In-Game Reset (IGR)

In-Game Reset lets you leave a running game — or power the console off — without touching the console's own Reset button. It is a controller shortcut that works from inside the game.

RiptOPL installs a small hook into the running game that watches the controller for a reserved button combination. When it sees one, it tears the game down and either leaves for the PS2 browser (or the ELF set in IGR Path) or shuts the console down.

The button combinations

Every combination starts the same way: hold all four shoulder buttons — L1 + L2 + R1 + R2 — and then, while still holding them, press the second half.

L3 and R3 are the analog-stick clicks, so the power-off combination needs a DualShock with the analog light on.

The console power button

The power button on the front of the console is hooked too, and does not need a controller:

The second press has to land within about a second — RiptOPL waits ~50 vertical blanks after the first press to see whether another arrives, then acts on the count.

Where a reset takes you

With the IGR Path setting (Settings → General & System) left blank, a reset exits to the PS2 browser, the same place the menu's own Exit goes. It does not come back to RiptOPL by itself.

Point IGR Path at an ELF and that ELF is booted on reset instead: another launcher, a homebrew menu, or RiptOPL itself. To come straight back to RiptOPL, give it RiptOPL's own ELF — mc0:/APP_RIPTOPL/RIPTOPL.ELF if you imported APP_RIPTOPL.psu to the first memory card. RiptOPL then starts fresh. It does not restore what you had selected: Remember Last Played Game (Settings → General & System) is a separate setting, off by default, and it is what re-selects the last game you ran.

The ELF must live on a memory card (mc0: or mc1:) or on a FAT32 USB drive (mass:/…). After a reset the console can only reach USB through USBD.IRX and USBHDFSD.IRX in the memory card's SYS-CONF folder, the files FMCB installs; without them the reset drops to the PS2 browser instead. If they are missing, RiptOPL offers to copy its own there the first time you launch a game on the OPL core with a USB IGR Path (Neutrino has no IGR, so its launches never ask). It never replaces files that are already there. Games started by Auto Loading skip the offer, because nobody is at the menu to answer it: launch a game on the OPL core from the menu once, or copy the two files yourself, before relying on a USB IGR Path there.

If you use MMCE cards, IGR Bootcard Slot(s) (Settings → Game Sources → MMCE Settings) additionally sends a "switch to bootcard" command to slot 0, slot 1, both, or neither as the reset happens, so the card is already back on its boot image by the time the next thing loads. See MMCE.

When IGR is not available

IGR is not universal. It is worth knowing the three cases where the combinations will do nothing, so you do not spend time hunting a fault that is not there.

Before the game opens a controller

The hook attaches by patching the game's own scePadPortOpen / scePad2CreateSocket call. Until the game asks for a pad, there is nothing hooked — so IGR does not respond during very early boot logos on some titles. The console power button still works.

When the game is incompatible

A few games handle input in a way the hook disturbs. Per-game compatibility Mode 6 — Disable IGR turns the hook off for that title. If a game misbehaves in a way that started when you launched it through RiptOPL, this is the mode to try — at the cost of losing IGR for that game. See Per-game Settings.

Fewer games should need it now. IGR used to watch the pad from a VBLANK interrupt handler, and merely registering one black-screened some games (Fatal Fury: Battle Archives Volume 2), whatever the handler did. It now polls the pad from its own low-priority thread, woken by a timer about once a frame, and registers nothing on VBLANK (official OPL #1762, ported here). The RetroAchievements loader is the exception: its per-frame memory snapshots and unlock notice must run inside that interrupt, so it keeps the handler, and the games it upsets still need Mode 6 there.

Under the Neutrino core

PS1 titles are a separate case again: they run under POPSTARTER or Ember, each of which has its own independent IGR behaviour built into that binary. RiptOPL's hook is not involved. See PS1 Games and the sister POPStarter docs.

In-game screenshots (IGS)

The L1+L2+R1+R2 + Up combination captures the current frame to a bitmap on memory card slot 1, named from the game's ID with a zero-padded sequence number starting at 001 — for example mc1:/SLUS_012.34_GS(001).bmp. The number increments to a maximum of 255 per game.

Two conditions gate it, and both catch people out:

1. GSM must be enabled for the running game. The capture is gated on the game's GSM setting, so with GSM off the combination does nothing at all.
2. The build must include IGS. The Makefile defaults EXTRA_FEATURES to 0 and IGS follows it, and the main release loader is built with that default — so the loader most people run has no IGS and the Up combination is simply inert.

Troubleshooting

Nothing happens when I press the combination. Check, in order: the game has actually started (past the early boot logos); the Loader Core is OPL rather than Neutrino; Mode 6 is not set for this game; and — for the power-off combination specifically — the controller is in analog mode, since L3 and R3 are the stick clicks. The screenshot combination uses Up, so it needs no analog mode.

Try the console power button as a cross-check: if that resets and the pad combination does not, the hook is fine and the problem is in the pad half.

IGR stopped answering in a game that worked on an older build. Report the title. IGR now polls the pad from a low-priority thread (see When IGR is not available), and a game that never lets such a thread run would starve it. The power button does not depend on the pad and is the quickest cross-check.

Reset takes me somewhere unexpected. Check IGR Path in Settings → General & System. A stale path left over from an earlier setup will boot that ELF instead of exiting to the PS2 browser. A USB path that lands in the PS2 browser anyway is missing its memory-card drivers — see Where a reset takes you.

The game resets on its own during play. A game that uses all four shoulders plus Start or Select in normal play can trigger IGR by accident. Set Mode 6 — Disable IGR for that title.