Multidisk MSX games and M3U files

mitaholo

I'm having trouble getting M3U files for multidisk MSX games to work with BlueMSX. I've tried M3U files with just the game disk file names, complete directory paths, with and without quotations, M3Us and game files in the same and different directories, and even removing all spaces and special character from the paths but nothing works.

When opening a M3U file in EmulationStation BlueMSX only loads the "MSX BASIC version 3.0" screen and doesn't even give the disk swap option in the menu. Everything works normally when opening the disk files themselves, but the emulator doesn't seem to understand my M3Us at all. I even copy pasted the foobar-example from https://github.com/libretro/docs/blob/master/docs/library/bluemsx.md but that doesn't work any better.

For example I have these files in the /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/msx directory:

SD Snatcher (Japan).m3u
SD Snatcher (Japan) [Disk 1].dsk
SD Snatcher (Japan) [Disk 2].dsk
SD Snatcher (Japan) [Disk 3].dsk

And the SD Snatcher (Japan).m3u contains the following:

SD Snatcher (Japan) [Disk 1].dsk
SD Snatcher (Japan) [Disk 2].dsk
SD Snatcher (Japan) [Disk 3].dsk

According to everything I've read this should work, but doesn't. What am I doing wrong?

msheehan79

@mitaholo said in Multidisk MSX games and M3U files:

SD Snatcher (Japan) [Disk 1].dsk
SD Snatcher (Japan) [Disk 2].dsk
SD Snatcher (Japan) [Disk 3].dsk

Your m3u file looks good to me. The first thing I would check is to make sure you have the latest version of the lr-blueMSX core installed via the RetroPie-Setup script, as I had added .m3u support to this core a couple months ago so if you haven't updated in a while it may not have the support for this file.

Also make sure you choose to update from source as updating from binary is not always a guarantee that you'll get the latest features, depending on when the binaries were last built.

Also FWIW, on my setup I host the .dsk files for multidisk games in a different directory and only put the .m3u playlist file in the /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/msx directory; this keeps the EmulationStation folder clean so it's only one entry per game.

So my dsk files are hosted on /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/msx2-multidisk/ and the .m3u file looks like this:

../msx2-multidisk/Black Cyclon (1993)(Parallax)(Disk 1 of 2).dsk
../msx2-multidisk/Black Cyclon (1993)(Parallax)(Disk 2 of 2).dsk

mitaholo

@msheehan79
Updating from the source did the trick, thank you! I update all the packages about once a week, but it seems the changes had not yet made it into the binary release.

Am I missing something or is there really no way to save your progress in lr-bluemsx? No save state support and I see no way to simulate saving on cassette. Makes playing the many RPGs on the system quite difficult.

msheehan79

Glad to hear that sorted it out.

Agree it's a shame there is no save state support on this core. The standalone blueMSX does support it too. I had a look at the code to see if I could implement it, but it's no small task unfortunately. Hopefully some day it gets added.