@ffaddic ok, I got, I need to convert to .chd by chdman under Linux;) Thx

@windg
Alrighty! I'll keep playing normally, i'll install duckstation just to see it working
Thanks!

Additional notes:
I installed the duckstation core, i tried playing the game there and swapping discs works perfectly, although it doesn't recognize the CD1 or CD2 extension i had to rename them as .cue files again and change the m3u to reflect the changes

Quick update. For unrelated reasons I had to rebuild by system. I tried this again, renaming files and M3U entries .CD1-2 etc. Everything now works as expected.

I was totally convinced this was user error on my part. Apparently not. Queries resolved. Thanks all.

Rip your CDs as cue/bin files directly. Verify the files are correct by comparing the checksums for the .bin files and the .cue file's contents with the ones published on redump.org. You can use ImgBurn on Windows to rip the disc to .cue/.bin files.

@muldjord
Thank you for your answer. And congratulations on your fantastic work on the Skyscraper, the best multi-platform scraping tool, in my opinion.

Actually, I'm not very comfortable with the process of adding a .m3u file to each of my 2500+ individual Amstrad CPC games (or to every game in my other retro-collections).

And, @mitu, I'm not comfortable neither with the idea of adding a non-standard extension to my games, just to have ES showing the .m3u playlists only. I understand that ".cd1", ".cd2", etc. are like a standard now in PSX multi-disc games, but I suspect a home-made ".dsm", ".disk1" or whatever I could invent in my room for Amstrad CPC/MSX/other Libretro would drive me to a lot of issues when I update/scrape/configure something in the future. The same applies to hidden folders: if I want to update the scraping info, I would have to rename the folder before, re-hide the folder after... Even the idea to manage ".disk1" or ".disk2" sounds laborious when you have hundreds of folders, thousands of files...

But, I still think one scrapped entry in ES for a multi-disc game sounds like the most elegant solution.

So, I share here the solution I took:
1- As mentioned before, I create a .m3u playlist for each multi-disc game and put all the files, including the .m3u, inside a folder with the same basename (I do this with the script in my first post)

2- As @mitu told me, I edit the Skyscraper's config.ini to add the .m3u extension at the platform I want to scrap.

3- I scrap everything. So regular files, regular files in subfolders, and .m3u files get an image+description in gamelist.xml.

4- I duplicate the information related to the .m3u files in the gamelist.xml to create new <folder> sections with the same scraped information. Here is the command lines I used to do this:

# extract the XML sections about .m3u files to a new tmp.xml file perl -ne 'BEGIN{$/="</game>\n";} print m|(<game>.*m3u.*$/)|ms' gamelist.xml >> tmp.xml # change any <game> tag to a <folder> tag sed -i .bak "s/<game>/<folder>/g" tmp.xml # change any </game> tag to a </folder> tag sed -i .bak "s/<\/game>/<\/folder>/g" tmp.xml # crop any .m3u filename to keep the path only sed -i .bak 's/\/[[:alnum:][:blank:]\.\+\&,\(\);_-]*.m3u//g' tmp.xml # delete the closing tag at the end of gamelist.xml sed -i .bak '/^<\/gameList>/d' gamelist.xml # add the content of tmp.xml to the end of gamelist.xml cat tmp.xml >> gamelist.xml # add the closing tag at the end of gamelist.xml echo "</gameList>" >> gamelist.xml

And I must say, I'm quite happy with the result : now I have in ES only one scraped entry for any mono-disc game as I have one scraped entry for any subfolder (multi-disc game). When I select a game that is a multi-disc game, It opens the sublist - that is also scraped with the same information - and I just have to select the first entry to run the game.

I hope all this sounds useful.

@crimson0087 https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Add-a-New-System-in-EmulationStation/:

"each system in EmulationStation is defined in the file es_systems.cfg. The default version resides in the /etc/emulationstation folder. It is recommended that you make a copy of this file into the /opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation folder."

@spm2600 Remove the gamelist.xml generated for that system - you can find it in either the rom folder or in \\retropie\configs\all\emulationstation\gamelists\<system>.

Thanks for all the great help, as always. I tested the cue files by themselves and they did load fine. So I was able to confirm that Retropie and the PSX emulator does not like mulitple bin files. It only wants one cue, one bin. That's it. I solved this by remounting the current cue file with a virtual drive (and all the multi-tracks), and then just re-ripped them to a single bin/cue setup. Loaded that into Retropie with my M3U and it worked great!

I test it with Lunar - Silver Star Story and the game now loads fine. Thank you very much !

@mitu That's exactly the combination I'm using to "restart" the emulator. Basically, the main issue is with this way to restart.

I've also heard, there might be a different way (L1+L2+R1+R2+Select+Start, didn't work gor me).

@fnkngrv Not sure if you are still having trouble but have you checked the /dev/shm/ folder for the runcommand log files? They usually give a good indication with libretro cores as to why things aren't working.