Ok, the subject was not very clear, it was to tease the pcsx2 gurus ...

I want to find a generic way to uncompress ps2 ELF (packed with the wellknown tool "ps2-packer from Nicolas Noble).

As I can't find an out of the box tool, I thought about PCSX2.

Every packed ELF are automatically unpacked by the PS2 (assumption), to be able to run it of course.

So I wonder if it were be possible to load an ELF within PCSX2, let it uncompress the ELF, and then dump the memory ?

Any advice/suggestion would be appreciated.

Thank you.

if you want to run a game simply make an iso and load it trough the emu,loading an elf file makes no sense at all

(01-29-2010 05:27 PM)diegochiha Wrote:  if you want to run a game simply make an iso and load it trough the emu,loading an elf file makes no sense at all

I don't want to run a game, or the ELF. I want to unpack it.

ELF are packed to take less space, it is just like auto-extractible-zip, the PS2 CPU knows how to unpack them on-the-fly.

I got some news from the Nicolas 'Pixel', the author, which confirm what I thought and aimed to do. His unpacker were built on the pcsx2 code in fact but has been only released as alpha ...

There is a bunch elf decompressers you could find, when ask google 'PS2 elf decompresser'. Top results was on SjCRUNCH

Ok. So here are more information, as I had already did my job on google.

sjcrunch/sjuncrunch is a tool written by Oopo, and it uses LZO library. This compresser is not very used nowadays.

My ELF files are compressed with the ps2-packer (with the false version 0.4.4 on ps2dev, according to the sources Nicolas Pixel Noble gave me, it is in fact 1.0rc2 ...). It seems nicolas unpacker can't uncompress them, and won't as he doesn't work on this since long ago.

But as said above, he made it from the pcsx2 sources, that's why I am here now. The emulator has to decompress these ELF, as would the real PS2 do ... I'd like to look at the sources, but I don't where to begin my search ... so many files ...

You could not obtain sources only by decompression of elf, decompressed elf is still elf -- BINARY executive format. Only non-binary info you could expected is debug symbols, but they usually is strippe.

(01-30-2010 08:17 AM)Zeydlitz Wrote:  You could not obtain sources only by decompression of elf, decompressed elf is still elf -- BINARY executive format. Only non-binary info you could expected is debug symbols, but they usually is strippe.

Yes, thanks for the advice but I know that already. I'm new to PCSX2, but not really to development

I want to uncompress/unpack it, that's all !

If you really need to know the final reason, it is that an ELF can contain multiple ELFs combined. I want to split them as individual parts, but when the ELF is packed, it is not possible.