Reinstallation of port erases game data?

[zerojay]

Hi. I've noticed that at least two of my scriptmodules appears to be forcefully erasing the contents of $md_inst during installation/configuration. For example, you can run my scriptmodule for Streets of Rage Remake to install it but you need to add your own SorR.dat file into $md_build. If you install SORR from my script and copy over your SorR.dat file into $md_build and then reinstall SORR (as one might when you ask RetroPie to update itself), then you will find that the SorR.dat file is now suddenly missing after the new build is installed.

Is this something new, because it never used to happen like this? Is there a way around it that the official scriptmodules use?

SoRR scriptmodule:

rp_module_id="sorr"
rp_module_desc="Streets of Rage Remake"
rp_module_help="Please copy your SorR.dat file along with the mod and palettes folders into $md_inst."
rp_module_section="exp"
rp_module_flags="!x86 !x11 !mali"

function depends_sorr() {
    getDepends libsdl-mixer1.2 libpng12-0
}

function sources_sorr() {
    gitPullOrClone "$md_build" https://github.com/zerojay/bennugd.git
}

function install_sorr() {
    md_ret_files=(
    'bgdi-333'
    )
}

function configure_sorr() {
    mkRomDir "ports"
    chmod 755 "$md_inst/bgdi-333"
    moveConfigFile "$md_inst/savegame" "$md_conf_root/$md_id/"
    addPort "$md_id" "sorr" "Streets of Rage Remake" "pushd $md_inst; ./bgdi-333 ./SorR.dat; popd"

Thanks for any help you can provide.

[mitu]

Yes, it's normal - it's been like this for quite some time (since 4.2 ?) - see https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/blob/91e69972031215241076edbbb9d374972f383888/scriptmodules/packages.sh#L228.
You should have a user folder under roms/ports/<portname> where the game data (.dat ) file can be copied.

[zerojay]

Yeah, but I'm dealing with an application that apparently cannot have its data file anywhere else other than in the same directory as the application, so I'm not too sure how to proceed. If I touch the file to just make it exist for the purposes of symlinking into the romdir, I'm not sure if that link would survive if the dummy file is replaced with the real thing afterwards. I guess I'll test that out.

[mitu]

Try to see if the program doesn't search the current folder for the file needed. This way, you can cd to the game's folder and run it from there.