Little Joey 0.5.0 first public alpha Little Joey 0.5.0 first public alpha UPDATE

0.5.0 "Little Joey" — archive corrected 2026-09-02

If you downloaded this release before 2 September 2026, download it again.

The original archive contained the wrong disc image. It carried blackroo.bin,
which is the development disc.

The two images are the same size and carry the same files. They differ in 310
bytes of SYSTEM.CNF. The wrong one still boots — it just boots with no video
mode programmed, because programming one is kloader's job, so a television
shows coloured blocks and stray characters instead of a menu. If that is what
you saw, nothing was wrong with your burn or your console.

The burn instructions were wrong to match: they named a .toc file that was
not in the archive.

Nothing about the software changed. The Little Joey disc image is byte-for-byte
the one this release was built from, and it has been burned and booted on a real
PAL SCPH-750x since.

Regions (added 16 September 2026)

Each memory variant now comes in three archives:

archive suffix	licence area	for
(none)	PAL	Europe, Australia
_ntsc_u	NTSC-U	North America
_ntsc_j	NTSC-J	Japan

The licence area (the first 16 sectors of the disc) is the only difference
between them. Every other byte of the disc is identical to the PAL image that
was booted on hardware. kloader reads the console's own video standard when it
starts, so an NTSC console gets a 60 Hz picture from any of the three; the
region archive just gives it the licence data a disc from that region carries.
L2/R2 on the menu step through the other video modes if the television
disagrees.

The NTSC discs have not been booted on an NTSC console here. If you burn one,
please report what you saw.

Credit: GOROman brought 0.5.0 up on a Japanese SCPH-3500 over the SIO1
serial port, and fixed the kernel's video fallback (NTSC instead of PAL when
booted without kloader) and the serial console's line endings. Those fixes are
in the repository under his authorship and will be in the next build. These
region archives follow from that work.

What is in each archive

blackroo-kloader.bin   the disc image
blackroo-kloader.cue
blackroo-kloader.toc   burn this one with cdrdao
blackroo.exe           kernel as a PS-EXE, for serial upload from kloader
BURNING.txt            how to burn it, and what it should look like
RELEASE.txt            exactly what this build was 
COPYING.TXT         

Burn from inside the unpacked folder:

cdrdao write --device /dev/sr0 --driver generic-mmc-raw -n --eject \
    blackroo-kloader.toc

You should get the kloader menu with the codename on it. A burned CD-R still
needs a modchip, or tonyhax / FreePSXBoot from a memory card — an unmodified
console rejects any CD-R regardless of what is written to it.

Three variants

archive	console	status
blackroo_0.5.0_littlejoey.zip	stock, 2 MB	burned and booted on hardware
blackroo_0.5.0_blackbelt.zip	8 MB RAM mod	builds and verifies; not run on hardware
blackroo_0.5.0_bigskippah.zip	16 MB RAM mod	COMING SOON. The RAM_SIZE register has no published 16 MB encoding, so this build uses the
runtime probe. It has never run on a 16 MB console.

Checksums

Archives:

e5e71a399eedd734fb7438622e7df918252b128586a13c68a179e52eba049674  blackroo_0.5.0_littlejoey.zip
30feaf25742fccac0eccba785422f14c30311f9562f44981da0f61bb0bbf5873  blackroo_0.5.0_littlejoey_ntsc_u.zip
d461558c1fa0d714960da92828b687189d75930205014049f9de9b506b74462f  blackroo_0.5.0_littlejoey_ntsc_j.zip
e1360a45c30fde20ca42c271feedb7cc7d8fa44282dc2afaf381513e4517245f  blackroo_0.5.0_blackbelt.zip
815462fc31d71da7d3d8329c7b1325f112c4973469ddedf1c7ae417cb998c7bc  blackroo_0.5.0_blackbelt_ntsc_u.zip
a27b0eda3496a0521c507b4c68743e2dea02624674a3c08e54095047a1c43fc9  blackroo_0.5.0_blackbelt_ntsc_j.zip
943c9d9b21969b8a05e558e3631f2556476ba545c175339bb96e4c2950258cd9  blackroo_0.5.0_bigskippah.zip
a938e7c7396648efae18abbb23f0b35944ac8c7494d9f608185cccb619b8c743  blackroo_0.5.0_bigskippah_ntsc_u.zip
3d361f2fee3d2038cd1604782fd3cb2e0ce7c272fff8e1373e11999422f0b6d4  blackroo_0.5.0_bigskippah_ntsc_j.zip

The disc image inside blackroo_0.5.0_littlejoey.zip is
03625211a0b179bf... — if yours is 32734567d3d31e04... you have the old,
wrong one.