psp-doc

The PSP counterpart of the psx-spx plugin: one skill per chapter of yet another PlayStationPortable Documentation, so the hardware reference is at hand while working on PSP code instead of in a browser.

python3 build_plugin.py fetch     # chapters -> html/
python3 build_plugin.py build     # html/ and html_upspd/ -> skills/<name>/SKILL.md

html/ holds the YAPSPD chapters, fetched by the script. html_upspd/ holds three documents from the uofw/upspd collection, downloaded by hand from https://uofw.github.io/upspd/docs/ because YAPSPD has nothing on the caches and its register chapter is thinner than PSPTEK.

Thirty-eight skills. Most are generated from a chapter; the four biggest chapters — CPU, Graphics Engine, exceptions and hardware registers — are split at their own section boundaries, and seven chapters left as stubs by the original authors are skipped rather than shipped empty.

Two things are ours rather than converted. handwritten/allegrex-vs-r3000a.md is a skill we wrote, because both sources stop short exactly where it matters: YAPSPD documents three MIPS instructions and leaves the rest to the MIPS manuals. And intro/<name>.md holds a short preamble that the build puts between the frontmatter and the archived text — what the chapter really covers, what it is good for, and where it is thin or overlaps another skill. The text below the preamble stays as it was written, so it can still be quoted.

The source's images are not shipped. figures/<file>.md holds a text rendering of each one (pin tables and block diagrams transcribed, photos described), and the build puts it where the ![](file) reference was; an image without one stops the build.

Why it is worth having

The PSP is not a PSX with a bigger screen: the CPU is an Allegrex, a MIPS32 R4000-based core, where the PSX has an R3000A. It has instructions the PSX has not — the branch-likely beql/bnel above all, plus ext, ins, seb, seh, rotr, movz, movn — and reading one of those as data is how a patch silently breaks a jump. skills/cpu is the chapter that settles those questions; skills/memory-map and skills/file-formats cover the address space and the PRX/ELF layout the relocations live in.

Sources

• YAPSPD: https://hitmen.c02.at/files/yapspd/psp_doc/index.html
• uofw/upspd documents: https://uofw.github.io/upspd/docs/ — PSPTEK (registers), the cache HOWTO by Jeremy Fitzhardinge, and the module/patching tutorial. psp_doc.pdf there is YAPSPD itself in PDF, so it is not used twice.
• worth keeping beside it, not included here:
  • PSDevWiki, Allegrex: https://www.psdevwiki.com/psp/Allegrex
  • uofw/upspd wiki: https://github.com/uofw/upspd/wiki
  • VFPU: https://pspdev.github.io/vfpu-docs/

Credit

The chapters are not ours. YAPSPD was written by groepaz/hitmen and the documents under html_upspd/ come from the uofw/upspd collection: PSPTEK by Alex Marshall, the cache HOWTO by Jeremy Fitzhardinge, and the module tutorial by Anissian. None of them carries a licence; they are reproduced here whole and credited, and every skill says at the top which document it comes from. What is ours is the packaging: the build script, the preambles under intro/, and the hand-written allegrex-vs-r3000a. If an author would rather not be mirrored here, say so and the chapter goes.