Over time, the homebrew scene for basically every console grows and grows, and the PS2 is no exception. We haven't quite seen new games for it yet a la the Game Boy, Dreamcast, or even the PS1, but there's been tons of source ports of existing games from Super Mario 64 to 3D Pinball Space Cadet and no shortage of emulators, media players, and the general kinds of homebrew you see on other consoles. Modding existing games is a small but vibrant scene too—as I can attest to with all my time spent modding Guitar Hero II.
If you don't know, disc-based consoles work a lot like computers in that they still use executable files (like .exe on PC or .app bundles on Mac) for their games. PS2 games use ELF files; there's your whimsy for the day. Occasionally, you'll have a need to boot multiple ELF files on one disc. When we were working on Guitar Hero II Deluxe 2.0, we used lightly modified duplicates of the game's executable to boot into different sets of songs using a funny hook in the game's scripting language.
So how do you give the end user the option of which executable to boot? You can use a homebrew launcher like a flavor of LaunchELF, and it's even customizable, but it's just a text mode list of files on the disc. Kinda plain.
That's when I remembered that this is exactly how demo discs are put together.
Demo discs are this exact problem solved: they use customizable, graphically-appealing loaders to boot into various game demos and bits of media from a singular menu. Not just useful to us working on Guitar Hero II Deluxe, but useful to homebrew devs and dorks like me who wanna put together their own demo discs or collections of real games all on one disc. I wasn't the first to think of this idea, as we soon discovered what was colloquially dubbed the "Ultimate $ony Multi Loader" by various people online, but these are just customized demo discs using the same loaders I'm going to document here and not really worth further discussion.
Anyway, this is a clearinghouse of all my information on the various official Sony demo disc loaders that I've been able to crack open and customize. Anything I know, from the menu structure to the formats of graphics, menu videos, and background music, I'll document here for the curious or whoever can make use of it. Decrypted configs will be available for study with their respective loaders. (Keep in mind I won't be going over basic stuff, like how the PS2 boots into an executable from disc load or how to rebuild a disc image. That's all stuff I've either written about elsewhere or stuff you can easily find online. I'm assuming anyone who needs something this niche and nerdy already knows how to do those things.)
One last caveat: so far, all my work has been gone towards the European demo disc loaders. Similar to how the spines of European PS2 games are blank white with black text to make the boxart easier to localize, these loaders are comparatively much less flashy than their American counterparts and seemingly easier to break open too. The American ones are definitely more nostalgic to me and I'd love to know how to customize those as well. That'll have to be for another day, though. Let's get these ones written up first.
Pick a menu below to see the documentation for it:
| The "filmstrip" loader 2000-2004 |
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|---|---|
| The "orbs" loader 2004-2008 |
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Acknowledgements
I'd like to give a hearty thank you and link back to demo pals, a minisite of its own documenting the crossover of European demo discs along with disc and cover scans (that Nirvana CD/record manufacturing minisite is my kinda autism too), and Benmue_Retro on YouTube, whose video series playing through all 100 Official PS2 Magazine discs was supremely useful in finding specific dates and disc numbers on when each loader came into use.