A disc game or memory stick EBOOT started from the XMB used to be swapped in under the XMB's session,
so it ran without its PARAM.SFO, compat flags, game config, window title, savestates and so on.
Much of that is decided once, at boot (the memory map, the GPU backend, the shader cache), so
sceKernelLoadExec now asks the frontend for a reboot into the disc image or EBOOT (PSP_RequestBoot)
and stops. The app and headless boot it like a game from the game list.
The game keeps the XMB's launch args (CoreParameter::launchedFromVSH), so exiting boots the XMB
again, with the disc that's in the drive and those args, and the XMB comes back where it was without
auto-starting the disc. Homebrew keeps the disc that was in the drive. A disc whose executables are
all zeroes (the EUR Video Demo Disc's "game") still loads in place and fails back to the XMB.
In headless, the run carries on through the reboot, starting stopped under the debugger like the
first boot, since the reboot loses a pending cpu.runUntilTime.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The game list already did, but booting a video disc any other way (the command line, a file
association, dropping it on a running game, headless) tried it as a game and failed. The loader now
swaps in vshmain.prx with the disc mounted and auto-start on whenever it identifies a UMD Video
disc and the installed firmware can play it. GetUmdVideoVSHPath() moves from the UI to
Core/Util/PSARUnpack.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
With firmware 2.71 or later installed, picking a UMD Video disc boots the XMB with the disc in the
drive and UMD auto-start forced on for that boot, so the disc's menu comes up. Without one, the
info screen saying UMD Video isn't supported shows as before. The info screen's Play does the same.
A disc with both a game and video asks which to start. For the video, the XMB comes up with
auto-start forced off, since auto-start runs the game.
Older firmware can't play these: 1.50, 2.00 and 2.60 crash in video_plugin or paf with a video disc
in the drive, and 2.50 refuses it. 2.71 through 6.61 reach Bourne Supremacy's menu.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
It was left unresolved with the kernel mutex calls, as they all let the
flash drivers reach the NAND controller during a VSH boot. It's the
mutexes that do that: with only the FPL resolved, sceIdStorage_Service
allocates from its pool and every firmware's VSH in 1.50-6.61 boots to
the same XMB picture as without it. Resolving the mutexes still hangs on
0xbd101300.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The XMB, booted without a game, now starts with an empty drive: when
vsh_module loads with nothing at disc0:, the drive is marked empty, and
activating it tells the shell's drive callback (SceVshMediaDetectUMD)
there's no disc. Activation used to report a readable disc regardless,
so the shell asked for its type and showed "The disc could not be read."
The disc type devctl (0x01F20001) answers 0 without a disc, as JPCSP
does.
game.umd.insert (path) mounts a disc image into the empty drive and
calls the drive callback as inserting one does; game.umd.eject takes it
out. UmdMount() is UmdReplace() without its need for a disc already in.
Inserted into the 6.61 XMB, Daxter shows in the Game column with its
icon, background and animated preview, and launching it boots the game
to its title menu.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
-i, -j, -r, -J, --ir and --jit-ir are gone. -r was also --root's short form,
and --root won, so -r took the next argument as the root path and nothing
booted (test.py -r failed every test).
-i, -j and -J now fail with an error pointing at --cpu= instead of quietly
running on the default core. Docs and test.py updated.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
6.60 and 6.61 crashed in vsh_module's alarm-task scan on a count nothing
initialized, and a data patch zeroed it. With the shell's modules started
in order, both reach the XMB, show icons and launch homebrew without it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The kernel starts modules one by one, each module_start returning before
the next starts. We started them all as threads side by side, and
vsh_module's start ran before paf's. Its 12MB request for game_plugin's
surface pools then went to the 8.3MB heap we pre-filled scePaf's pool
slot with, failed, and game_plugin threw away every decoded ICON0 and
PIC1 (white tiles on 3.80-5.05, grey placeholders from 5.50).
heaparea1, vshbridge, paf, common_gui and common_util now start in order,
and vsh_module waits for the last. The kd/ drivers still start side by
side, since syscon's start blocks on its hardware interrupt. paf fills
its own pool slot now, so the pre-fill is gone. Icons show on every
version from 1.50 to 6.61, and homebrew launches on the same ones as
before.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Record the fifth cause (the rejected impose parameter), correct the counts now
that 3.80/3.90 and 2.6x-2.8x are covered, and note that 1.50 through 2.50 never
touch the encrypted XMB index at all.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The old claim of "all of them" measured that the shell renders, which several
versions do while showing only the wallpaper or a full-screen error. Record what
each version actually does, the four causes that were in the way, and how to
find the next one of each kind - including that --timeout is wall-clock, so a
slow-drawing shell can look stuck when it isn't.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Backwards from 5.01, one release at a time, against all 39 versions that ship
on a disc plus the download-only 6.61. Nothing here is an offset - it's almost
entirely Sony renumbering the kernel *_driver NIDs, which sends an import we
mean to HLE into the real firmware module instead.
Four more NIDs each for sceRtc_driver/sceRtcSetAlarmTick and
sceHprm_driver/sceHprmReadLatch, covering 1.50 up. The rtc one is what parked
every thread on a SceSysconSync semaphore; the hprm one runs once a frame, so
unresolved it was most of the boot log. Also sceImposeGetParam/sceImposeChanges
(1.50 - 2.xx) and sceKernelLoadModuleVSH (1.x, which is how the shell loads its
own plugins - unresolved it got module id 0 and StartModule failed).
sceRtcIsAlarmed had to be implemented too; it returns 0, as in JPCSP. As a null
entry it returned LIBRARY_NOT_YET_LINKED, and the 3.0x-3.5x VSH read that as
"ask the hardware instead" and went back to blocking on syscon.
Two structural findings:
- Up to 4.05, scePaf's heap allocator is a separate heaparea1.prx that paf
imports as scePafHeaparea. Load it when it's there. Its pool pointer needs
the same pre-fill paf's does, at gp - 0x7FCC rather than gp - 0x7E88.
- 1.50's vshmain.prx declares no module attributes at all - PSP_MODULE_VSH_MODE
only appears from 1.52 - so the whole VSH bootstrap was being skipped. Accept
the module name too.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The blocker below 6.60 wasn't offsets, it was that Sony renumbered the kernel
*_driver NIDs between versions. A function we HLE under its 6.6x NID is a
stranger on an older build, so the import lands in the real firmware module
instead - and that's where it goes wrong:
- sceRtc_driver sceRtcSetAlarmTick. Without the HLE the VSH's alarm call ran
the real rtc.prx, which called on into syscon.prx and blocked forever on a
SceSysconSync semaphore. That was the whole "stalls with every thread parked"
symptom; the tell was a fourth SceSysconSync waiter a healthy boot lacks.
- sceHprm_driver sceHprmReadLatch, called once a frame - so before this an
older firmware's 12-second boot logged ~20000 lines of one unresolved import.
Three extra NIDs each, found by disassembling the module from both firmwares
and matching on the address of the user-mode export whose NID never changed
(sceRtc/0x7D1FBED3, sceHprm/0x40D2F9F0).
5.55 additionally needed two PRX decryption keys we didn't have (0x4C941AF0
and 0x4C941BF0) - without them none of flash0:/kd decrypted and the shell came
up with no drivers behind it at all.
Checked one release at a time against every version that ships on a disc, plus
6.61. 4.05 and below still die on a null write inside vsh_module.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
6.60 ships byte-identical paf.prx and vshmain.prx to 6.61 - all 6338 + 669
functions disassemble the same - and boots to an interactive XMB, so let
FirmwareVersionSupportsVSH accept it. That matters because no UMD carries 6.61
(it was download-only), so 6.60 is the best a disc-installed firmware can be.
The two module patches were hardcoded offsets from the module base applied to
any module of the right name, which is quietly wrong on any other build:
- The scePaf heap arena slot moves with every build (0x18CCD8 on 6.00 through
0x18D728 on 6.60/6.61) but sits at gp - 0x7E88 in all of them, so find it
that way. On its own this turns an immediate SIGSEGV inside scePaf into a
clean stall on 6.00 through 6.39 - they still don't reach an XMB, they get
stuck in sceVshBridge_Driver instead.
- The vsh_module alarm-category offset has no such anchor, so check the word
there is the one the patch was derived from. On 6.20 and 6.00 it's ASCII
string data - the unconditional write was corrupting a string table.
Also resolve the per-model kernel drivers (memlmd, loadexec, wlanfirm) to the
model being emulated. They were asked for as _01g, which a firmware unpacked
for a single model doesn't have - and our own updater unpack defaults to 02g.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
