PS2 An Ode to KrHACKen & POPSTARTER

T

tktagmedia

Member
You know... Popstarter gets a lot of undue guff.

Considering that the binaries consisted of an incomplete emulator that was designed to only run a small handful of games, @krHACKen and a dedicated, passionate community took it way, WAY further than anyone could have ever anticipated.

With minimal tweaking, the launcher is capable of playing well over half the entire PSone library PERFECTLY.

It may never emulate the likes of Tekken 3 or Final Fantasy VII properly, but omissions of the landmark titles that everyone knows caused me to branch out and explore. It helped me discover other classic titles and hidden gems that I otherwise would have never played:

Klonoa, Armored Core, Bust-a-Move, ONE, Breath of Fire 3, Einhander and G-Police, just to name a few.

Popstarter also had the unintentional benefit of breathing extra life into PS2s that have failing or dead lasers by restoring some PSone function.

If you haven't given Popstarter a fair shake, take another look at what it can do.

Discover your next, new favorite classic.
 
60fpshacksrock said:
It would have been great if development on it had continued. Those of us who followed it 2016-2017 know why it was stopped.
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yeah i know and i agreed with him I think an creation some Gui of POPStarter would be nice but outside of OPl... some day we hope someone can make POPStater Gui
 
60fpshacksrock said:
True. GT2 1.0 is now playable. But the fix introduced (unless it is my USB drive and/or USB .irx drivers) sound issues in the garage area.
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Good morning, you are somewhat outdated, I am the one who corrects that game for use in Popstarter and currently I have already done it for all versions, and to eliminate dirty Audio in some effects, you must activate mode 1 and not use BIOS, if you are interested in knowing what games I have corrected more I could give you my Discord, but I don't know if putting my Discord user account would be a violation of the regulations on this page I don't know that, Currently I have corrected many games, the last ones were Resident Evil 3, Dino Crisis 1, Digimon World 2003, Bugs Bunny Lost in Time, Jade Cocoon, Rayman 2, and many more... Greetings!
 
hugopocked said:
Good morning, you are somewhat outdated, I am the one who corrects that game for use in Popstarter and currently I have already done it for all versions, and to eliminate dirty Audio in some effects, you must activate mode 1 and not use BIOS, if you are interested in knowing what games I have corrected more I could give you my Discord, but I don't know if putting my Discord user account would be a violation of the regulations on this page I don't know that, Currently I have corrected many games, the last ones were Resident Evil 3, Dino Crisis 1, Digimon World 2003, Bugs Bunny Lost in Time, Jade Cocoon, Rayman 2, and many more... Greetings!
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Awesome work.

Also, may I ask how you fixed GT2's car texture issue?
 
60fpshacksrock said:
Awesome work.

Also, may I ask how you fixed GT2's car texture issue?
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It is an incompatibility in the emulation of Pops, the one in charge of Luma RGB calculations, What I did was debug to see which feature is not working correctly, in the game code created a call to free ram and inject a mips routine that emulates that calculation and process, It takes more work than it seems, I think I already did it for all the games with this problem, Medielvil 2, Tomb Raider 3/4/5, Gran Turismo 2 surely others I have to review what I have saved, surely you are using an old Cheat that I made for Gran Turismo 2 USA 1.0, I updated and corrected other calculations and processes to make the game almost perfect in its versions Europe Japanese USA 1.0/1.2

Berion said:
@hugopocked Do You have any github page or something like that with all patches etc. per game?
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I'll see if I make a page on github, I'll first update and organize the latest patches.
 
Berion said:
Such patches would be golden, worth to preserve them. Closed social media like Discord isn't the best place for such stuff. ^^
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I have them on my hard drive in raw PS-EXE, inject them with CDmage, but I'm putting everything in xdelta patch format, since not everyone knows how to use CDmage, I wanted to create a Trojan file but I saw that the Toolbox application that compiles those files has some bugs.
 
Great idea. Executable files are copyrighted, patches in *.xdelta are also great solution (yet TROJANs would be better as don't need to messing with games).

For disc image RAW (i.e *.bin) or TOC+RAW (*.vcd)?

- - -
There is a toolbox for "official patches"? Could You link to it?
 
Berion said:
Great idea. Executable files are copyrighted, patches in *.xdelta are also great solution (yet TROJANs would be better as don't need to messing with games).

For disc image RAW (i.e *.bin) or TOC+RAW (*.vcd)?

- - -
There is a toolbox for "official patches"? Could You link to it?
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Well apparently it was an outdated app, used a long time ago by krHACKen, then added that feature and fixed some bugs in Popstarter's cheat engine, which would be today's use of CHEATS.TXT

But there are a few games that I can't create xdelta patches for example Rayman 2 so I made it in Gameshark format to use in the CHEATS.TXT I would like to do something more professional in that game, for example creating a trojan file I'm going to work on it, this is the link:
https://bitbucket.org/ShaolinAssassin/popstarter-documentation-stuff/wiki/toolbox-commands
 
hugopocked said:
It is an incompatibility in the emulation of Pops, the one in charge of Luma RGB calculations, What I did was debug to see which feature is not working correctly, in the game code created a call to free ram and inject a mips routine that emulates that calculation and process, It takes more work than it seems, I think I already did it for all the games with this problem, Medielvil 2, Tomb Raider 3/4/5, Gran Turismo 2 surely others I have to review what I have saved, surely you are using an old Cheat that I made for Gran Turismo 2 USA 1.0, I updated and corrected other calculations and processes to make the game almost perfect in its versions Europe Japanese USA 1.0/1.2


I'll see if I make a page on github, I'll first update and organize the latest patches.
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Very interesting. Thank you for the detailed information.

The place I got the other original code from is a 'home' for 'PS2' so to speak. I would love to have the new one without the audio issues.
GT2 is one of the best games on PSX.

On the other site where the codes are posted I wanted to both thank you and ask you about the code for GT2. But thankfully I can do that here instead.
 
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60fpshacksrock said:
My guess would be compressed executables. I know GT 1-4 uses it on its executables.
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Exact, it takes your work to trace the algorithm and create an application to do that for each game that presents this problem, it's easier in this particular case to use cheats or other means, Right now I was creating my own updated trojan's because Toolbox v1.0 has some bugs.
 
How this matter? Patcher comparing bit by bit both files and writing differences in a file. And delta format have that advantage over many other that data don't need to be exactly in the same place to recognize structures. I still don't get it. The only flaw here is output patch size as in case of compression or encryption, different is whole file (in this case, whole executable inside disc image).
 
Berion said:
How this matter? Patcher comparing bit by bit both files and writing differences in a file. And delta format have that advantage over many other that data don't need to be exactly in the same place to recognize structures. I still don't get it. The only flaw here is output patch size as in case of compression or encryption, different is whole file (in this case, whole executable inside disc image).
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Maybe there isn't a way yet to decompress and recompress the executable for patching.

The only GT that I know of that can have its executable patched is GT4 because of the DVD5 kit someone made for it. It allows the layer 2 VOL to be read from layer 1. The VOL from layer 0 contains main game data while layer 1 contains the PSS video files.

Some users on GTPlanet may know how to decompress the GT games' executables. They have tools for GT 2-4 to extract the VOL files and rebuild them but still no option to decompress the PS-EXE or ELF files.
 
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