(Test wanted) EmulationStation : Directory interpreted as file

opa

How do you handle games that consist of multiple media (disc/disk) in ES?

Commonly known method is to make ES recognize .m3u/.cmd/etc. and, since it would be inconvenient if individual media were displayed in the game list, to give them extensions that ES does not recognize, such as .cd1 .cd2.

However, this method requires the media file extension to be uncommon, which can cause problems with programs such as lr-np2kai, which determine the media file type by the extension.
(For example, lr-np2kai has each own processing for file extensions such as .d88, .fdd, .nfd, etc., and if you change these to .fd1 .fd2, it will not work correctly)

Other methods that have been devised include making media files you don't want to display hidden files beginning with ".", or storing them in a directory other than the one ES searches for, but I think both of these methods make management complicated and unintuitive.

I followed es-de's Directories interpreted as files and tried a simple fix to treat one folder as one game. It seems to work well in my environment.

If you think this fix is useful, please test it and let me know in the comments.

For test, You can clone it with:
git clone --recursive https://github.com/o-p-a/EmulationStation.git --branch dir_as_file
To get your binaries, see the Building section in README.md.

For details on the fixes, please see this pull request.

Lolonois

I am pretty confident it will break some Scrapers, as they willl have to use the parent folder yadda.ext/ as "game" instead of the nested file yadda.ext/yadda.ext.

Also if a user puts for the platform scummvm a structure ~/RetroPie/roms/scummvm/game.svm/game.svm (which is not really useful currently for the current scummvm launchers anyway) the proposed change will de-rail the launchers.

Daphne should be okay as long as the user does not construct things like game.daphne/game.daphne inside ~/RetroPie/roms/daphne.

I would rather fix it either per launcher or even better in the np2kai codebase (i assume the different files *.d88, *.fdd, ... must have distinguishable magic numbers).

mitu

@opa said in (Test wanted) EmulationStation : Directory interpreted as file:

Commonly known method is to make ES recognize .m3u/.cmd/etc. and, since it would be inconvenient if individual media were displayed in the game list, to give them extensions that ES does not recognize, such as .cd1 .cd2.

NB: the .cd1, .cd2 hack is still something emulator dependent, only supported by pcsx-rearmed .

I followed es-de's Directories interpreted as files and tried a simple fix to treat one folder as one game. It seems to work well in my environment.

I found this solution a bit 'gimmicky' or 'hacky', which ties the structure of the ROM/Game folders to a particular front-end. Nevertheless, this does solve the issue of displaying the individual 'playlist'/'command file' components when they should be not.

I haven't tested your patch (and I think @Lolonois has a point there), but isn't it just a launcher fix, without actually hiding the 'main' folder's contents ?