Not recognizing SEGA CD games?

[Forty0ztoFreedom]

It is not recognizing ISO's inside of sub-folders. Is this normal? All of my Sega CD games are in sub-folders with their own mp3's. I can't just lump everything into one folder.

How can I make Gameex recognize my Sega CD games?

[fRequEnCy]

It is not recognizing ISO's inside of sub-folders. Is this normal? All of my Sega CD games are in sub-folders with their own mp3's. I can't just lump everything into one folder.

How can I make Gameex recognize my Sega CD games?

Sub-folders are not supported. There's different ways of going about this.

1. Create a wrapper to run your games from their current locations.
   
2. Name your folders the same as your game and get creative with the command-line by running emulator.exe "[ROMPATH]\[ROM]\[ROMFILE]"
   

For example:

C:\Sega CD\Sonic CD\Sonic CD.iso

[bkenobi]

Or create hard links for each iso file and put them in a single directory. Then point GameEx to that directory. This makes GameEx happy and keeps things organized for you. It's not ideal, but it is a workable solution if you don't like either of the 2 frequency suggested.

[jombee]

Or.....

Mount the ISO/mp3's (daemon tools, etc) and use something like nero to create a complete image of the game. This works perfect for me and avoids having tons of folders or having to rename a ton of mp3/wav files.

[Endaar]

You can also zip up each CD image and then enable 7zip support, although this is pretty slow.

[Forty0ztoFreedom]

Thanks for all the suggestions. I like the hard links idea. How do you go about doing that? I could probably just look it up.

[bkenobi]

Here's the software:

http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellex...nkshellext.html

I wrote up a tutorial for using hard links with Circo's emumovies collection for MAME. It's the same procedure...more or less, so you might want to check it out.

http://www.gameex.info/forums/index.php?showtopic=5908

[Adultery]

Off on another tangent, I turned all my Sega CD games into Bin/Cue. You may want to explore that avenue too, as it works flawlessly and you can keep your lists nice and tidy that way.

[bkenobi]

I haven't checked to see how many roms are in the Sega CD set, so this may not be applicable. Anyway, is there an automated utility to convert a set of Sega CD games into Bin/Cue without requiring interaction? If the set is large, it would be nice not to have to do each one manually.

NOTE: I don't have any Sega CD stuff, so this is more focused on whether I should be interested in them or not. I already have a Saturn US set, so I'm not sure I want to mess with Sega CD also due to shear size!

[Adultery]

Well, the US set is about 150 discs, so yeah it was kinda tedious. I used UltraISO for a few and snagged a bunch that were done already and DAT'd with boxes and discs and manuals etc. But yeah, it's a one at a time process and it takes some doing.

On a side note, I'm working on Sega Saturn U set as we speak. What's the best emulator to use? I was thinking Satourne but I'm noobish to the Saturn so any info you could share would be awesome.

[bkenobi]

I tried SSF a while back, but didn't get anything going. I've basically been sitting on a gigantic set of stuff without the knowledge of how to get it going. It's been on my list to get it set up (just like my Daphne stuff) for a while. I've just finished with the majority of the other things on my list, so Saturn and Daphne are pretty close to the top again. I've been trolling any thread that has to do with Saturn for a while now with the hopes that someone would give a good set of directions for getting it set up. Nothing yet...

[Forty0ztoFreedom]

# Name your folders the same as your game and get creative with the command-line by running emulator.exe "[ROMPATH]\[ROM]\[ROMFILE]"

I did try this but it still doesn't work. I'm gonna try out the linking program. Thanks for all the help.

[fRequEnCy]

I did try this but it still doesn't work. I'm gonna try out the linking program. Thanks for all the help.

Trust me when I say it works! LOL. Give us more status on what's going on so we can further help you.

[Forty0ztoFreedom]

Trust me when I say it works! LOL. Give us more status on what's going on so we can further help you.

Hmm . . well, I'll have to double check at home later but I'm pretty sure I have, for instance, Sonic CD.iso in a "Sonic CD" sub-folder. I put in the above command line and it still says "NO GAMES FOUND."

But again, I'll have to double check everything. What is the default on the Sega CD rom extension filter? I never changed it to ISO. That could be it.

[bkenobi]

As long as there's nothing else in the directories than single rom files, you can turn off the filter. Otherwise, you will want to put several in there depending on what you have (e.g., *.iso, *.cue, etc).

[Forty0ztoFreedom]

I used the hard link program, but all the links I created still seem to be the same size as the originals . . are these really links or just copies? I ask because when I play these the mp3's in the ROM folders do not play. So its launching only the ISO "link" I created.

To get over this I did change the command line to include the "/[ROM]/[ROMFILE]" thing, and it worked. So apparently, the program is finding the roms in the rom folder, but then launching the ISO in the sub-folder.

For laughs, rather than creating a hard-link, I created a blank text file and named it "Sewer Shark.iso". 0 bytes. And still, it works.

So there's another solution for you. Oh well, problem solved on my end.

[bkenobi]

I suggest you read the info on the shell extensions page I linked to find out all the technical details. In short, they are the same file. The file you see in file explorer is really the link to the actual file in the file system. The hard link will create another link to the file that's exactly like the original. If you delete the original, the second copy will still remain because you are just deleting the link. If you delete the second link (the hard link), you will delete the last pointer to the file. The file is still on the hard drive, but you have no way of knowing where it is, so it's effectively gone (without some work to recover the location). There are programs that will overwrite the data prior to deleting the link (sometimes called "wiping"), but that's not really that common. Basically the data is still on your drive until you overwrite it, but you won't be able to use it unless you have a link to it in the file system.

Glad you got it going!