I’m excited to announce a new revision of Half Byte Loader that brings more compatibility, and some features that people have been expecting for a while. Let’s skip the details, but this revision improves compatibility for picodrive, gpsp (kai 3.2 is the one I used for my tests), and scummVM.

A major change of this revision is a system of config files and override config files. A basic config file hbl_config.txt goes in the hbl folder, and override config files can go in each homebrew’s folder.

Picodrive is a good example because it is the reason I added this functionality. Picodrive uses the function sceIoMkdir to create folders on your memory stick, when it runs. Unfortunately, Patapon does not have that function, which means HBL needs to “estimate” it. If you’ve been using HBL for a while, you now know that estimations sometimes fail. Estimations lead to crashes, crashes lead to anger, anger leads to…errr, nevermind.

But the good thing is: you can manually create these folders, and bypass this function call in Picodrive. This is done with a simple configuration file. You can find this file in hbl_config_samples/picodrive/hbl_config.txt. Just copy it in your picodrive folder, and voilà, picodrive will not crash at that specific point. HOWEVER, there is an important drawback: if you set that specific parameter in the config file, it means the function to create folders will not work anymore. For Picodrive it is not a big deal since you can create them manually, but for other games it might be a problem, which is why I set the system up so that you can tweak the config on a per game basis. For the time being, the config file only allows to play with sceIoMkdir, and also to set your Homebrew path (check hbl/hbl_config.txt), but in the future we might expand this configuration system to improve homebrew compatibility. Of course, feel free to help us with the code on that part!

Hmmm, I guess that’s it, improved compatibility for 3 major homebrews (and probably for others that I haven’t tested), possibility to choose where you put your homebrews, and advanced configuration system.

Enjoy

download here