PlayStation 2 DevEnv for Docker

A toolchain host for the Sony PlayStation 2 SDK, using a 🔗Retail Debugging Startup Cart (PSX-Place) for on-target debugging on retail systems.

See also: ps2ded-vscode, a VS Code Devcontainer for PS2DED

System Requirements

• Docker Desktop (Windows host) or Docker Server (Linux host)
• Retail PlayStation 2 w/ Ethernet interface (tested on SCPH-77004)
• uLaunchELF (tested with v4.43a)

Preparation

This repository does not and will not include third-party tools. They need to be sourced separately.

1. Source a 2005 Sony PlayStation 2 SDK disk image
2. Install the SDK on a Windows machine, and pack the sce folder into a compressed ZIP archive sce.zip
3. Move the archive into the install/ directory of this repo
4. Download the DSNET tool set from the RDB project: 🔗PSX-Place (dsnet-bin.7z)
5. Place the 7zip archive into the install/ folder as well

Retail Debugging Startup Cart (RDB-UIF)

1. Download the binaries from the RDB project: 🔗PSX-Place (RDB-095-bin.7z)
2. Transfer the following files to your system, e.g. using uLaunchELF's FTP server. Place them in a new folder on your memory card, e.g. mc0:/RDB/
   • RDB-UIF.elf
   • thmon.irx
3. Copy the following files from your SDK folder sce/iop/modules/ into the same memory card location, as those listed above:
   • sio2man.irx
   • IOPRP300.img - rename this file to IOPRP.img on the memory card

Building

To build the Docker image, open a shell session inside the cloned repo folder, and run:

docker build -t ps2ded-sce .

Due to limitations of the Docker build system, this will leave behind an untagged image of the builder stage, with a size of around 3 GB. This dangling image can be removed.

Image Size Optimization

You can limit the image size by removing unnecessary files and folders from the sce.zip archive, such as documentation or Windows tools. The minimum configuration consists of:

• dsnet-bin.7z: only requires dsnetm executable
• sce.zip: requires sce/bin/, sce/common/, sce/ee/, and sce/iop/ folders

Configuration	Image Size
Full	ca. 2 GB
Minimal	ca. 250 MB

Usage

The container provides access to the PlayStation 2 SDK compiler and debugger toolchain, as well as all related header files. The DSNET server can be accessed from other tools, similar to a TOOL PlayStation 2, via the exposed network port 8510. In order to launch a new session, use:

docker run -v <workspace>:/work -e PS2IP=<ipaddr> --rm -it ps2ded-sce

Load the RDB-UIF executable on your PlayStation and start the DSNET server by running the following command inside the container shell. The script will use the IP address specified in $PS2IP.

start_dsnetm

The script will automatically start up an IOP module server, and dump the register contents of both processors to check the connection.

Volume mounts from a Windows host

Due to incompatibilities between the 32-bit libraries used by SCE tools and the volume driver for Windows mounts, ee-gcc and the like will fail trying to access files in the /work directory.

A workaround is provided with the sync_work script. This script will copy the /work folder to the container-local filesystem, and synchronize outgoing changes back to the Windows host using rsync. Synchronization is repeated every 5 seconds, and checks file contents for changes using a CRC.

Note: This will keep overriding any changes made on the Windows host, except for the _transfer folder.

sync_work ~
cd ~/work

In order to transfer files from the Windows host to the container, create a _transfer folder in the work directory. Any changes made to the files contained in this folder from within the container will, again be overwritten.

Configuration

Use Docker environment variable arguments when launching a new container to configure the IP address of the target device:

-e PS2IP=192.168.1.100