[PS2] POPS stuff & POPStarter

Castlevania SOTN will crash if you put aside your controller for 10 mins or longer, it also crashes with long time game-play.

 

Reprise des Listes Officielles pour bientôt.

Bonjour "Ruffonetas" ...

Très bientôt, vous allez pouvoir inscrire vos données dans les listes "officielles" que je gère pour krHACKen.

Cordialement.


Very soon you will be able to enter your data in the "official" lists I manage to krHACKen.


Kind regards.

Algol.

 

If you use last version of the emu you don't need the patch_4 for this games, because
they are already applied in the emu.

No, i checked it and the Ypos is perfectly centered, do you have a bad dump
of the game, or a video related problem in your console or tv.

No, this game works, loading times are so long because the voices fails, using Mode 1 fixes
the voices and then the loading times becomes normal.
Unfortunately all the graphics of the game are glitched making the game unplayable, but
the game do not freezes in start menu.

Mode 1 for what? i checked the game and i don't see any sound problem, is not needed.
Mode 4 yes, fixes the slowdowns in the ships selection screen.

Music not works for this games.

This game have random freezes in some doors and another points, you really
played all the entire game from the start with a clean game without receive
any freeze? its rare but maybe you have this luck.

No, voices and audio effects works perfectly fine, you have a bad dump of the game.

Regards.

 

One day I believe someone will hack the built in ps1 emulator for the ps2 to make it work similarly to the gamecube loaders, which patch the game loading code.
When you run a ps1 game on the ps2 it's not all hardware emulation.

 

I already explained why, but you kept saying that it is possible.

If it was always possible and viable, then why do projects like PSIO still require hardware modification?

 

Because PSIO went down a route that required hardware modification. That doesn't prove anything about the viability of an alternate solution.

The Gamecube loaders had issues with missing streamed music etc for the same reason that it would be hard to do on the PS1. Although there was work on the Gamecube loaders for the Wii to patch the games more to get audio streaming working too, I believe that would be possible for the PS2 as well.

The reason it's not been done is nobody has been interested in reverse engineering the backward compatibility of the PS2 at a hardware level to figure it out.

It won't be 100% backward compatible because the PS2 isn't even 100% backward compatible with the PS1, they added patches for some games and left others not working. No emulators are 100% backward compatible either.

 

Funny, it never (EVER) happened that I put a PS1 game on one of my PS2s and it did not work. (Must be because I insist on using the oldest possible PS2s which have 99% of the PS1 hardware in it)

 

You do realize that the PlayStation 2 essentially becomes a full PlayStation, when it's in PS1 mode. Don't you?
It's not something that we can simply patch. Not only because hardware access on the software level can be done in many ways, but because the only thing that we have absolute control over in that hardware emulator is the EE (Which is not routed to the peripheral INTC, and not even their DMACs either).

The reason why I brought up PSIO is because it's similar. It requires hardware modification because there's NO way they can fully emulate the CD/DVD drive in software, even though they can load the game's data through the PIO port.
Likewise, there is NO way anyone can simply emulate the CD/DVD drive in software, while the PS2 is in PS1 mode.

If there was really a way to create a software-only solution (despite the difficulties that I mentioned before, which you brushed off as all being totally doable...), then why didn't the PSIO developers (who I am sure are already rather skilled) opt for this generic solution that would have made the PlayStation community happier?

PSIO is already in a better position than what we'll probably ever have for hacking on the PS1 emulator within the PS2, since it has access to the hardware bus as well. It has its own dedicated DMA channel too.
The only console that seems to still have the PIO interface is the TOOL. And that became known as the "PIF", which is used for communicating with the PC-side hardware (via DECI/DECI2).

l_Oliveira is right. The older PlayStation 2 consoles had a nearly 100% hardware emulator, except that the logic behind the GPU was software-emulated (The GPU's DMA channel and registers were still emulated in hardware). But even with newer consoles (e.g. SCPH-75000 series) that were known to have poorer compatibility, it was only a handful of titles that weren't compatible. In fact, I think that OPL still has a poorer compatibility rate than the PS1 emulator of the SCPH-75000.

 

in ps1 cd-dsp and PIO share the bus (it has 16 bit, but cd drive uses only 8 bit).
we off native cd-dsp, and replace/attach to PIO our board.
so from software pointf of view it has same registers and dma channel. no need any game pachtching. maybe only for Libcrypted. but as i know we need info from sub channels to restore ifo about bad CRC sectors.(correct me if i'm wrong)

ps2 is more complex console, it is big plus and minus at same time.
software level gives posibbility for patching/replacing drivers and etc.
hardware is complex. more wires for data/addr bus of cdvd-drive and no dedicated cdvd-rive bus. expansion bus is not direct.
but maybe it can pass trough signalls.. i didnt discover it. i remeber ther is DEV9 disable signal, maybe for debugger, to disable native drive and replace by some ext device to emulate cdvd drive?
but it's harder to attach cdvd emu to ps2 comparable to how it easy can be done for ps1.

anyway, it's interesting to make something for ps2)) software emulator is quite good. but is not ideal. more over today moder mcu like ARM is becoming more cheaper and more interfaces and features suppurted. in one chip easy to fit USB HOST, SD, ETH, parallel bus controllers

OH, i think in ps1 mode - ps1 still use same protocol and 8 bit bus to cdvd-drive. as ps-exe is totally executed on r3000 layer. so theoretically possible connect psio for ps1-drive emulation. but before it, we need switch ps2 to ps1-mode... it's little complex qeustion.

 

Tested game: Yu Gi Oh! Forbidden Memories SLES-03947 Unplayable (black screen and flickering)

 

The original playstation make 20 years today, and sony even care for pops anymore

 

GPU is handled by EE & there are timing differences which is the main reason for games needing being patched. Some PS1 games are very sensitive to timing, I visited SCEE head office during the run up to the PS3 launch as they were looking for game specific patches to make some important games work in their software emulator.

Running the game on the IOP in PS2 mode would be the most similar to how gamecube loaders like nintendont work for running gamecube games. I'm not aware of any effort to investigate all the hardware registers involved in switching to PS1 mode, so it may be possible to run with some of the PS2 hardware still accessible or even switch modes for when you need to load a game. Not all the PS1 hardware is even 100% documented, some of the registers are never used in the bios or games, there are some interesting things left over from the LR33300 (the PS1 doesn't have a MIPS R3000A in it in any shape or form, it's a software compatible LSI clone written in some form of HDL that was then modified).

The PS1 doesn't have USB or Ethernet hardware to load games from, it was always going to need some form of hardware. Quite often projects can go in different directions and they chose one based on their ideas. It doesn't always mean that there is only one solution, it probably is a more compatible solution (especially as it's for PS1 hardware).

 

little offtopic. I was always interested how fast is PS2 Memory Card interface (theoretical maximum).

 

Please HELP to combine Fear Effect 2

 

The Legend of Dragoon with combined disks patch have two issues:
Freezes in Kashua Glacier cave (black screen with background music). The solution is use the Disk 3 Iso;
Crash in first video ending. Using the Disk 4 iso, You can see almost first video ending, but have a crash and skip to second video. the Ending credits have sound problems.

 

The problem is, the PIO interface does not exist on the PlayStation 2. Only the TOOL has it, but it's not an external bus anymore. :/

There IS this secret expansion connector on every PlayStation 2 mainboard in existence, but nobody knows what it can actually do. It might be like the PIO, since modchips tap onto it and SONY did use it to replace the BOOT and DVD ROMs (DEV1) on the SCPH-18000 A-chassis+ (GH-003).

smf's idea was that it would be possible to simply patch all code in software, which accesses the CD/DVD drive. Other than how impossible it would likely be to accurately pinpoint every single piece of code that accesses the CD/DVD drive registers (including between program changes), I don't see how it would be possible to cram the CD/DVD drive emulator into the 2MB EDO RAM space.

But have you actually found any incompatible games with the SCPH-10000, SCPH-15000, SCPH-18000, SCPH-30000, SCPH-35000 and SCPH-39000 series?
Modchip'ed consoles cannot be used as a valid test target for imported games because the PS1 drivers of these early consoles do not contain the necessary settings for out-of-region games.

Even if the IOP was switched into PS1 mode (but yet retaining access to the PS2 peripherals) and the rest of the software incompatibilities ignored (RESET switching over directly to the PS1 boot code upon a hardware reset, some PS2 modules refusing to start in PS1 mode, and how the interrupt managers must share exception vectors etc), my point is that it's nearly impossible to accurately pinpoint the code that accesses the CD/DVD registers. It could be anything under the sun....

Even for OPL, PS2ESDL etc, we don't patch any games to redirect I/O to the CD/DVD drive, to other devices.

Ironically, I did have this same idea in 2009, when I first started developing software for the PlayStation 2. dlanor told me that it would be very difficult to implement, and then I realized why over the years.

They have the PIO interface, which they are using for this exact same purpose. We don't have the PIO interface.
As cybdyn has just explained, the existance of the PIO interface gives PSIO a better chance of creating an actual CD/DVD drive emulator than with just the R3000A alone.

They had to perform slight hardware modifications to the PlayStation because the PIO interface wasn't meant to be used in the way that they require (some stuff, like interrupt emulation, needs hardware modification for them to pull off).

I don't remember the average that I got with the FMCB installer, but I think that it was roughly 500KB/s.

 

lol guys, they just cut the legit CD interface chip select signal and leave it disabled while replacing it with their own device (PSIO). It's the most logical and feasible approach for this problem. Just like on the PS2 we attack the software layer (CDVDMAN, CDVDFSV, CDVDSTM) drivers.

 

Before i began to use popstarter, i was using cd-rom to read psx games on ps2 and just want to say that it really doesnt have 100% of the retrocompatibility, the most obvious problem is the absence of sound in the game cutscenes, for example: when aku-aku appear for crash to hint him on CTR, his voice is anulled.

Also there are games that really doesnt work by this way, final fantasy tactics for example, i never could pass from that intro that presents the forest, the sound works but the intro never cames, i could play it well on popstarter.

 

No sound = poorly burnt pirated discs.
If your claims were even close to be fair, it would be about graphical glitches.

Games which use streamed music (CTR does for the race finish jingles, for example) or videos, will fail if you burn them with wrong ECC data.

All that proves is that you were playing copied discs. I know CTR and FFT work perfectly on the PS2 because I already played them on mine and they worked perfectly.

 

Okay, first of all: how can you be so shure? is not like you have opened it and verified if it has or not all what is needed for psx games, it was already conffirmmed a while ago that ps2 has absence with some parts of ps1 system.

People say that some ps2 models might work finest than another, i have a slim SCPH-75001 and there are a lot of psx games that doesnt have sound in game intros and cutscenes, and its not about disc quality, i use philips 700 mb cd-roms, burn them with alcohol 120% in the lowest speed.