sLaunch GUI / Game Menu — 480i / CRT build

sLaunch is an alternative UI for accessing your webMAN games on the XMB. It's based on the new GUI for sMAN released by DeanK.

This is a modified build of the sLaunch plugin from webMAN MOD, reworked for standard definition output on a CRT and for large game libraries. The stock plugin draws a 1920x1080 canvas and point-samples it down to the 720x480 framebuffer, throwing away about 83% of the image — this build area-averages it instead, adds an anti-flicker pass for 480i, compensates for TV overscan/underscan, shows the scanned directories from /ROMS/xxx in their specific categories, removes PSP/ALL/VIDEO categories, increases the total game limit shown to 3500 whilst using the /ROMS/PSXISO /ROMS/PS2ISO /ROMS/PS3ISO workaround and fixes a number of bugs in list handling and navigation along the way.

Usage

Press L2+R2 or START button for 3 seconds from XMB to open/close the game menu.

• L/R Sticks = Navigate
• PAD Arrows = Navigate
• LEFT / RIGHT = Move along the row, turns the page at the ends of it
• UP / DOWN = Move between rows, never turns the page
• L1 / R1 = Prev / Next page
• L2 / R2 = Back / Forward 5 pages
• CROSS = Load the game title
• CIRCLE = Exit to XMB

• TRIANGLE = Side menu
• SQUARE = Filter content by game type (PSX / PS2 / PS3)
• L3 = Toggle between 5x2 / 10x4 items per page
• R3 = Jump to letter
• L3+R3 = Save a screenshot to /dev_hdd0/slaunch_NN.bmp

• SELECT = Toggle between Favorite / Normal list
• SELECT+R3 = Exit to XMB and show the webMAN popup
• START = Add / Remove game from Favorite list

Jump to letter (R3)

A narrow strip at the right edge listing # and A-Z. It opens on the initial of the title you are currently on. The list is kept sorted, so the first match is the start of that letter.

• UP / DOWN = Move one letter
• LEFT / RIGHT = Move five letters
• CROSS = Jump to the first title starting with that letter
• CIRCLE / TRIANGLE / R3 = Close without jumping
• L3+R3 = Save a screenshot

Side menu (TRIANGLE)

• UP / DOWN = Move between options
• LEFT / RIGHT = Change the value of the highlighted option
• CROSS = Select
• CIRCLE / TRIANGLE = Close
• L3+R3 = Save a screenshot

Features

• Area-averaged rendering and interlaced anti-flicker for SD output
• Overscan compensation, adjustable per axis
• On screen temperature display (CPU/RSX) — HD output only
• Fast menu navigation in grid format (5x2 or 10x4)
• Jump to letter (R3)
• Screen capture to BMP (L3+R3)
• Side menu
  • Favorites - Toggle between Favorite / Normal list
  • Unmount - Unload mounted game (ISO / folder)
  • Refresh - Scan for content / instant list without reload XMB
  • gameDATA - Redirects /dev_hdd0/game to USB device
  • Disable CFW Syscalls (press LEFT/RIGHT over gameDATA)
  • Restart - Restarts the PS3
  • Shutdown - Turn off the PS3
  • Unload webMAN
  • Setup - Open configuration page
  • File Manager (press LEFT/RIGHT over Setup)

Changes in this build

Rendering

• Area-averaged downscale. The stock blit iterates source pixels, so each output pixel keeps whichever canvas pixel happened to be written last — pure decimation. This one iterates destination pixels and averages every source pixel mapping onto each (4-9 of them). Alpha images are composited over 18% grey first, as the stock path does.
• Interlaced anti-flicker. Vertical 1-2-1 low-pass over the destination rows, applied after each blit. (a + 2b + c) / 4 is exactly AVG2(b, AVG2(a, c)), so it costs two packed halving adds per pixel — no divides, no channel unpacking.
• Overscan compensation. The UI is drawn into an inset region of the framebuffer with the border blacked out, since the PS3 has no picture-size control of its own. OVERSCAN_PCT_X and OVERSCAN_PCT_Y in blitting.c trim each axis independently; both at 0 gives the stock full-frame mapping exactly.
• Thin horizontal rules are widened on SD, since they are drawn straight to the framebuffer and bypass the averaging.
• The four integer divides per output pixel are replaced with a multiply and a shift against a reciprocal table, and the per-column source mapping is built once per blit rather than re-derived for every one of the ~345,000 output pixels.
• Toggles at the top of blitting.c: SD_AREA_AVERAGE, SD_ANTIFLICKER.

Rendering fixes

• print_text cleared sizeof(Glyph) bytes at the address of a Glyph * — around 60 bytes written over its own stack frame, on a thread with an 8KB stack.
• Glyph dimensions are clamped to the 0x400 cache slot they are copied into. The rasteriser can return an image larger than requested, which is how bigger fonts corrupted the heap.
• The glyph cache index was off by one, leaving slot 0 unused and putting every freshly rendered glyph outside the search range.

Content and list handling

• PSX/PS2 ROMs split by path. Entries under /ROMS/PSXISO/ and /ROMS/PS2ISO/ are tagged with the generic ROM type by webMAN, so they never matched the PSX/PS2 filters.
• MAX_GAMES raised from 2000 to 3500.
• Heapsort replaces the O(n²) selection sort — around 85x fewer string comparisons at 3500 titles, and one struct copy per level instead of three.
• The sorted list is cached back to slist.bin, so a category switch no longer re-sorts from scratch. The write is guarded so a capped or short read can't truncate the library.
• Fixed an inverted empty-entry filter that kept the blank records and dropped an equal number of real titles off the end.
• Fixed the empty-category retry re-reading the file with the wrong count and silently losing the tail of the library.
• Fixed a hang: the empty-category retry used to terminate only because it eventually landed on ALL. It is now bounded to one pass over the category list.

Categories and navigation

• SQUARE cycles PSX → PS2 → PS3, driven by a single array — the side menu, the empty category skip and the saved-config validation all derive from it.
• The unlabelled ALL category is gone. Favorites skip the type filter instead.
• The device filter (SQUARE+L2) and reset (SQUARE+R2) are removed.
• LEFT/RIGHT move along the row and turn the page at its ends, landing on the same row of the next page. UP/DOWN stay on the page.
• L2/R2 move five pages, so both trigger pairs scale with the grid size.
• Trigger tests use an exact match rather than a bitwise AND — the AND was firing on stray bits from the PS button, since pad data here is a raw HID report.
• L3 grid toggle restored — draw_page was resetting the grid size on every redraw on SD, so 10x4 never stuck.
• Fixed the cursor index wrapping to 65535 when the last favorite was removed.

Side menu and letter panel

• Closing either panel leaves it on screen until the full repaint lands, so nothing half-drawn is ever shown. Neither restores a saved screen strip any more.
• Cancelling the side menu no longer triggers a full reload of slist.bin.
• The letter panel is a narrow strip at the right edge — one character per row does not need the side menu's width, so the covers underneath stay visible.

Image decoding

• The decoder is created once per session instead of once per image. Both loaders wrapped Create/Destroy around every decode; that is the session-level pair in this API, Open/Close is the per-file pair. Drawing one page of the grid paid for it ten times over, forty in the 10x4 grid, plus once per background reload.
• It matters most for JPEG, where the SPU thread is enabled — each pair was starting and stopping an SPU thread, which costs far more than decoding a cover. The PNG path is PPU-only, so the saving there is smaller.
• Both decoders are released in stop_VSH_Menu(), alongside font_finalize().

Info bar

• Shows the title only. webMAN builds names as folder/file, which for one folder per game is the same title twice — this keeps the part after the last slash. The path line is removed and the counter moved up.

How it works

The plugin is stored in /dev_hdd0/tmp/wm_res/slaunch.sprx. It is loaded dynamically by webMAN MOD and unloaded from memory when it exits to XMB.

NOTE: /dev_hdd0/tmp is webMAN's working directory — reinstalling or updating webMAN MOD will overwrite the plugin, so keep a copy.

The file /dev_hdd0/tmp/wmtmp/slist.bin containing the list of games is built by webMAN MOD when the XML content list is scanned. New content needs a webMAN refresh before it appears.

A second /dev_hdd0/tmp/wmtmp/slist1.bin is used for favorite games.

NOTE: The internal data structure is very different to sLaunch menu in sMAN.

The menu is rendered writing directly to the XMB video buffer using the hack developed by 3141card for VSH menu and extended by DeanK to display on full screen. Because the UI is already sitting in the framebuffer, the screen capture is a straight dump of that memory — the file is exactly what the TV was showing, downscaling and all.

When a game is selected, the menu sends a web command to webMAN MOD to mount the game. The rest of the game loading process is performed by webMAN MOD and Cobra payload.

The last used settings are stored in /dev_hdd0/tmp/wmtmp/slaunch.cfg

Compilation Notes

This build is compiled with the official PS3 SDK v400.001 toolchain, MinGW and Git Bash on Windows.

_Projects_/slaunch has its own Makefile — the root _Make.bat does not build it — so run the batch file from inside that folder. The modified sources are slaunch.c, blitting.c, jpg_dec.c and png_dec.c.

NOTE: if a rebuild seems to change nothing, delete the objs folder first. The Makefile can report objs/slaunch.ppu.o as up to date and relink the stale object, so the build succeeds and hands you the previous binary. APP_VERSION at the top of slaunch.c prints at the top of the side menu — bump it each build and you can confirm at a glance which one the console is actually running.

The rendering changes only affect the SD path. On 720p/1080p the plugin takes the stock code path and behaves as upstream; the rest of the fixes apply at every resolution.

Credits

• DeanK - Original sLaunch GUI concept and coding.
• aldostools - Modification, additional features and optimizations.
• 3141card - Video rendering functions and memory handling.
• DarjanKrijan - ARGB support and testing
• Mysis - VSH exports