Credits
POPStarter, POPSLoader, and this documentation archive are the work of many people across more than a decade. This page credits them as accurately as the record allows.
★ Documentation
ShaolinAssassin
Author of the original POPStarter documentation wiki — the single most important source this entire archive is built from. Every reference page on this site exists because ShaolinAssassin took the time to document POPStarter for the community. This whole project is, first and foremost, a preservation of that work.
POPStarter & POPS
- krHACKen
- Author of POPStarter and its official
CHANGES.TXTchangelog — the launcher this entire site documents. Nearly every behaviour, command, and config byte here is his work. - Sony Computer Entertainment
- Created POPS, the PS1-on-PS2 emulator POPStarter wraps. Acknowledged here by checksum only — it is not distributed.
Compatibility, patches & fixes
- Hugopocked
- The leading, still-maintained community per-game fix pack for POPStarter, plus countless individual game fixes.
- krHACKen
- The
PATCH_#.BIN/TROJAN_#.BINcompatibility-mode system, the LibCrypt cracks, and the cumulative fix bundles.
IGR menu textures
- gledson999, El_Patas, arkl1t32, LopoTRI
- Community-made IGR menu texture packs in Chinese, English, French, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese and German.
- The AssemblerGames community
- Early POPS / POPStarter research and texture contributions.
Devices & modern backends
- israpps (El_isra)
- BDM Assault (exFAT / BDMA),
MMCEMAN, and much of the modern device tooling that lets POPStarter reach exFAT USB, MX4SIO and MMCE. - The Open PS2 Loader (OPL) project
- The BDM device-backend ecosystem POPSLoader builds on — USB, MX4SIO, MMCE, ATA, iLink and UDPBD — and the patterns the fork mirrors.
- Rick Gaiser
- udpbd — the UDP block-device network backend.
POPSLoader — the modern launcher
- israpps (El_isra)
- Original POPSLoader project creator.
- Daniel Santos
- Creator of the Enceladus runtime foundation POPSLoader is built on.
- Ripto / NathanNeurotic
- Maintainer of this fork — maintenance, UI polishing, device backends, and release engineering.
- Berion
- User-interface design and theme assets.
- nuno6573
- Cover-art engine integrations and scripting (plus hardware testing).
- P4NCHOL1NO, VizoR, provato, TnA-Plastic, saildot4k, oldman63, and the community
- Hardware testing on real PS2 consoles — the only thing that proves a launch path actually works.
This archive & site
- The Internet Archive / Wayback Machine
- Preserved ShaolinAssassin's lost wiki, the download archives, and the menu images — without it this archive could not exist.
- Retro-Jogos (Gledson's Portuguese guide)
- Preserved the original documentation navigation taxonomy when the source wiki went dark.
- R3Z3N
- Partition-install (
PP.) documentation for HDDOSD / PSBBN games. - PSX-Place
- The community home of POPStarter, and the release thread mined for this site.
ℹ Missing or mis-credited?
This is community work and the historical record is imperfect — if someone is missing or wrongly attributed, let the maintainer know and it will be corrected.