PS2BUILD SDK Documentation

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Storage beta ​

New, hand-written section - see the note on the cheat sheet.

The PS2 has three real storage devices a homebrew project might touch

  • the disc, the memory card, and (much less commonly today) a hard disk - and, as with every peripheral so far, all three are reached through the IOP, never directly from the EE. Each has its own low-level driver plus a filesystem layer built on top of it.

The disc: CD/DVD ​

  • cdvd (core) is the low-level EE-side interface to the drive - reading raw sectors, tray/disc status.
  • cdvdfsv (core) is the IOP-side CD/DVD filesystem server - the ISO9660-level piece that turns raw sectors into files and directories.
  • cdfs (core) registers the actual cdfs: device (built on top of cdvdman, the underlying low-level IOP driver) that your program opens files through.

In practice: your code reads files via cdfs:/cdvdfsv, not by parsing ISO9660 sectors itself.

The memory card ​

Physically a SIO2 peripheral (see Controllers), but its job is storage, so it gets its own filesystem layer too:

  • mc (core) is the EE-side RPC client; mcman (core) is the IOP driver it talks to - the same client/driver shape as pad/ padman.
  • mcserv (core) is a higher-level IOP-side filesystem server on top of mcman - the piece that understands the memory card's actual directory/file structure, not just raw sector access.
  • fs-osd/hdd-osd (core) implement PFS - the real filesystem format the PS2 BIOS's own save-game browser uses. This is the format you want if save data needs to show up correctly in the system's own memory-card management screen, on both a real memory card and (see below) the HDD.
  • mmceman (world) is a memory-card-emulator target - useful when you want save data backed by something other than a real physical card (e.g. during development), without changing how your game code talks to mc.

Hard disk / generic block devices ​

The PS2's HDD (a real but niche unit for retail hardware, more common in development setups) and generic USB mass storage share a different layer, since neither is a SIO2 peripheral:

  • apa (core) is the APA partition manager - the PS2's own disk-partitioning scheme, registering hdd0: as a device.
  • bdm (core) is a more generic block-device manager - MBR/GPT partition table parsing for things that aren't APA-formatted (a USB drive, for instance).
  • bdmfs_fatfs (core) is a FAT12/16/32 filesystem driver sitting on top of bdm - the piece that makes a plain FAT-formatted USB drive actually readable as files.
  • fs-osd/hdd-osd (the same PFS packages as above) are also what you'd use for BIOS-browser-compatible save data living on the HDD instead of a memory card.

See also ​