Console launcher

What it is

New in 0.10.0. ophtml.elf is a finished PlayStation 2 program that lists the ISOs on the drives it can mount and draws them through your theme. Pressing ✕ hands the selected game to Neutrino, which boots it. The theme is an ordinary .uib. Nothing in C is yours to write.

It has not yet been run on a console. CI boots it in the Play! emulator, where it draws, fills its list and follows the pad. Play! has no USB, HDD or memory card slot, so no real drive has been read and no game has been started. The bench cases in console/README.md are the hardware checks, and each stays open until a sitting reports it. Treat any failure on a console as a gap in the launcher, and report it as an issue.

The same program built with MOCK=1 lists fourteen invented games without reading a drive, and a release carries it as ophtml-mock.elf. This is the previewer's drawing of that list through the built-in theme after three presses of Down. CI presses the same keys at the emulator and compares its frame with this one:

Minimal example

1. Download ophtml.elf from the Assets list of a GitHub Release. Check it against the release's SHA256SUMS.
2. Copy it to a memory card or a USB stick, and start it from the launcher you already use, such as wLaunchELF or FMCB.
3. Download Neutrino from its releases page. Unzip its neutrino/ folder at the root of the drive that holds your games.
4. Put your ISOs in DVD/ or CD/ at that drive's root, as OPL does.

<drive root>/
  DVD/                  Name.iso, or SLUS_200.02.Name.iso
  CD/                   the same, for CD games
  neutrino/             Neutrino's release folder, unzipped as-is
  OPHTML/theme.uib      optional: your theme

With no theme on the drive, the launcher draws its built-in one, the examples/console project.

To run your own theme, build it with ps2ui build and copy the blob as theme.uib beside ophtml.elf, or to OPHTML/theme.uib on a drive. Check it first with ps2ui check, and see it filled with the mock games in ps2ui serve --console. Both are on ps2ui-check and the previewer.

A release with no ophtml.elf among its assets predates the launcher. Build it from a checkout instead, with the Docker line in console/README.md.

Reference table

The names the launcher fills. Each one is optional. A name the theme leaves out is never filled.

name	element	filled with
game-0, game-1, ...	focusable row, id="game-{i}" under data-repeat	one game per row; the launcher counts the rows from game-0 until the first missing number
game-{i}-title	data-slot	the title, from the file name
game-{i}-id	data-slot	the title ID, from the file name or the disc's SYSTEM.CNF
game-{i}-media	data-slot	DVD or CD, from the folder
game-{i}-device	data-slot	USB, HDD, SD or MMCE
sel-title, sel-id, sel-media, sel-device	data-slot	the same four, for the selected game
game-count	data-slot	the number of games found
status	data-slot	what the launcher is doing, or what went wrong

The drives it mounts, and the label each one gets:

drive	attached	label
USB stick or USB SD reader	USB port, FAT32 or exFAT	USB
internal HDD	expansion bay, exFAT	HDD
microSD on MX4SIO	memory card slot	SD
microSD in an SD2PSX or MemCard PRO2	memory card slot	MMCE

The controls:

button	action
Up, Down	move through the list, and out of it at either end
L1, R1	one page up or down
Left, Right	move between the theme's other focusable elements
✕	start the selected game

Behaviour

The launcher waits for the drives before it draws anything, because the theme may be on one of them. The wait ends once the drives stop changing, and is capped at 300 frames: five seconds at 60 Hz, six on a PAL console. The screen stays plain dark while it waits. The wait is wait_for_drives.

It then picks the theme once, in this order: choose_theme.

order	where
1	theme.uib in the folder ophtml.elf was started from
2	OPHTML/theme.uib at each drive's root
3	the built-in theme

A theme the runtime refuses falls back to the built-in one, and status names the file and the error code.

The launcher opens on the theme's screen named games. A theme with no such screen opens on its first screen. It scans DVD/ and CD/ on every drive and sorts the games by title.

When ✕ is pressed, it looks for Neutrino in this order: console_find_neutrino.

order	path
1	neutrino/neutrino.elf, then neutrino.elf, beside ophtml.elf
2	neutrino/neutrino.elf at each drive's root
3	mc0:/APPS/neutrino/neutrino.elf, then the same on mc1:

MX4SIO and MMCE both drive the memory card port, so only one is loaded. MMCE is the default. To load MX4SIO instead, rename the ELF so its name contains m4s or M4S, such as ophtml-m4s.elf, or start it with the argument -mx4sio: wants_mx4sio.

Limits and errors

A problem the launcher can report goes to the status slot in words.

status	cause	fix
No drives found	no drive mounted within the wait	attach a drive, and check the label table above for the formats read
No ISOs in DVD/ or CD/	drives mounted, none with ISOs in those folders	move the ISOs into DVD/ or CD/ at the drive's root
Neutrino not found: put neutrino/ at a drive's root	✕ pressed, Neutrino in none of the places above	unzip Neutrino's neutrino/ folder at a drive's root
Could not start Neutrino (<code>)	Neutrino was found, and the loader returned instead of starting it	check that neutrino/ is Neutrino's release folder unzipped as-is, with its modules beside neutrino.elf
This theme has no game-0 row to list games in	games were found, and the theme has no game-0 row to show them in	add rows with id="game-{i}" under data-repeat, and run ps2ui check --console on the blob
<path> refused (<code>); built-in theme	your theme.uib failed to load	run ps2ui check on it, and read the code on Errors and constants

Before a theme draws, a solid colour is the only signal: main.

screen	meaning
grey	a required IOP module failed to load
red, before any theme	the built-in theme failed to load, so the ELF is broken
yellow	the theme did not fit in video memory; the launcher holds this screen and does not fall back to the built-in theme, so run ps2ui check on your theme first and read its VRAM line

After ✕, the PS2SDK loader that starts Neutrino paints its own colours. Red at that point is the loader refusing its arguments, not the launcher. The full list of the loader's colours is in console/README.md.

An HDD formatted for HDLoader, the APA format OPL uses, is not read. Only exFAT is. The launcher has no cover art and no per-game settings yet.

Related pages

• ps2ui-check holds a theme to the names above.
• Previewer fills a theme with the mock games.
• Lists covers data-repeat and the list window.
• Deploying covers getting any ELF onto a console.