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.

POPStarter & POPS

krHACKen

Author of POPStarter and its official CHANGES.TXT changelog — 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_#.BIN compatibility-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.

saildot4k

BDMA-ATA — the exFAT internal-HDD (ATA) backend for POPSLoader: implementation, fixes, feedback, and oversight that brought the HDD (exFAT) page to life.

Okeanos — BDM-UDPFS Assault (experimental in POPSLoader)

Author of BDM-UDPFS Assault Alpha, the read-only POPSTARTER UDPFS VCD fallback, based on israpps' BDM Assault. POPSLoader menu browsing, automatic BDMA equip and launch integration are Coming soon; planned setup and credits.

The Open PS2 Loader (OPL) project

The BDM device-backend ecosystem POPSLoader builds on — USB, MX4SIO, MMCE, ATA and iLink — and the patterns the fork mirrors. (OPL also ships a UDPBD network backend; POPSLoader does not.)

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, oldman63, and the community

Hardware testing on real PS2 consoles — the only thing that proves a launch path actually works.

This archive & site

AstroSnail

Preserved and shared the original Bitbucket wiki Git clone: 2,140 historical commits (2016–2024), earlier revisions and deleted material, complementing the Wayback recovery. Original wiki authors retain credit.

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.