Swordpdf/PS5SX2 vk-285-161

PS5SX2 2.01

on GitHub

Release 2.01 covers vk-285-140 through live-19, built on top of 2.00 (vk-285-139).

Download

• PS5SX2-vk-285-161.zip — the app (eboot and files), as before. The installer installs it for you.
  SHA-256: a00cb64a01bfbf6659fb0ebd371ecb11e39488508b8ff55407875e161aee51d8
• ps5sx2-aio.elf — the all-in-one: helper, installer and disc-auto launcher in one ELF. It replaces all the previous ELFs (PS5SXHelper, PS5SX2Installer, DiscLaunch); it's the only payload you need now. Run it from your payload manager.
  SHA-256: b52c7a70c266826974314417bc059063b6e8ab0b8cc9537471f65f0e4915560d

New features

🎸 USB guitars and pads (vk-285-140, -141, -142, -143)

PS5SX2 now reads USB controllers that the PS5 doesn't recognise as a DualSense or DS4, opening the door to PS2-era guitar controllers and third-party pads.

Supported devices:

• PS3-mode HID guitars (12ba:01xx / 12ba:02xx, 1430:4748, 1bad:0002, or product string containing "guitar")
• XInput guitars
• PS3 pads (USB), DualShock 3 (with 0xF4 enable)
• Generic HID gamepads

Reads via /dev/uhidN first, then /dev/ugenB.A endpoint nodes, then libSceUsbd as a last resort. Never touches Sony controllers, keyboards, mice, hubs or storage. Flag files usbguitar / usbpad / nousbpad override auto-detection per game.

Guitar Hero / Rock Band games are detected from the game database; the USB guitar becomes PS2 port 1 automatically. Frets → Cross/Circle/Triangle/Square/L1; strum → d-pad hat; whammy → right stick X; star power → Select.

Firmware 13.60: raw endpoint probing (vk-285-142) handles consoles where USB_GET_DEVICEINFO returns ENOTTY. The probe runs only for guitar or pad games — never for a normal game — so there is no risk of interfering with USB storage or a cabled DualSense. (vk-285-155)

🎤 DualSense mic as PS2 USB mic (vk-285-141)

The DualSense's built-in microphone now works as the PS2 USB microphone for games that need one: Lifeline, Operator's Side, and games that use the SingStar or headset mic device. Enabled by default for the known titles (PS5SX2/Microphone = auto); configurable per game or in gs.ini. Settings page: Controls → Microphone.

💿 Disc auto-play — beta (vk-285-144 through vk-285-160, live-1 through live-14)

Put a PS2 disc in the drive → PS5SX2 dumps it if not already dumped and launches the game. Disc out → the shelf comes back. Works whether PS5SX2 is open or closed at the time. The disc launcher is part of ps5sx2-aio.elf.

Safety notes:

• A .incomplete marker is left beside any copy interrupted by bad sectors; the shelf shows it but won't auto-start it.
• A game that was just auto-started isn't started again from the same disc for 15 minutes (prevents a stuck loop across a reboot + re-jailbreak).
• Drive noise after a dump is suppressed: the disc's identity is cached so the watcher re-reads it only when the media size changes (vk-285-160l).

Only tested on one phat console. Feedback welcome.

🕹️ Touchpad L / R remappable (live-17)

Controls → Touchpad now lets you remap the left and right touchpad click (L2+R2, shoulder buttons, or any other combination you prefer). The default behaviour is unchanged.

🔗 Configurable webpage shortcut (live-17)

Settings → Web shortcut: choose which button combo opens the companion web page. Previously hardcoded to L2+R2.

Fixes

🖥️ Black screen on game launch with unknown USB devices (vk-285-155)

The USB pad scan introduced in vk-285-142 probed every unknown USB device for every game, including raw interrupt endpoint reads and libSceUsbd control transfers. On some consoles this stole a wired DualSense's input (PS button stopped working → forced power-off) or stalled USB storage the game was loading from (game never loaded → black screen). The blind probes now run only for guitar/pad games and when the usbpadscan flag is set.

📡 NFS covers (vk-285-156)

Games on NFS shares never received covers because the cover prefetch runs before the jailbreak (shares mount after it) and the shelf's download gate was USB-only. Both are fixed:

• MayDownload() now returns true for NFS games as well as USB.
• usb-games.txt (the next cold start's prefetch list) now includes NFS game serials.
• A share's root folder works like a USB drive's: covers/ subfolder and Open PS2 Loader's ART/<id>_COV files are found at any letter case.

Boot log now reports NFS game counts: [frontend] N disc image(s), N on USB, N on NFS shares.

💥 Shelf crash (KP) with 2000+ NFS games (live-19)

CoverService::Run() painted spine and placeholder images for all games in a tight loop and dumped the results into the deque without waiting for the main thread to drain any. With a library of ~2,300 NFS games this accumulated ~2.8 GB of image data (96×1304 RGBA spines + 364×512 placeholders), causing extreme frame stalls (up to 179 s per frame) followed by the watchdog killing the process.

Fix: the worker waits when the queue reaches 24 items. The main thread drains 4 images per frame; the queue stays under ~20 MB at all times.

🎨 Ratchet & Clank 1 ring artefact after cutscenes (live-18)

Framebuffer writes to mip levels 1–6 weren't invalidating cached textures because m_src.m_map tracks only mip 0. InvalidateVideoMem() now scans m_src.m_surfaces to catch writes to any mip level. Fixes ring artefacts that appeared in the game world after full-motion video cutscenes.

🔒 More reliable elevation (live-15)

The jailbreak step now elevates via the Lapy owned-root daemon instead of watching for the etaHEN marker file. More reliable on consoles where the marker write could be missed.

Notes

• The USB guitar / pad reader is logged under [usbpad] in boot.log. Flag nousbpad disables it entirely; nousbd skips libSceUsbd; nougen skips the ugen path.
• The microphone can be forced on or off per game with PS5SX2/Microphone = 0 / 1 / 2 in gs.ini.

PS5SX2 is made in my free time. If it brought your PS2 games back to life, please consider supporting it on Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/sword95

Thanks to everyone who tested and sent logs.