Hacking [Release] Vita-Launcher App to launch games and apps

cy33hc · Oct 12, 2020

Release v1.4

Add ability to launch Adrenaline PSP ISO and EBOOT games directly via the launcher app. This still requires Adrenaline Bubble Booter which is installed by Adrenaline Bubble Manager. You will NEED to install AdrenalineLauncher.vpk. This will install a placeholder Bubble which will be used by Vita-Launcher. Vita-Launcher make some modification to the content in the Bubble with the game info before starting it.

Add rom filters in the ux0:data/SMLA00001/config.ini to only look for specific files in the ROMS folder. This allows the scan to skip sav file and unrelated content while scanning for games. Also you can edit the config to specify any other file extensions you want to skip.

Add new categories for Atari 2600, 7800, C64 and Wonder Swan.

Here is require VPK to install to make use of direct Adrenaline booting.
https://github.com/cy33hc/vita-launcher/releases/download/v1.4/AdrenalineLauncher.vpk
New How to video.
How to setup Vita-Laucher to launch Adrenaline ISO and EBOOT directly.

nowhereman87 · Oct 12, 2020

cy33hc said:
Those are good ideas about the retro icons. As for the app running in the background, that's something that can be looked into later. I just start coding in vita, so still alot for me to learn.

The good thing about using Retroarch's thumbnail resources is that these files already have the exact name of the ROM files, so they would not need to be renamed. I suppose that the difficult thing would be to adapt them to icon format since they are images in 4:3 ratio for the most part and have a tad bigger size than standard icons.
For arcade roms (MAME, FBA, FBN etc) maybe it would be necessary to examine the playlists generated by RA or use its workaround since those roms use abbreviated names, so RA "learn" their full name by looking at the standard database files and then requests the thumbnails.

Some places where anyone can get those databases that Retroarch and others arcade emulators use:
https://github.com/libretro/libretro-database/tree/master/metadat/mame
https://github.com/libretro/fbneo/tree/master/dats
https://insertmorecoins.es/dats-mame/

cy33hc said:
... PSP ISO icons will be missing since I don't know how to extract them from ISO yet. EBOOT.PBP icons are ok.

For the extraction of icons and other metadata from image files, I guess it would be useful to look the ABM code since that app successfully extracts them from eboot, ISO and CSO files. Sorry I can't help more because I'm a total noob in programming matters, thanks for the new features!

satel · Oct 12, 2020

@cy33hc

thanks for the great work you have done so far on the best Vita Launcher the only thing i say missing is the ability for us to customize it,is it even possible for you to add such feature ? i would like to be able to remove NeoGeo,N64 & add my own.

by the way even with v1.4 if icons in the same folder as roms the scan will crash the launcher !! not a big deal i will just separate them.

@cy33hc

to save much time can scanning be made to scan only for content that has been added recently aka scan emulators separately rather than scan for everything that has already been scanned because if scan crash due to whatever reason this means everything has to be re-scanned again ! i have been unable to scan the mega drive,master system,gamegear because scan keeps on crashing on NeoGeo !

cy33hc · Oct 14, 2020

satel said:
@cy33hc

thanks for the great work you have done so far on the best Vita Launcher the only thing i say missing is the ability for us to customize it,is it even possible for you to add such feature ? i would like to be able to remove NeoGeo,N64 & add my own.

by the way even with v1.4 if icons in the same folder as roms the scan will crash the launcher !! not a big deal i will just separate them.

@cy33hc

to save much time can scanning be made to scan only for content that has been added recently aka scan emulators separately rather than scan for everything that has already been scanned because if scan crash due to whatever reason this means everything has to be re-scanned again ! i have been unable to scan the mega drive,master system,gamegear because scan keeps on crashing on NeoGeo !

I'm looking into only scanning a particular category and not everything too to reduce the issues. As for custom categories it's a little difficult to implement so I'll keep in the backlog. I've figured out how to extra PSP ISO icons.

satel · Oct 14, 2020

cy33hc said:
I'm looking into only scanning a particular category and not everything too to reduce the issues. As for custom categories it's a little difficult to implement so I'll keep in the backlog. I've figured out how to extra PSP ISO icons.

scanning particular category will be very useful, also did you manage to extract ps mobile icons too ? 1 more thing if that's ok, does your launcher scan for adrenaline categories ? below is my categories & they are not scanning as the launcher will just crash when i try to scan.

CAT_Minis ( eboots )
CAT_PSN ( eboots )
CAT_PSOne Classics ( eboots )
CAT_PSOne Shmups ( eboots )
CAT_PSP ( eboots )

the CSO PSP directory:
pspemu/ISO/CAT_PSN CSO/

cy33hc · Oct 14, 2020

satel said:
scanning particular category will be very useful, also did you manage to extract ps mobile icons too ? 1 more thing if that's ok, does your launcher scan for adrenaline categories ? below is my categories & they are not scanning as the launcher will just crash when i try to scan.

CAT_Minis ( eboots )
CAT_PSN ( eboots )
CAT_PSOne Classics ( eboots )
CAT_PSOne Shmups ( eboots )
CAT_PSP ( eboots )

the CSO PSP directory:
pspemu/ISO/CAT_PSN CSO/

I'm not scaning subfolders and I think the app is think the subfolder is a game therefore causing the crash. I will have to exclude subfolder for now in the filter. Are you using the categories plugin??

satel · Oct 14, 2020

cy33hc said:
I'm not scaning subfolders and I think the app is think the subfolder is a game therefore causing the crash. I will have to exclude subfolder for now in the filter. Are you using the categories plugin??

yes i'm using category_lite.prx

do you think it's possible to make the adrenaline roms_path like how retroarch is aka wet set the path for the psp.psp minis.psp psn.ps1 classics,ps1 shmups,psp cso ?

cy33hc · Oct 15, 2020

Release v1.5

Add support for scanning for PSP ISO/CSO and EBOOT found in sub directories. This will find the games in subfolders created by category_lite plugin.
Add ability to extract the ICON's from PSP ISO/CSO's
Add ability to scan individual games categories.
Fixed issue while scanning game folders that contains folders that would crash the app.
Improve the startup speed of the app when there are thousands of games.

https://github.com/cy33hc/vita-launcher/releases/tag/v1.5

satel · Oct 15, 2020

@cy33hc

thanks a lot for the great update & here is what i have found after scanning:

1- psp category also shows some psx & psp minis games
2- psp minis category same as above
3- ps mobile category still has no icons
4- some categories are shown duplicate icons like psp.psx.psp mini. gbc some of these duplicates are linked to the Launcher's own folder.

improvements: would be nice if you can change the category scrolling colour to red or something easier to spot than blue

cy33hc · Oct 15, 2020

satel said:
@cy33hc

thanks a lot for the great update & here is what i have found after scanning:

1- psp category also shows some psx & psp minis games
2- psp minis category same as above
3- ps mobile category still has no icons
4- some categories are shown duplicate icons like psp.psx.psp mini. gbc some of these duplicates are linked to the Launcher's own folder.

improvements: would be nice if you can change the category scrolling colour to red or something easier to spot than blue

Can you PM me with the cache.db found in the ux0:data/SMLA00001 folder. Thx

satel · Oct 15, 2020

cy33hc said:
Can you PM me with the cache.db found in the ux0:data/SMLA00001 folder. Thx

i just did

cy33hc · Oct 16, 2020

satel said:
i just did

Hi satel.

I reviewed your cache file, and for psp, psx those duplicates are legit. You have EBOOT under different folders, but they are the same game.

Example.
CAT_PSN/Bomberman ULUS10121/EBOOT.PBP
CAT_PSP/Bomberman/EBOOT.PBP

This 2 EBOOTs are both AngryBirds. It's just different titleId.
CAT_Minis/NPUZ00119/EBOOT.PBP
CAT_Minis/NPUZ00241/EBOOT.PBP

As for the GBC duplicates, can you just try re-scan. I think the rescan should remove the duplicates.

You can view the Database Content using the following opensource software.

https://sqlitebrowser.org/dl/

satel · Oct 16, 2020

thanks @cy33hc for taking the time to look into this for me i really appreciate it.

there are some are duplicates but some aren't actual games thus aren't playable for example activision hits for psp showing 3 icons but but only 1 is actual playable game & the icons names are different so i'm not sure where the other 2 icons came from

here
Activision Hits the actual game
PSPEMU084 - Activision Hits ( where this come from?) not playbale
PSPEMU092 - Activision Hits ( also this one?) not playable

this image for psp category it has psx.psp minis plus other none playable duplicates too that begin with this PSPEMU

cy33hc · Oct 16, 2020

satel said:
thanks @cy33hc for taking the time to look into this for me i really appreciate it.

there are some are duplicates but some aren't actual games thus aren't playable for example activision hits for psp showing 3 icons but but only 1 is actual playable game & the icons names are different so i'm not sure where the other 2 icons came from

here
Activision Hits the actual game
PSPEMU084 - Activision Hits ( where this come from?) not playbale
PSPEMU092 - Activision Hits ( also this one?) not playable

this image for psp category it has psx.psp minis plus other none playable duplicates too that begin with this PSPEMU

Are you using Adrenaline Bubble Manager. The titleId that begin with "PSPEMU" are normally create by ABM.

satel · Oct 16, 2020

@cy33hc

yes i have lots of bubbles created by ABM,this means i need to delete the bubbles ? any chance you can add the option to remove them from your launcher or better make it not scan for ABM bubbles ?

cy33hc · Oct 16, 2020

satel said:
@cy33hc

yes i have lots of bubbles created by ABM,this means i need to delete the bubbles ? any chance you can add the option to remove them from your launcher or better make it not scan for ABM bubbles ?

For Vita bubbles, I'm reading the game info directly from the Vita's DB so I can't nor do I want to mock around the VitaDB. You can edit the config.ini and remove PSPEM from the PSP section valid_title_ids, but they will end up under the "Others" category.

satel · Oct 16, 2020

cy33hc said:
For Vita bubbles, I'm reading the game info directly from the Vita's DB so I can't nor do I want to mock around the VitaDB.

i see,is it possible you can add the option to manually remove the ABM bubbles from your launcher ?

cy33hc · Oct 16, 2020

satel said:
i see,is it possible you can add the option to manually remove the ABM bubbles from your launcher ?

You can use ABM to remove the bubbles. The "O" button brings up the UI in ABM to remove them.

satel · Oct 16, 2020

@cy33hc

thanks

satel · Oct 16, 2020

cy33hc said:
You can use ABM to remove the bubbles. The "O" button brings up the UI in ABM to remove them.

i have removed the ABM bubbles & this removed all duplicates but still PSP Eboots are showing in the PSP Minis category, any chance you can please make a separate category for PSP Eboots ?

pspemu/PSP\GAME/CAT_PSP this is the location for psp eboots

also any chance we can change the icons row from 3 rows to 2 ? just so we can have bigger icons ? you don't have to remove the 3 rows just add an option to change the rows count if possible. thanks

Hacking [Release] Vita-Launcher App to launch games and apps

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