How to play a Multi-Disk game on the RetroPie; like Resident Evil 2

[CasualGamer]

Hello there,

Backstory:
My brother and I wanted to play Resident Evil 2 on the Raspberry Pi. We decided to use RetroPie as the OS. We began with CD1 and played through Leon A, on the End Screen we saved the Claire B file. Next, we started CD2, but to our surprise we couldn't find the "Claire B" file. What happened there, and how did we solve this?

Problem:
As far as we understood, the emulator makes a "memory card" for each game. This means, that each game has its own "memory card". The "memory card" files are usually being saved in the same directory as the ROM and they usually have the same name as the ROM. In our example, our ROM would be something like "Resident Evil 2 CD1.img" and the save file would be "Resident Evil 2 CD1.srm". As soon as we start CD2, the emulator makes a save file for that game, which would be "Resident Evil 2 CD2.srm". As we can see, the emulator won't use the same "memory card", therefore it won't be able to find the Claire B savegame.

Solution:
Step 0: Now, the idea is to "force" the emulator to use the same save file instead of different ones for each CD.
Step 1: Tell RetroArch to use the same directory for both CD 1 and CD 2. (I am not quite sure how we did that)
Step 2: We made seperate directories for both CD's, because we wanted that both CD's have the exact same name.
(e.g: Path to CD1: ".../Resident Evil 2 CD1/re2.img")
(e.g: Path to CD2: ".../Resident Evil 2 CD2/re2.img")
Step 3: Now we start CD1 (we made a save sate (using the hotkey) right at the End Screen, in order to not have to play the game over and over again), load the save state and save the Claire B file. The emulator will now save the "re2.srm" file in the directory, which we declared at Step 1.
Step 4: Now we start CD2; because of Step1, the emulator will now look and find the "re2.srm" file, which contains the Claire B savegame.
Step 5: Have fun!

I thought I write this here, because we couldn't find a proper solution to our problem on the WorldWideWeb. Hopefully, this will help some people who have the same or similar issue.

[lilbud]

There was a good thread about this over on the Retropie subreddit. Pretty much, you navigate to the folder where the save file is and run this command on the command line.

ln -s "re2d1.srm" "re2d2.srm"

So that creates an imaginary file that links to the original save. So, the original file would be resd1, Resident Evil 2 Disk 1, and the command will create a symbolic link using the name of the second disk ROM, so, re2d2. Resident Evil 2 Disk 2.

You would replace the names in the command listed above with the save file names that you have.

[CasualGamer]

Thank you,

that sounds much easier than what we did. I'll have to try that one out :)