xmb_gamecache v1.8 by beckerd

On a big card, ARK-4 reads every game again each time you go back to the XMB, and its own cache holds only 32 games. This plugin keeps the titles and icons for any number of games in ms0:/PSP/SYSTEM/XMBGC.BIN, plus a copy in RAM that lasts through sleep. It also remembers the free space reading from boot, and puts the games you played last at the top of the menu. New or changed games are picked up by themselves.

Copy xmb_gamecache.prx to ms0:/SEPLUGINS/, add vsh, ms0:/SEPLUGINS/xmb_gamecache.prx, on to PLUGINS.TXT and reboot. The first visit to the Game menu builds the cache and is as slow as before. On a PSP Go's internal storage use ef0: instead.

The author runs it on a PSP-1000 with ARK-4 and a 128 GB card. Other models, other ARK versions and the PSP Go's internal storage haven't been tried yet. If the XMB acts up, turn the plugin off in ARK's recovery menu (hold R at power on). Delete XMBGC.BIN to rebuild the cache, or XMBMRU.BIN to reset the order.

The cache file is now capped in absolute size, scaled to your card: 0.5% of capacity, clamped to 8–48 MB. Previously only dead bytes counted against the ~48 MB rebuild trigger, so a library that kept growing could grow the cache without limit — the cap now covers the whole file.

What's new

• Card-scaled size budget — about 10 MB on a 2 GB card, 20 MB on 4 GB, the full 48 MB on anything 10 GB+; derived from the free-space snapshot the plugin already keeps (never an extra slow FAT count)
• Graceful reclamation instead of wipe-and-rebuild. When the cap is reached, cheapest step first: trim free space at the end of the file → evict bulky media (animated icons, backgrounds, menu music) from the least recently played games — every game keeps its title and icon, so the list stays instant → compact the survivors into a fresh file. Nothing goes cold and no ISO is re-scanned; the old discard-everything path remains only as a fallback if compaction itself fails
• While over budget mid-session, reads stream straight from the ISO instead of growing the file

Crash-safe by ordering: the index is deleted before the data-file swap, so an interruption at any point lands on the normal rebuild path, never on corruption.

Install / upgrade

1. Copy xmb_gamecache.prx (below) over the old one in ms0:/SEPLUGINS/
2. If installing fresh, add to ms0:/SEPLUGINS/PLUGINS.TXT: vsh, ms0:/SEPLUGINS/xmb_gamecache.prx, on
3. Reboot. Your existing cache is kept — no rebuild needed when upgrading from v1.7

See the README for details and the CHANGELOG for the full history.

Tested on

PSP-1000 (32 MB) + ARK-4 + 128 GB card. Designed to fail safe (goes inert) everywhere else, but other models, ARK-4 versions, and PSP Go internal storage are unverified — testers welcome, please open an issue with your results.