IGR Reference

In-Game Reset (IGR)

In-Game Reset lets you leave a running game — or power the console off — without touching the console's own Reset button. It is a controller shortcut that works from inside the game.

RiptOPL installs a small hook into the running game that watches the controller for a reserved button combination. When it sees one, it tears the game down and either leaves for the PS2 browser (or the ELF set in IGR Path) or shuts the console down.

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The button combinations

Every combination starts the same way: hold all four shoulder buttons — L1 + L2 + R1 + R2 — and then, while still holding them, press the second half.

Hold	Then press	Result
L1 + L2 + R1 + R2	Start + Select	Reset — quit the game; see Where a reset takes you
L1 + L2 + R1 + R2	L3 + R3	Power off the console
L1 + L2 + R1 + R2	Up	In-Game Screenshot — see Screenshots

L3 and R3 are the analog-stick clicks, so the power-off combination needs a DualShock with the analog light on.

The console power button

The power button on the front of the console is hooked too, and does not need a controller:

Power button	Result
Press once	Power off
Press twice	Reset — the same as Start + Select

The second press has to land within about a second — RiptOPL waits ~50 polling frames after the first press to see whether another arrives, then acts on the count. A single hardware power-off status held across several frames counts as one press, not a spurious double press.

A physical tap is not guaranteed on every console and transport. On hardware with an active DEV9/network adapter or HDD, the front-panel event passes through the console's Mechacon/CDVD handling. If the event is missed, controller IGR can still work: the two have different input paths, and reset and power-off take different shutdown paths. This is a compatibility limit, not a reason to reset DEV9 or power-cycle the drive during a game. If a short tap is ignored, the console's normal press-and-hold standby action is the hardware fallback; avoid cutting AC power during disk activity.

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Where a reset takes you

With the IGR Path setting (Settings → General & System) left blank, a reset exits to the PS2 browser, the same place the menu's own Exit goes. It does not come back to RiptOPL by itself.

Point IGR Path at an ELF and that ELF is booted on reset instead: another launcher, a homebrew menu, or RiptOPL itself. To come straight back to RiptOPL, give it RiptOPL's own ELF — mc0:/APP_RIPTOPL/RIPTOPL.ELF if you imported APP_RIPTOPL.psu to the first memory card. RiptOPL then starts fresh. It does not restore what you had selected: Remember Last Played Game (Settings → General & System) is a separate setting, off by default, and it is what re-selects the last game you ran.

The ELF must live on a memory card (mc0: or mc1:) or on a FAT32 USB drive (mass:/…). After a reset the console can only reach USB through USBD.IRX and USBHDFSD.IRX in the memory card's SYS-CONF folder, the files FMCB installs; without them the reset drops to the PS2 browser instead. If they are missing, RiptOPL offers to copy its own there the first time you launch a game on the OPL core with a USB IGR Path (Neutrino has no IGR, so its launches never ask). It never replaces files that are already there. Games started by Auto Loading skip the offer, because nobody is at the menu to answer it: launch a game on the OPL core from the menu once, or copy the two files yourself, before relying on a USB IGR Path there.

If you use MMCE cards, IGR Bootcard Slot(s) (Settings → Game Sources → MMCE Settings) additionally sends a "switch to bootcard" command to slot 0, slot 1, both, or neither as the reset happens, so the card is already back on its boot image by the time the next thing loads.

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When IGR is not available

IGR is not universal. It is worth knowing the three cases where the combinations will do nothing, so you do not spend time hunting a fault that is not there.

Before the game opens a controller. The hook attaches by patching the game's own scePadPortOpen / scePad2CreateSocket call. Until the game asks for a pad, there is nothing hooked — so IGR does not respond during very early boot logos on some titles. The console power button still works.

When the game is incompatible. A few games handle input in a way the hook disturbs. Per-game compatibility Mode 6 — Disable IGR turns the hook off for that title. If a game misbehaves in a way that started when you launched it through RiptOPL, this is the mode to try — at the cost of losing IGR for that game.

Fewer games should need it now. IGR used to watch the pad from a VBLANK interrupt handler, and merely registering one black-screened some games (Fatal Fury: Battle Archives Volume 2), whatever the handler did. It now polls the pad from its own low-priority thread, woken by a timer about once a frame, and registers nothing on VBLANK (official OPL #1762, ported here). The RetroAchievements loader is the exception: its per-frame snapshots and unlock notice require a VBLANK interrupt. With IGR enabled, RA uses the existing combined VBLANK/IGR path. Under Mode 6, RA instead installs a snapshot-only handler when telemetry is active, without an IGR thread or pad hooks. Achievements may continue, but client-triggered reset is unavailable. Games incompatible with registration of any VBLANK handler may still be affected.

If IGR stops responding in a game that used to answer it on an older build, report the title. A game that never lets a low-priority thread run would starve the polling thread; the power button does not depend on the pad and is the quickest cross-check.

Under the Neutrino core. Neutrino has no IGR at all. This is not a RiptOPL limitation but a property of that loader, and it is why Mode 6 is greyed out whenever the Loader Core is set to Neutrino — there is no hook there to disable. To leave a Neutrino-launched game, use the console's power or reset button.

PS1 titles are a separate case again: they run under POPSTARTER or Ember, each of which has its own independent IGR behaviour built into that binary. RiptOPL's hook is not involved. See VCD.md.

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In-Game Screenshots (IGS)

The L1+L2+R1+R2 + Up combination captures the current frame to a bitmap on memory card slot 1, named from the game's ID with a zero-padded sequence number starting at 001 — for example mc1:/SLUS_012.34_GS(001).bmp. The number increments to a maximum of 255 per game.

Two conditions gate it, and both catch people out:

1. GSM must be enabled for the running game. The capture is gated on the game's GSM setting, so with GSM off the combination does nothing at all.
2. The build must include IGS. The Makefile defaults EXTRA_FEATURES to 0 and IGS follows it, and the main release loader is built with that default — so the loader most people run has no IGS and the Up combination is simply inert.

You do not have to build it yourself. The rolling release also publishes an IGS-enabled loader: inside RIPTOPL-VARIANTS-*.zip, the variants named -extra1 are built with EXTRA_FEATURES=1, which turns IGS on. They come in pademu0/pademu1 and optional -ds5 flavours. Building from source with make IGS=1 (or EXTRA_FEATURES=1) works too.

One combination is not available: the RetroAchievements loader (RIPTOPL-RetroAchievements-*.zip) is deliberately built without EXTRA_FEATURES, because GSM 1080p plus IGS and RA cannot both fit in the ram84 region — you can have achievements or in-game screenshots, not both.

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Troubleshooting

Nothing happens when I press the combination. Check, in order: the game has actually started (past the early boot logos); the Loader Core is OPL rather than Neutrino; Mode 6 is not set for this game; and — for the power-off combination specifically — the controller is in analog mode, since L3 and R3 are the stick clicks. The screenshot combination uses Up, so it needs no analog mode.

Try the console power button as a cross-check: if that resets and the pad combination does not, the hook is fine and the problem is in the pad half.

Reset takes me somewhere unexpected. Check IGR Path in Settings → General & System. A stale path left over from an earlier setup will boot that ELF instead of exiting to the PS2 browser. A USB path that lands in the PS2 browser anyway is missing its memory-card drivers — see Where a reset takes you.

The game resets on its own during play. A game that uses all four shoulders plus Start or Select in normal play can trigger IGR by accident. Set Mode 6 — Disable IGR for that title.

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Where this lives in the source

File	Role
ee_core/src/padhook.c	The hook itself: pad pattern matching, the polling IGR thread and its one-frame alarm (the VBLANK interrupt handler in RetroAchievements builds only), combo dispatch
ee_core/include/padhook.h	The combo constants (IGR_COMBO_R1_L1_R2_L2, IGR_COMBO_START_SELECT, IGR_COMBO_R3_L3, IGR_COMBO_UP)
ee_core/src/cd_igr_rpc.c	IOP-side reset RPC
ee_core/src/igs_api.c	Screenshot capture and BMP writing
include/iosupport.h	COMPAT_MODE_6 — the Disable IGR flag

See also

• CONTROLS.md — the full button reference
• NEUTRINO.md — the alternative core, which has no IGR
• VCD.md — PS1 titles and their own IGR behaviour

Related guide: In Game Reset.

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Source: docs/IGR.md @ 679582deddf5.