forums.ps2dev.org

ok, well this is sort of an off-shoot from the other thread about PS2SDK enhancements. I wanted to create a thread to get some discussion going on the next big change to PS2LINK. I'll post some of my plans/ideas, feel free to comment or add your own suggestions.

First of all, I would like to remove the HOST and TTY functions from PS2LINK itself and make them into seperate modules. I know there are existing modules based off the TTY and HOST stuff in PS2LINK so this should be easy.

Second I would like to remove IOPTRAP, the EE exception handler code and anything else related to low-level debugging. In place of that I would have a generic "debug" library for EE(which could then be glued to the screen regdump, etc), as well as a IOPDEBUG.IRX to provide IOP-side exception/debug handling.

Finally, I would like to abstract the communication layer that PS2LINK uses. I'd very much like to remove the network support from PS2LINK and leave that up to the IOP to provide the actual connection to the host. The idea would be for PS2LINK to have a list of modules it loads, one of which will provide the communication layer. This would allow alternative communication layers to be provided, such as USB link cable(for which I have a module basically complete).

Of those ideas, the first 2 are things I intend to do. The communications layer probably wouldn't be that hard either but I'm not sure that there's enough interest to really warrant that.

So let me know what you think!

I personally think these changes that you are suggesting are so dramatic that this should be branched into a "Enchanced PS2Link" instead of PS2Link 2.0, as people are now used to PS2Link being what it is.

But if you can maintain "backwards" compatibility with ps2client and PS2 programs which rely on networking or other features which might break in such a upgrade and just added features, I think labeling it as PS2Link 2.0 is fine.

I'd also like to give a remainder of how many people actually develop actively for the PS2 and if it really worth this competely rewrite. I think it's fine you are considering it, it's just that there might be other projects on which time would be better spent (hint: usb driver), but that's just my personal opinion :-)

well, what I propose isn't really that dramatic. Mostly I want to make PS2link more modular, having it use seperate libraries/modules for some things rather than containing it's own tty/host/debug stuff. I wouldn't want to break compatibility with existing clients, or even change the protocols and such. Mostly just looking to clean it up a bit and add a few features.

as far as the activity thing, that's not important to me. I've never been too concerned about people actually using the things I make. ;)

I'll probably check in my USB link cable driver soon, just need to do a little cleanup and maybe write a simple example driver for use with it. Basically the idea is that you load usbd then the link cable then another driver which registers with the link cable driver to get events that occur on the cable, such as connect/disconnect, data packets in/out, etc. The way it's designed, you can have any number of drivers that register with the link cable and they can all send/receive data independently of each other without worry of conflicts.

Mostly all that I'm missing on the USB part is a PC-side client. I was working with the driver used in Naplink that wIRE wrote but this seems to have some bug(s) which causes the data to become corrupted. Since I hate win32 coding, that was all it took for me to lose interrest. ;)

The whole PS2Link update sounds like a great idea :-)

As for the usb driver, awesome :-)

Keep up the good work!