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PS3 Pop-fe a utility to create PSX Classics packages for PS3 v1.16

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Ronnie Sahlberg said:
It is at the bottom at this page:
https://github.com/sahlberg/pop-fe/actions/runs/8677042320
Note, you need to be signed in to github. Github only show these links to scratch builds to authenticalted/logged-in users.
Click to expand...

oh.. I didn't know you needed an account, that's why I wasn't seeing the link. Anyway just finished converting a 2disc game and it's night and day difference! My computer no longer hangs. Thanks again for your amazing work.
 
Not sure if it's just on my end but the latest version is not creating the PKG correctly, everything seems fine and then it says creating pkg and stays there forever but it doesn't freeze, when you close the window the pkg created is 1/3 the size it should be.

EDIT: Nevermind, I think it was the "windows 7" box being ticked in the .exe compatibility settings that was causing an issue, unticked that plus the admin rights box and it's working fine now. Thank you.
 
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Hey, Ronnie

I have very recently discovered this tool, its easy to use and being able to customize the XMB is amazing. Never liked the default and very bland XMB visuals of PS One classics. Being able to customize with fetched images or my own images and adding music/sound to my own liking for presentation of the games on the XMB is nothing short of amazing. Especially for ps1 games that never released on the PS Store.
Ronnie Sahlberg said:
Update: I have now added links to 953 different software manuals, so a decent chunk of ps1 games but a lot are still missing. Though I now ran out of places to harvest links from so this is all for now.
Software manual only work for PSP. I do not have more cycles to try to reverse engineer the modified and cryptographically signed? format that PS3 uses :-(
Click to expand...
I really want to ask if you had any luck attempting to add software manuals since last year. I think this would complete the package (no pun intended). I extracted ps one classics i already had installed on my ps3 with psxtract. It decrypted DOCUMENT.DAT as DOCUMENT_DEC.DAT, sadly i have no suggestion for reverse engineering as this is beyond my comprehension. Hopefully someday software manuals can be added on PS3.

I wanna say thanks for creating Pop-Fe.
 
It is possible to add DOCUMENT.DAT after the pkg file has been created. I grabbed the DOCUMENT.DAT file from official PSOne Classics and put them in the game's respective folders: game/GAMEID/USRDIR/CONTENT and it successfully shows up in the XMB. It was an oversight but not surprised it works.

If you already have some PSOne Classics on your download list you can acquire the DOCUMENT.DAT and copy it to the pkg created from Pop-Fe. If you don't have PSOne classics on your download list you can obtain DOCUMENT.DAT elsewhere.

However, this still doesn't answer the question on how to create a DOCUMENT.DAT from scratch, not every ps1 games released on the PS Store thus not every game had a DOCUMENT.DAT File.
 
Mr_MikeGar321 said:
It is possible to add DOCUMENT.DAT after the pkg file has been created. I grabbed the DOCUMENT.DAT file from official PSOne Classics and put them in the game's respective folders: game/GAMEID/USRDIR/CONTENT and it successfully shows up in the XMB. It was an oversight but not surprised it works.

If you already have some PSOne Classics on your download list you can acquire the DOCUMENT.DAT and copy it to the pkg created from Pop-Fe. If you don't have PSOne classics on your download list you can obtain DOCUMENT.DAT elsewhere.

However, this still doesn't answer the question on how to create a DOCUMENT.DAT from scratch, not every ps1 games released on the PS Store thus not every game had a DOCUMENT.DAT File.
Click to expand...

You can just copy it to the directory on the PS3.
We know how to create DOCUMENT.DAT from a set of PNG files on PSP, and pop-fe will automatically create a SoftwareManual on PSP.
On PS3 however the file is in a slightly different format and it had encryption that we do not yet understand.
The whole file is encrypted with a static key and DES. We know how to do that.
But then there is an additional layer of encryption that covers multiple blocks of 40 bytes each that we do not know how to deal with.
Thus we can not create DOCUMENT.DAT for PS3 :-(

I spent some time on it but gave up. To get any further would require to reverse enginner the PS1 emulator or support libraries on the PS3 to see what it does to open/read these files but that is beyond my skills or time I have availabel for this hobby.'

If anyone does reverse engineer the encryption and file format for PS3 DOCUMENT.DAT then I will absolutely implement it in pop-fe right away.
 
Hi @Ronnie Sahlberg , would you be able to please help me understand when converting a PS1 CUE/BIN to pkg via pop-fe-ps3.exe, which is the default emulator that it will then run when launched from XMB?

I had understood it was ps1_netemu as per the notes on GitHub.

Thanks for your help!

Longer background to why I'm asking if useful:
I had understood it was ps1_netemu as per the notes on GitHub.

"
--ps1_newemu : This only applies for PS3 PKGs. This switches the
emulator to use to ps1_newemu instead of the default
ps1_netemu.
"

However, the reason I am a bit confused is I have a game (Harry Potter & the COS) that as CUE/BIN seems to run fine on ps1_emu, but on ps1_netemu will not go further in an early cut scene as it doesn't seem to load the audio. However, when converted to pkg with pop-fe-ps3.exe, it launches and runs through that scene fine.

Since I had understood pkg use ps1_netemu, I had expected the issue to remain...so if indeed it does default to ps1_netemu, I'm now curious as to why it runs fine in pkg format as I don't see it having a config etc...
 
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CrashRS said:
Hi @Ronnie Sahlberg , would you be able to please help me understand when converting a PS1 CUE/BIN to pkg via pop-fe-ps3.exe, which is the default emulator that it will then run when launched from XMB?

I had understood it was ps1_netemu as per the notes on GitHub.

Thanks for your help!

Longer background to why I'm asking if useful:
I had understood it was ps1_netemu as per the notes on GitHub.

"
--ps1_newemu : This only applies for PS3 PKGs. This switches the
emulator to use to ps1_newemu instead of the default
ps1_netemu.
"

However, the reason I am a bit confused is I have a game (Harry Potter & the COS) that as CUE/BIN seems to run fine on ps1_emu, but on ps1_netemu will not go further in an early cut scene as it doesn't seem to load the audio. However, when converted to pkg with pop-fe-ps3.exe, it launches and runs through that scene fine.

Since I had understood pkg use ps1_netemu, I had expected the issue to remain...so if indeed it does default to ps1_netemu, I'm now curious as to why it runs fine in pkg format as I don't see it having a config etc...
Click to expand...
The emulator used with POP-FE is ps1_netemu unless you check the ps1_newemu checkbox. The freezing sounds like it could be a Cobra issue when running as BIN/CUE, and that is why PKG is not affected.
 
kozarovv has successfully reversed the DOCUMENT.DAT file format used on the PS3 so we can now create "software manual" for games on the PS3.
For PSP we have known how to create DOCUMENT.DAT for a while now but now we also can get "software manual" working on PS3 as well.

There are currently 3719 entries in the database that have a 'manual' associated with it, so a decent percentage of all games are covered already.

I have updated pop-fe and pop-fe-ps3 on github if you want to test it. No new release yet so you have to download a scratch build from the actions tab.

You can even create your own "software manual" but to do that you need to have a python environment set up so you can run the python program document.py directly from the commandline.

All this thanks to kozarovv. He did all the work and is a treasure to the community. I only added a python implementation of this for his discovery, so all the glory and thanks for this goes to him.
 
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There should be manuals for ALL NTSC-U releases. PAL and NTSC-J are still very spotty.
Anyone that knows where collections of PAL or, in particular, NTSC-J manuals can be found please let me know.
 
Hi, I compiled the latest version via Github, but the documents don't seem to work yet. As a test, I tried Alundra, and it says, "There is no software manual."
 
XDeltaOne said:
Hi, I compiled the latest version via Github, but the documents don't seem to work yet. As a test, I tried Alundra, and it says, "There is no software manual."
Click to expand...
Hmm.
I just converted Alundra SLUS00553 and the manual works for me when I test on my PS3.
Make sure to check the log when it was processing the file that it could download the manual and that all dependencies needed to coververt it were installed.

When you run pop-fe-ps3 these are the relavent lines to look for :

...
Create manual https://www.videogamemanual.com/ps1/Alundra (USA).pdf
Create DOCUMENT.DAT from https://www.videogamemanual.com/ps1/Alundra (USA).pdf
Download manual from https://www.videogamemanual.com/ps1/Alundra (USA).pdf
Saving 'pop-fe-ps3-work//DOCUMENT-Alundra%20(USA).pdf'
HTTP response 200 [https://www.videogamemanual.com/ps1/Alundra (USA).pdf]
pop-fe-ps3-work//DOC 100% [=============================>] 49.02M 4.68MB/s
[Files: 1 Bytes: 49.02M [3.93M]
Downloaded manual as pop-fe-ps3-work//DOCUMENT-Alundra%20(USA).pdf
Extract manual pop-fe-ps3-work//DOCUMENT-Alundra%20(USA).pdf from PDF
Create PS3 manual
Encrypt SLUS00553
Encrypting and writing pic 0
Encrypting and writing pic 1
...
Encrypting and writing pic 59
Created PS3 manual in pop-fe-ps3-work//DOCUMENT-tmp/DOCUMENT.DAT

This manual is sourced from a PDF document. Are there any warnings related to missing PDF packages that are printed?
 
So, I have the SLES-01256 Alundra Germany. The tool then automatically downloads from Archiv.org and also creates everything. I also have the document.dat file. He also converts 100%, but doesn't download the PDF you give me here.
 
I see, the german version tried to download a cached prebuilt version of the manual from github, but those are built for PSP.
I have dropped the cache from pop-fe now so please sync up to current master and try again.

It works now for the german version of Alundra. The bad news is that the link to archive.org it uses for the manual is to the english manual (and a worse quality scan at that).

All NTSC-U games have high quality scans for manuals. Support for PAL and NTSC-J is very spotty at best.
And here is where you can help. If you find links to scans of german manuals, please send these links to me and the game-id and I can add them to the database.
You can send it either here as a DM or open a bug on the github and I will add the links.
 
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Thank you, it works. I tested it. Great! Yes, the quality is not the best, but it is better than nothing. Would this be different if you could take the other link for better quality? What else did I want to ask: What do the "force pal" and "ntsc" settings do? Is it necessary? Unfortunately, I can't have the instructions for this, I bought used it at the time.
 
XDeltaOne said:
Thank you, it works. I tested it. Great! Yes, the quality is not the best, but it is better than nothing. Would this be different if you could take the other link for better quality? What else did I want to ask: What do the "force pal" and "ntsc" settings do? Is it necessary? Unfortunately, I can't have the instructions for this, I bought used it at the time.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I replaced the manuals for PAL Alundra with the high quality one for NTSC-U since they were in english anyway.
So, at least there is a manual for PAL now eventhough in the wrong language. (Except the spanish version of alundra, it has a spanish manual).

"force pal"/"force ntsc". The metadata in the eboot for the game contains flags for the region of the game. By default pop-fe will pick the region based on game-id, for example SCES..... means it is a PAL game and SLUS... means it is NTSC.
Force pal/force ntsc allows you to override this and make it flag a specific pkg/eboot as a different region that it actually is.

I am not really super knowledgeable for the reasons why and in what situations you need to do this, but basically it is if you for reasons want a PAL game to identify as an NTSC game to the PS3 and vice versa.

I never use these settings myself, but then again I mostly/only play JRPGs so ...
 
Going for a vacation to a place with no internet for a while, but please test and report issues either here or in DM or in github and I will look at it and respond in a few days.

Little bit tipsy because I am sooo happy how well this turned out, so apologies for the bravado, but please test converting a NTSC-U game, like NTSC-U Alundra and check the manual. It looks so good. It is perfection. The "software manual" on NTSC-U games look so good.

We PS1-on-PS3 enjoyers are eating well right now. All PS1-on-other_platform envy us right now.
 
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