PiKey and IRShell 3.6 plugins for VSH

[sier]

First post.   Please go easy...  

I should start off by saying that I bought my PSP two weeks ago on a complete whim.  It was cheap, I knew it could browse the internet wirelessly, and I could play games whenever I got bored.  it came with 3.40 firmware, which I upgraded to 3.51 - and then took back the next day after reading some homebrew forums (thanks WalMart!).  So now with the second PSP, I upgraded to 3.50, then downgraded using Lumines to 1.50, then back up to 3.40 OE-A.  I have flashed other devices and modded other systems, so I felt pretty comfortable jumping into this.  But keep in mind, I am still new to the PSP firmware structure terminology (but getting better each day I play with this sucker).

I just recently installed IRShell to play around with it.  Install went just fine, I enabled the VSH plugin in the recovery menu so it would auto-boot into IRShell - no biggie.

Yesterday I picked up a Targus PA870v2.0 for 18 bucks and wanted to give some homebrew apps a try with it.  All of ZX81's apps worked pretty well with the keyboard, so i figured I'd give PiKey a try as well (even though I know there are issues with PiKey and ZX81's apps).  

I installed PiKey, went into recovery, enabled both VSH and GAME plugins and rebooted.  Upon reboot, my system hangs at the "waves" with no XMB displaying and no IRShell auto-load.  It shows the little loading "dot" in the lower right hand corner, but it simply sits there.  I figured there was was some sort of conflict with the two VSH plugins (IRShell and PiKey), so I went back into recovery and disabled IRShell's VSH plugin and rebooted.  It loaded straight into the XMB as I hoped it would and PiKey was working great.

Back out in recovery I re-enabled IRShell's VSH plugin to see if maybe it was a glitch, but it did the same thing - upon boot up it hung up at the Waves and never entered XMB or IRShell.  So I disabled it once more and tested PiKey once again - working perfectly.

So after this ridiculously long story (I wanted to give as much info as possible), I am wondering if having two VSH plugins isn't kosher (once again, I am only two weeks into modding the PSP), or if it's just those two conflicting with one another.  I have no problems loading IRShell from the GAMES menu in XMB (but it does bomb out when I try to exit it if I dont use the VSH plugin), but if I can get these two plugins working together that would be fantastic.

Anyone have a simple answer to this?  PiKey is working *awesome* otherwise and I am in a huge debt to all the dev that went into this.  Thanks for putting up with my novel.

~ s


Posted on: August 03, 2007, 01:48:57 AMAfter doing a bit more research on the subject, I've come to the conclusion that it could just simply be a memory error since IRShell uses so much of it.   That would make the most sense.  How much of the onboard mem does PiKey take to run?  

Anyone else run into a similar problem using only two VSH plugins?

[Fanjita]

I would guess that you're right about it being a memory shortage.

piKey is designed to use very little mem - it's really a very small application, it should take up only a handful of kilobytes - but the free memory under VSH on later firmwares is extremely limited to begin with.

It's possible that if you manage to load the modules in the opposite order (pikey then irshell, or irshell then pikey) then it *might* just work - I forget exactly how to do this, but I imagine it's as simple as changing the order in seplugins/vsh.txt.

[sier]

Thanks for the quick response.

I tried your advice of re-ordering the pluigins in VSH.txt (which does make the most sense).  Upon reboot into recovery mode I noticed the plugins were now listed in different order (PiKey VSH, IRShell VSH, and PiKey GAME).  I enabled all of them, but still have the same result.  I went back in and only disabled the GAME PiKey plugin, but same result.  I think it's simply the VSH's plugins trying to consume too much memory on boot.  

Honestly, I have no problem disabling one or the other on bootup so that looks like it might be the best solution right now.  Thanks again for the help.

~ s

[Fanjita]

You can also disable piKey by holding the SELECT button at boot time - when you do that, it does its best to unload as much of itself as possible, it would be interesting to know if that makes any difference.

[sier]

That was my first solution to get into IRShell with the PiKey plugins enabled.   If I disable PiKey on bootup (with SELECT) I can boot into IRShell without the PSP hanging on the waves, which does lend a little more credibility to the "memory" issue.  

Alternatively, I can also hold TRIANGLE to disable IRShell on bootup and that will bootup with PiKey.  So as long as I disable one or the other with the corresponding button, I am able to bootup as if only one of the VSH plugins is enabled.  If there is no solution simply because of the limited memory of the PSP, that is a solution I can live with.  If I can tinker around with the plugins and get it working with both, I will post my solution up here.

Until then, I guess my PSP has somewhat of a security feature to the average user because if they turn it on in a normal fashion, they wont be getting anywhere...hahaha.

Thanks for the help, Fanjita.  PiKey works fantastic on it's own.

[thorrrr]

I have the same issue with mine running on 3.52 M33-4 love pikey but its a shame there is no work around.

[Angelo]

The whole app is dead in 3.71 M33