Setting Up Certain Multidisc PlayStation Games

[RetrOkada]

Hello,

I'm curious as to how people choose to set up certain PlayStation multidisc games.

Many of these are designed as progressive, continuous experiences. You swap the disc at a certain point in order to carry on the story. Examples include "Abe's Exoddus" and the Final Fantasy series. I'd set these up with an .m3u playlist and swap the disc at the appropriate point.

Others require more frequent disc-swapping, as each disc contains different game modes. Such games include "Gran Turismo 2", "Rival Schools: United By Fate", and the Command and Conquer series. It's these which I'm curious about.

I'd have thought that one of the better approaches would be to create .m3u playlists, as with other multidisc games, as this allows for easier save management and a cleaner game list. However, I've come across several custom RetroPie images which, for many of these games, have a separate entry in the game list for each of the discs. Perhaps this is to allow for easier disc selection, as it would avoid having to launch the game, then immediately swap discs?

I'd personally prefer the .m3u approach. Perhaps I could create a script which would ask me to select an entry from the .m3u and load the corresponding disc when one of these games is launched? For example, when I launch "Gran Turismo 2", I would be asked to select either the "Arcade" or "Simulation" disc.

Anyone have any opinions or advice?

Any help appreciated.

Best.

[sleve_mcdichael]

If you make a folder such as Gran Turismo 2 then put the individual discs in that folder, it will do what you want (select "Gran Turismo 2" first, and then you pick which disc to load.)

You can share save data by enabling the second memory card core option. The second slot is shared so even though Arcade Mode and Simulation mode are separate "games," you can still access the same player profile.

[sugarfree]

Nice tip, thank you!

[RetrOkada]

@sleve_mcdichael Yes, that’s a really good tip. Hadn’t known about the second memory card option. Can the folder be scraped such that it displays the game’s box art? Cheers.

[RetrOkada]

I'm actually wondering if I can take this further.

Essentially, I want to create an image which is as clean and seemless as possible; something which anyone can pick up and play, with minimal fuss.

Most people probably wouldn't know that they need to select memory card 2 on certain games; some may not offer this option anyway.

So perhaps I could use symlinks to point the original disc's save file to the second memory card, the shared one? So, in the Terminal, I'd run something like "ln -sf psx-card2.mcd "Gran Turismo 2 (USA) (Arcade Mode).srm"" and "ln -sf psx-card2.mcd "Gran Turismo 2 (USA) (Simulation Mode).srm"".

Would this work? IE, no matter which memory card is chosen, it will point back to the second card?

Thanks again.

[sleve_mcdichael]

@RetrOkada I don't know if you can scrape the folder, but I do think you can edit the gamelist xml to add the boxart and such manually, since the folder should have its own entry in there (I'm not near my system to test anything right now, though, so maybe there is a way to scrape it after all?)

A symlink for the save file should work fine. In that case, you wouldn't even need to enable the "second memory card" core option, you could just link whatever set(s) of games you want to the same file (ie. link both Gran Turismo saves to one file, link all the Armored Core games to another one, maybe link all the Konami games together for Metal Gear: Solid shenanigans, etc.)

[RetrOkada]

@sleve_mcdichael Great, thank you. I’ll give it a try☺️.