Gradius (arcade) without Bubble System countdown

[WeirdH]

Gradius launches with the Bubble System countdown, which takes some time. Nemesis does not, making it the faster game to load. However, my OCD would like to have a gamelist that contains 'Gradius 1, 2 and 3' consecutively, instead of 'Gradius 2 and 3' under G and then 'Nemesis' under N. Even renaming Nemesis to Gradius in gamelist.xml is not done, because of the mismatched title screen (yeah, my OCD is reasonable like that).

Using some Google Fu, I came across this forum post, containing patches for basically turning Nemesis (nemesisuk.zip) into Gradius (at least graphics wise). I had to do some figuring out on how to use bspatch, but I think I managed. The problem is that my resulting romset does not launch from Retropie.

Mame2003-plus expects the romset to be nemesuk.zip and contains differently named roms, so I reckoned that one was not suited for the patch either way. FBNeo seems to use the right version however (at least it uses everything named the same as the patch files), but also does not launch the game, going back to ES after a while.

I'm not at all versed in the world of checksums and the like, so I'm totally out of my depth here. Does anyone have the know-how to get this patch working (or otherwise launch a version of Gradius without the countdown)?

Thanks in advance.

[mitu]

You can use the sortname tag in gamelist.xml to sort arbitrary entries, without changing their name in the gamelist. You can add <sortname>Gradius 4</sortname> to Nemesis and it will appear right under the other Gradius games.
As for the why the patched ROM doesn't work - depends on the emulator. Look in the log file and search for missing ROMs.

[gomisensei]

Your options:

1. Change the sortname field (in gamelist.xml or by editing the metadata in ES) to Gradius 1, the Name to Gradius, and set the title screen/image your gradius title shot (probably gradius.png) and grit your teeth thru the title screen on launch.

2. continue to use bubble system gradius and either save a state after the countdown, or just Unthrottle the emulator so the countdown goes faster (or both).

Either way you have to sacrifice something.

[WeirdH]

@mitu Oh wow, I didn't know about the sortname tag, that is useful. I'm grouping other titles together right now as well, thanks.