Easier Disc Switching [feedback]

[piedownjoe]

Hi, guys. Love RetroPie. After a couple days of tweaking, I finally built myself a great retro console. I love that RetroPie aims to be as user friendly as possible while still offering advanced options to really make it yours. I see one opportunity I'd love to see happen.

The disc switching system for PSX is far too complicated. For me, it flat out doesn't work (and that might be a me problem). But for those whom it does work, the process of switching a disc is anything but seamless. 1. Save a state or memory slot, 2. open up the quick menu, 3. scroll down to disc control, pop out the virtual tray, 4. append the disc image after hunting through your entire root directory and fishing out a cue/mdf file from hundreds of other files (this can be a lengthy step).

I'm aware that forcing the emulator to detect an in-game disc change is difficult to impossible. I'm also aware of the challenges of potentially running two disc images simultaneously, but what if the user was in control of that? What if the software got a little closer to emulating a physical disc change the way the original console would handle the procedure? Pressing a sequence of hotkeys on the controller (let's say fn/select + RT) would emulate a still-running system that has just had the tray open and take you to a quick menu that would filter out all but cue or mdf files from your psx directory. Once the file is selected, the previous game would still be running and detecting the new disc.

A method like this would also support expansion pack games like Grand Theft Auto: London 1969 as it prompts to insert the original GTA disc and reinserting the GTA: London disc. A game like this currently isn't supported with the current disc-switching method.

This is admittedly pointless, but I also try testing out the disc changing by deliberately launching disc 2 of Metal Gear Solid. On the original PSX, it would prompt me to insert disc 1 upon starting a new game, and just seamlessly start the game. In the emulator, if I switch to disc 1, it just restarts the emulator completely, and I have to skip through the Konami screen and opening FMV sequences and start the game again.

I'm minimally experienced in programming, so I don't know the extent of how possible this idea is. Maybe if I'm doing something wrong and overcomplicating the current method, someone can point me in the right direction. Otherwise, Google hasn't been much help to make disc switching easier.

Thanks for hearing me!

[lostless]

@piedownjoe unfortunately that’s how RetroArch handles multi disk games. You can make a PSP .pbp file that has the multi disks all as one file so you don’t have to go hunting for the second disk. It will mount both, but always start with disk 1. You can also edit your controller configuration file in the configs to add eject disk and next disk to hotkeys. I’ll have to look up the how to do that later, but it is possible to use an easier method. But still only works with pbp files.

[lilbud]

@piedownjoe There is kind of a way to this;
So you have your 3 discs in your PSX directory
FFVII (D1)

FFVII (D2)

FFVII (D3)

You can copy & symlink the save files. So you'd have your save for disc 1. You would run this command ln -s ./FFVIID1.sav ./FFVIID1.sav

The files would be linked together and change everytime the other is updated.

I think this is right, I can't find the reddit post where it was talked about.

[KN4THX]

So I haven't played with this a ton but FFVII was pretty quick to swap. Maybe some other games are more troublesome. I use the m3u playlist though so all of my disks seem to be ready to go when switching. All I had to do when it asked me to switch disks was :

Open RA Menu
Go to disk control
Open Tray
Use left/right to change the disk number at the top
Close tray
Resume

Takes me about 5-10 seconds and I never had to hunt for anything.

If I had more saves on Disk 2s for other games I'd test it out.

[piedownjoe]

@TheDataCereal This is probably the easiest method so far. Do you know what a proper m3u file should look like and how the file should be named so the emulator recognizes it?

While that's the easiest, I still think this could be much more user friendly. Not knocking your suggestions at all, but as any classic American infomercial would say, "There's gotta be a better way!"