Adding games¶

Games are disc images of your own PS2 discs. YAOPL reads ISO, ZSO (compressed ISO) and USBExtreme images from USB, MX4SIO, iLink, exFAT HDDs, SMB, UDPBD and MMCE. On an APA-formatted HDD games are HDL partitions instead.

Folders¶

When a device starts, YAOPL creates these folders on it if they are missing:

The APA HDD has no CD and DVD folders; its other folders are in the OPL partition. A prefix path (BDM Prefix Path, ETH Prefix Path in Settings; MMCE Prefix Path in MMCE Settings) moves all of them into a folder on the device.

A CD game put in DVD (or the other way round) may not start: the folder tells YAOPL which kind of disc to emulate.

ISO¶

Put .iso images in CD or DVD. Two ways of naming them work:

• The title only: Kingdom Hearts II.iso. YAOPL reads the game ID from the image's SYSTEM.CNF.
• Game ID, then the title: SLUS_209.46.Kingdom Hearts II.iso. YAOPL takes the game ID from the name and does not open the image to list it, which is faster on slow devices. The ID must be in the form XXXX_NNN.NN followed by a dot.

The title can be up to 160 characters. An image whose SYSTEM.CNF cannot be read (a damaged image, or not a PS2 game) is not listed.

YAOPL remembers the IDs of the games it has read in games.bin inside CD and DVD, so the list appears faster next time. It is updated when games are added or removed. If you replace an image with a different game under the same file name, delete games.bin in that folder.

ZSO¶

ZSO is an ISO compressed with LZ4; put .zso files next to the ISOs, named the same way. To make them, use pc/ziso.py from the YAOPL repository, which needs Python 3 and the lz4 package (pip install lz4):

python ziso.py -c 2 "input.iso" "output.zso"    # compress
python ziso.py -c 0 "input.zso" "output.iso"    # decompress

YAOPL reads ZSO files with 2048-byte blocks only and refuses others, which OPL would read as the wrong sectors. So do not pass -b, and with maxcso pass --block=2048 (its default for images of 2 GiB or more is 16 KiB blocks).

The BDM Cache, HDD Cache and SMB Cache settings set how many sectors YAOPL reads ahead for ZSO games (see Settings).

USBExtreme (UL)¶

The old USBExtreme format splits a game into 1 GB parts listed in ul.cfg, which lets FAT32 hold games of 4 GB and more. The parts and ul.cfg are in the root of the device (or of the prefix path), not in CD or DVD. Make them with a PC tool such as OPL Manager or pc/iso2opl. Titles are up to 32 characters.

A game whose title has non-ASCII characters uses the CRC that PC tools compute, which some upstream OPL builds computed differently; parts named by such a build may need renaming.

USBExtreme games cannot be started from MMCE or by another launcher.

Fragmentation¶

On USB, MX4SIO, iLink and exFAT HDDs, a game may have at most 64 fragments. See Copy games so they are not fragmented.

Game IDs¶

The game ID (for example SLUS_209.46) names a game's files: CFG/<ID>.cfg, CHT/<ID>.cht, ART/<ID>_COV.png, VMC names. It is the name of the main executable in SYSTEM.CNF, or the start of the file name as above. For an HDL game it is stored in the partition.

Renaming and deleting¶

With Write Operations on in Settings, the game menu has Rename and Delete:

• Rename renames the image (an ID at the start of the name and the extension are kept) or all parts of a USBExtreme game; for an HDL game it changes the title stored in the partition.
• Delete deletes the image, all parts of a USBExtreme game, or the HDL partition. The game's settings, cheats, art and VMCs stay.

Starting a game from another launcher¶

Launchers can start a game in YAOPL directly, without its menu, by passing arguments to OPNPS2LD.ELF:

• <game ID> <start sector> <OPL partition> mini for an HDL game (used by HDD-OSD launchers such as OPL Launcher);
• <file name> <game ID> CD|DVD bdm for an ISO or ZSO on a BDM device (the first internal exFAT HDD, else the first USB device). USBExtreme games and UDPBD are not supported this way.

The game's settings from CFG are used.