homebrew SDK which make the ATAD driver only use 48 bit LBA if it detects a LBA48 bit hdd. That mechanism could be further developed and made so ATAD can detect it's running on a DESR then change mode to 28 bit (DESR HDD interface won't accept LBA48 bit commands and will hang) enabling homebrew apps to work correctly on the DESR units.

So this is how we stand on this front currently.

 

uLaunchELF always worked on the PSX, with the exception of HDD access.

Only when FMCB v1.93 is released, they can finally install a working copy with the PSX itself... or with PS3MCA. The support for the PSX within v1.92 is broken, but I'm a bit busy with other stuff to test v1.93 for new bugs. @_@

The driver always did that... but what I did was to ensure that it'll totally not use 48-bit LBA support if the disk doesn't support 48-bit LBA. It was mainly for performance, since you wrote that it helped there.

The problem with the ATA interface malfunctioning when the ATA registers are written twice to is a problem with the DVRP itself. The same thing goes for 48-bit LBA support on it, since the firmware of the disk isn't being emulated properly (It advertises 48-bit LBA support and the true size of the HDD itself, but isn't able to support all that at all).

The only workaround here would be to rig ATAD to detect the presence of a PSX's boot ROM (check for rom0SXVER) and to entirely disable 48-bit LBA support under such a condition, since the PSX's ATA interface has design problems (Not in the eyes of Sony, since they never intended PS2 software to support 48-bit LBA). This hasn't been done yet.

 

Thanks for the info guys!

 

Yesterday SP193 came up with a update for the ATAD driver... Now it auto detects the PS2 hardware capabilities and locks down to 28bit LBA mode if the "DVRP" device is detected. (The DVRP device is unique to the PSX)

Tested a version of Open PS2 Loader equipped with this new ATAD driver and it worked perfectly on the two DESR units I have here.

We might have a fully functional FMCB installer for these units soon.

 

Thank YOU for the idea.

The installer was always working fully. The problem was with FMCB itself. Although that has been fixed, I felt bad about making an update that still doesn't have working CD/DVD access.

Have you figured out how to enable the CD/DVD drive? I certainly haven't.

 

Not yet, but if I discover anything, I'll let you know for sure !

 

Great to see some new info on this, love to help out if I can... but I'm sure I'll need to get a copy of Swap Magic for it.

 

Don't waste your time with Swapmagic, it doesn't work on the PSX because the PSX reads/detects discs first using the DVD recorder laser and the Swapmagic disc has bad sectors to confuse PC DVD-ROM drives.