CD Based Games

[hansolo77]

When it comes to CD based games, what is the best method for adding them into GameEx? I think this was asked a LONG time ago, but there's been so many changes to the frontend, I don't know if there's any new ways to accomplish it.

I have a Sega-CD set, and would really like to have a setup where they're not stored on the hard drive. I know GameEx has a setting to watch for a specific file or something on a CD. Would this be the way to do it? I never had the CD based games working in GameEx before. Would I be able to burn them, store them in a binder or something, and still have GameEx recognize roms for listing without needing them in the drive first?

[EDIT] Oops, didn't realize mentioning that was bad. I didn't say WHERE, but ok.

[Sliver X]

I would create a custom batch file for Kega Fusion, setting it up as an External Application called Run Sega CD Game or somesuch. Since you're using actual disks, you don't need a list to launch things from in the menu.

I use a similar system for Blu-Ray/DVD playback on my machine.

Like...

SegaCD.bat

@REM Substitute Z: with the letter of the physical drive. Put this batch in the same folder as Kega Fusion!

@REM - If there's no disk in the drive, go back to GameEx...

@IF NOT EXIST Z:\NUL EXIT

@REM Call SCD emulator and have it autoboot into SCD mode.

@%~dp0Fusion.exe -scd

@REM - Quit!

EXIT

You will also, of course, need to set up the BIOS ROMs and point Fusion to your CD drive.

Gens can't autoboot a SCD disk to my knowledge (A Linux fork of it, GensGS can though) : You'd have to use something like AutoIT to automate GUI usage to pull it off.

[mesk]

The best thing to do is if you have the HDD space is to store them on there.it makes little sense to burn them all to disc,i mean unless you really want to.You can however zip them up which will save some space and GameEX will unzip them when you load a game.plus kega fusion (i assume you will be using fusion for sega cd) loads disc images.

Myself personally with cd based systems is I choose just the games i know i will play (especially on sega cd there were so many shitty games not worth the HDD space).Same thing with PS1,PS2,Gamecube,Wii and all cd based systems I have installed

Edited August 13, 2011 by fRequEnCy
Post has been reworded to keep within the rules.

[fRequEnCy]

Please watch your wording guys! Please review the Forum Guidelines and Rules. Posts have been adjusted.

[hansolo77]

I've picked through and selected just the USA games, or the euro/jap ones if theres not a USA version. All said though, it is a LOT of games. I thought I could burn them all (I have a TON of blank CD's, since games upgraded to DVD). If GameEx doesn't have a way to list the games without the disks in place, I guess Sliver X's method would probably work best. Maybe I'll just store the few favorites on the hard drive, and create a separate listing to directly boot cds.

Edited August 13, 2011 by fRequEnCy
Post adjusted! No more please.

[DJoneK]

I keep my CD stuff compressed because I rarely play any of them. I know it takes a while to decompress if I ever want to play one, but It's so rare, that I'd rather save the HDD space. At the same time, they are all neatly in GameEx, and ready to play whenever I want. For this, I created a batch file. It will extract the cd contents into a temporary folder on my main drive, mount it on Daemon Tools Lite, run the emulator, then once the emulator exits, it will unmount from daemon tools lite, delete the temporary files and folders and back to GameEx it goes. So the HDD with the stored compressed images is just read (It's a USB drive).

Very important. The .cue file inside the compressed archive must have exactly the same name as the archive itself for this to work.

Also, this method is for *.7z archives. For .zip or .rar archives, replace {set "file=%file:~1,-4%"} with {set "file=%file:~1,-5%"}

This is my example batch file for Fusion: (You'd need to change some paths, since these are mine. )

(NOTE: I don't use Daemon Tools with Fusion)

Edited August 13, 2011 by fRequEnCy
Batch has been removed. Reason is that this batch conflicts with a registered only feature in GameEx.

[fRequEnCy]

[EDIT] Oops, didn't realize mentioning that was bad. I didn't say WHERE, but ok.

Where and how is frowned upon. How is just as bad as where as it shows that roms/games were obtained illegally.

[hansolo77]

eek!

[Sliver X]

If size is the primary concern, you may want to consider ripping the games to ISO+MP3.

Mount each into a virtual CD drive: The copy of Virtual CloneDrive included with GameEx will work fine. Proceed to rip it to CUE/ISO/WAV with TurboRip, then encode the WAV files into MP3 at whatever settings you want. I like using BonkEnc myself.

Slap the ISO and MP3s into a folder named for the game: Lather, rinse, repeat. When done, set up an emulator entry for Kega Fusion, using a ROM type of *.iso.

You can further shrink things by applying NTFS compression to the ISO images (Pointless to do so on the MP3s): The 29 SCD games I have on my MPC only occupy 3.17GB doing all this.

Note that you can do something similar for Turbo CD games with Mednafen, which supports ISO+Ogg rips. These also involve some slight editing of the CUE sheets, but nothing major.

Edited August 13, 2011 by fRequEnCy
Edited the post because of rules.

[fRequEnCy]

People! Speaking of downloading roms/games is forbidden! This is way too many violations in one topic. This can no longer continue! I've tried to be nice but next post will result in a warning. This is enough! Please read the Forum Guidelines and Rules. Any further posts by users who's posts were fixed must first read the rules and then verify they were read.

[hansolo77]

My original ON TOPIC question is all this thread should have been about. I'm sorry my request caused such an uprise in illegal discussions. My original request was whether or not GameEx would support some feature to list CD-based games without having them taking up space on the hard drive. I never meant to include discussions on how to I was obtaining, or methods TOO obtain; just if and how GameEx would work the way I wanted.

Frequency is right to get all hot about this thread. I never should have been discussed in the first place.

[hansolo77]

I would create a custom batch file for Kega Fusion, setting it up as an External Application called Run Sega CD Game or somesuch. Since you're using actual disks, you don't need a list to launch things from in the menu.

I use a similar system for Blu-Ray/DVD playback on my machine.

Like...

SegaCD.bat

@REM Substitute Z: with the letter of the physical drive. Put this batch in the same folder as Kega Fusion!

@REM - If there's no disk in the drive, go back to GameEx...

@IF NOT EXIST Z:\NUL EXIT

@REM Call SCD emulator and have it autoboot into SCD mode.

@%~dp0Fusion.exe -scd

@REM - Quit!

EXIT

You will also, of course, need to set up the BIOS ROMs and point Fusion to your CD drive.

Gens can't autoboot a SCD disk to my knowledge (A Linux fork of it, GensGS can though) : You'd have to use something like AutoIT to automate GUI usage to pull it off.

This method works great. I created a bat file, changed the Z to F for my drive, and it loads great! Only problem I have now is that whenever I load a Sega CD game off the hard drive, it changes the settings in the emulator back to "None" as the CD Drive to use. It no longer boots CD games from my drive unless I manually change it back. I'm trying the "read-only" approach, by making the file uneditable, but this seems drastic. Does anybody know of a way (via command line that I could add to the bat file) of forcing Fusion to load a specific drive?

[fRequEnCy]

This method works great. I created a bat file, changed the Z to F for my drive, and it loads great! Only problem I have now is that whenever I load a Sega CD game off the hard drive, it changes the settings in the emulator back to "None" as the CD Drive to use. It no longer boots CD games from my drive unless I manually change it back. I'm trying the "read-only" approach, by making the file uneditable, but this seems drastic. Does anybody know of a way (via command line that I could add to the bat file) of forcing Fusion to load a specific drive?

Are you referring to the Fusion.ini file? It's not keeping the setting after loading from GameEx?

[hansolo77]

Yea; the Fusion.ini file.

I have a few Sega CD games on the hard drive, and when I play them through GameEx, the Fusion.ini file changes the line "DefaultDrive=5:0:0 HL-DT-ST BDDVDRW GGC-H20L 1.03" to "DefaultDrive=X:X:X None". It does that, apprently, so Fusion doesn't try to load the iso from the CD drive. This is fine, but after it does that, I can no longer direct boot from the CD drive, since the INI is now configured as "DefaultDrive=X:X:X None" and Fusion doesn't know where to find the CD. If there is some way to have Fusion just start up with "DefaultDrive=5:0:0 HL-DT-ST BDDVDRW GGC-H20L 1.03" for my direct boot (by adding a line to the command line for instance) that would be all I need.

[Adultery]

Do you use two different copies of Fusion? I'd keep them seperate and make the one you use for this a read-only just as a temp workaround until someone can have a sit down and look at the batch file.

[hansolo77]

I never thought of that. I'm using a separate copy of Fusion for every Sega console.. Master System, Game Gear, Genesis, 32, CD. Might as well have a separate for direct boot CD too. Glad you thought of it Adultery!

[Adultery]

It's only a temporary workaround though. I have an idea of a different batch file that might be used in this one's place if you wouldn't mind doing some testing.

[hansolo77]

I don't mind testing. This works fine for now. I figured there'd be some kind of command line to force it to load the CD drive. I just have to dig a little and see what I can come up with. I'm off tomorrow, and I usually work better at figuring stuff out on my day's off.

[fRequEnCy]

Well you can write the batch to always write the correct drive for that ini. But that's still something that would be a work around. The settings should save. Test outside of GameEx. Are settings still being saved? One thing I can think of is maybe using an advanced config to correctly exit the emulator because I've see where emulators don't write to the ini correctly when exited by other means (i.e. GameEx closing the process instead of exiting using the hotkeys).

[Adultery]

It almost seems to me like that batch file is written to tell the pgm that there's no drive present if a game's not in. Why couldn't it just tell it the drive's empty instead of removing it?

Maybe I'm reading it wrong?

[fRequEnCy]

It almost seems to me like that batch file is written to tell the pgm that there's no drive present if a game's not in. Why couldn't it just tell it the drive's empty instead of removing it?

Maybe I'm reading it wrong?

From the looks of it, it's just a check to see if the image is mounted. Not really required since the image should be mounted using the launch before anyways or using integrated mounting depending on image type and preference of user.

[hansolo77]

I'm not mounting any images. Fusion has built-in capabilities to read iso's directly. For the half dozen or so games I have on the hard drive, it's a simple matter of telling Fusion (via command line) where the iso is located, and Fusion does the rest. When NOT using an ISO, Fusion has the ability to read from the CD drive, thus allowing you to play directly off an actual CD, not an ISO. When playing a game on the CD, Fusion need's to be told to use the CD drive to find the game, otherwise it doesn't know where to find it, and just loads up with nothing (the Sega CD boot rom, but with nothing loaded).

I've test this outside of GameEx previously. That I how I figured out what it's doing. It changes the drive path setting in the INI when loading from an iso to 'None'. That then disables the auto-load from CD via GameEx. That's why I need a way to inject the drive path setting via Command Line so that the bat file works.

Another solution I'm thinking might be possible is if Fusion can load a specfic ini file. Then I could just have 2 ini files, one for "iso" and one for "CD". Then just use the command line to tell it which ini file to use, based on the method needed.

[fRequEnCy]

Fusion doesn't have a way to do that from command-line. The parameters are very basic. So if the setting is not being saved in the ini then only have two options. First as you guessed would be to set the file to read-only which you say is "drastic" but don't see how that's a problem when it makes it work and doesn't affect anything at all. Second would be to script something that changes the ini on each launch. So if you don't know how to script than I would opt for option one.

[hansolo77]

It's not really 'drastic', just seems like a way to solve the problem that's not ideal. The write-protect option limits the functionality of Fusion from saving any other changes I might need to make. I may not ever have to make changes, but if I do, it would be nice to be able to SAVE them. Adultery's idea of a separate copy of Fusion seems to be working great for now though, I think I'll just stick to that.

[Adultery]

Wait, I had a good idea? LOL