How to make ELF files?

TheSamuraiElephant · Post by **TheSamuraiElephant** » Thu Aug 04, 2005 9:29 pm

Hi,

I've heard lots of talk of people making home-brew games for the PSP by converting ELF files into PBP files to boot from. Is this the best way to get homebrew games working on the PSP?
Also, how do I make ELF files? I have Visual Studio.NET.

I'm a newbie to home-brew stuff (although not to programming), this is my first post. Go easy :)

Cheers!

J.F. · Post by **J.F.** » Wed Aug 10, 2005 8:10 am

Wrong forum. Ask in the PSP development forum.

Short answer - VS.Net won't make ELF files for MIPS CPUs. You need a version of gcc set to crosscompile for the proper CPU. Check the PSP SDK forum.

Post by **ooPo** » Wed Aug 10, 2005 8:39 am

Moved from 'PS2 General Discussion' to 'PSP Software Development'.

Mistake #1 - Posting to the wrong place.

Here's the sticky in this forum on using Visual Studio.Net that would have shown up in a simple search: http://forums.ps2dev.org/viewtopic.php?t=2493

Mistake #2 - Not bothering to read before writing.

Want to go for #3?

TheSamuraiElephant · Post by **TheSamuraiElephant** » Sat Aug 13, 2005 2:46 am

OK. Sorry I posted in the wrong place, it's my first post. I read somewhere that the PS2 general discussion was the place to ask newbie questions and assuming this generalisation swept out even to PSP newbie related discussion I posted there. Sorry about that.
RE: Mistake#2: I had already read that thread. While it does mention a way of linking the tool chain to Visual Studio.net It does not mention anything of converting ELF files to PBPs. I also did not hear if the way mentioned in the thread was the best way to create PBPs.
Perhaps mistake#3 was expecting this place to be a little more friendly.

Agoln · Post by **Agoln** » Sat Aug 13, 2005 3:16 am

TheSamuraiElephant wrote:Perhaps mistake#3 was expecting this place to be a little more friendly.

This place is friendly to people that have hinted that they have actually done some work on their own, instead of clogging up the forums by flapping their arms around asking how to do somthing that has been discussed in detail, many times over in the forums.

Your post suggested that you had heard of PBP and ELF somewhere, and you use VS.Net. If you did some researching, you would have found out that there is http://wiki.pspdev.org/psp:programming_faq that site, that tells how to get cygwin up and running, and goes on to explain how to start things off.

As for VS.Net, since that is not exactly *nix friendly, there has had to have been some hacking to get it to work properly. The thread mentioned by ooPo is the only one that someone has attempted to make the SDK work in .net.

But to answer your question after that lecture, here is the skinny of elf's and PBP's...

Elf's are an executable file that is made after compiling. Using the SDK and it's examples, you can use just about any Makfile in the sample SDK's and see how they are created.

After you create the ELF, you have to convert it into a file that the PSP can read and boot the game from. This is the PBP file. There are many tools available in the toolchain that convert Elf's to PBP's (pbp-packer) and PBP's to elf's (pbp-unpacker).

TheSamuraiElephant · Post by **TheSamuraiElephant** » Sat Aug 13, 2005 11:14 pm

Thanks for the reply.
I didn't intend that last post to sound bitter, I'm afraid it just came out the wrong way. Apologies if any offence was caused.
I can understand how annoying it must be to have to deal with people constantly asking the same questions without reading through FAQs. I had searched for PSP development sites (that is how i stumbled across this forum), but had not come across the wiki site previously. Thats probably my fault for skimming over my results.
Thanks for the explanations regarding ELFs and PBPs.
I won't post until I have something to show, or I have a problem relating to something I'm trying to develop (A 3DS file viewer for the PSP).
Hopefully then, I can get off to a better start with you both.

Cheers,
David