POPS Testing - Not working

Today attempted to load a game via POPS, Spyro 2. Brilliant game.

Sadly neither plugins worked, not the controller patching nor the battery level indicator.

I was somewhat hoping this would Just Work.

The way it's been built is i have two threads. The PSP is not multi-threaded. It's concurrency, not parallelism.

One of these threads polls the ESP32 for the latest controller states, whilst the second patches the PSP internal controller states.

The question is figuring where it is breaking, is the plugin not being loaded at all, are the treads not working, is one of them not working and the other is?

Luckily there is quite an easy way to resolve this. I could monitor the commands coming into the ESP32. If i see commands coming in then that proves at least the plugin is loaded and one of the threads is running.

On the ESP there are multiple Serial ports. I'm using Serial and Serial2. Serial is the primary one everyone uses when using an Arduino or ESP32. It's bound to the USB port. The others are bound to specific GPIO pins (they can be re-configured).

So we use Serial2 to talk to the PSP bound to RX: GPIO 16 and TX: GPIO 18 at Baud 38400. This leaves Serial free for me to send debug information to a connected computer.

I modified the command parsing logic to send out 0x17 when processing a command, if i see this then i know at least half of it is working.

void processCommand(uint8_t command) {
    Serial.write(0x17);
    
    for (int i = 0; i < commandCount; ++i) {
        if (commands[i].code == command) {            
            commands[i].function();
            
            return;
        }
    }

    SerialWrapper_write(RESPONSE_COMMANDNOTFOUND);
}

Good news, we do.

So this proves the plugin is loaded and at least the ESP polling thread is working.

Nex job, investigate the controller patching.