View Full Version : Multi disc games
rangel
09-20-2011, 05:05 PM
Can we have a feature that allows you to select the CD number for multi game disc.
Example:
Cycle to RE2, hit enter, quick option pops up asking which CD to load. 1,2,3 ect. or be able to name the discs (Leon Disc & Claire Disc).
This would be so much easier then having the same game on the wheel 4 times for games with 4 discs.
This has been requested soooo many times.
brolly
09-20-2011, 06:37 PM
And I still hope it will be addressed :D
rangel
09-20-2011, 07:24 PM
Did they say it is possible then? Or at least hinted that it might? :)
brolly
09-20-2011, 07:39 PM
Sure it is possible, everything is possible. But there's no official confirmation this will be done though.
BadBoyBill
09-21-2011, 06:30 AM
Having the disc 4 times on the wheel allows for 2 things , 1 it allows me to have a setting where you can not show those items on the wheel and only show the first item and have a popup menu display allowing you to choose the disc. 2 it still allows you to audit your game discs agains an HS database.
I am still working on this feature but it should be in 2.0.
rangel
09-21-2011, 07:18 AM
Awesome!!! This I definetly can't wait for!! Thanks BBB!!
Having the disc 4 times on the wheel allows for 2 things , 1 it allows me to have a setting where you can not show those items on the wheel and only show the first item and have a popup menu display allowing you to choose the disc. 2 it still allows you to audit your game discs agains an HS database.
I am still working on this feature but it should be in 2.0.
brolly
09-21-2011, 10:51 AM
Great news indeed, how will you be detecting the multiple discs BBB? Based on the game name tag I suppose (Redump/No-Intro style)? If so don't forget this will not only be used with disc, but also tapes, disks, etc.
BadBoyBill
09-21-2011, 08:10 PM
It will be by name strictly (Disc 1) etc...
I''ll need to know the official names people are using in HS databased at HyperList for this to work.
So if your using tapes, then I need to know what the name for tapes is going to be, i.e (Tape 1) etc... exactly.
brolly
09-22-2011, 03:22 AM
To make it work for everything use the media types from TOSEC and make that the HL official (which should be already anyway).
Depending on the system you might come across the following:
Disc
Disk
File
Part
Side
Tape
The only special case is Side (refers to the side of a tape), which is named (Side A) or (Side B). You can also have (Side 1) or (Side 2) though even though usually A and B is what's used.
For a single game you can also have something like (Tape 1) (Side A), (Tape 1) (Side B), (Tape 2) (Side A) and (Tape 2) (Side B). This is very common for any tape system ideally this should also be a single entry on the xml and through the popup menu you'd see the 4 tapes/sides. Depending on how you are parsing it this might be a problem or not, I mean if you are not parsing the actual disc/tape number this shouldn't be an issue.
This should cover all situations. There are some very specific cases with the Part tag, but I wouldn't bother with those.
BadBoyBill
09-30-2011, 12:03 AM
To make it work for everything use the media types from TOSEC and make that the HL official (which should be already anyway).
Depending on the system you might come across the following:
Disc
Disk
File
Part
Side
Tape
The only special case is Side (refers to the side of a tape), which is named (Side A) or (Side B). You can also have (Side 1) or (Side 2) though even though usually A and B is what's used.
For a single game you can also have something like (Tape 1) (Side A), (Tape 1) (Side B), (Tape 2) (Side A) and (Tape 2) (Side B). This is very common for any tape system ideally this should also be a single entry on the xml and through the popup menu you'd see the 4 tapes/sides. Depending on how you are parsing it this might be a problem or not, I mean if you are not parsing the actual disc/tape number this shouldn't be an issue.
This should cover all situations. There are some very specific cases with the Part tag, but I wouldn't bother with those.
Ok, I have this mostly working so far.
A couple things that came about because of this feature:
-We will removing the disc logos from the official wheel images. This is so you only show one wheel image for a disc set which comes from disc one.
-Game text when you land on this game will automatically parse out ("Disc1") from the game description since you don't need to see that.
-When you hit start on this wheel item, then a mini menu pops up showing all the discs for this set. Max is 8 discs per game, let me know if that number needs to be higher.
-I am testing this with our dreamcast set, I'll go through hyperbase and clean up the wheel images. We'll still keep wheel images for sub discs even though they will never be seen, this is just so you don't feel like your missing stuff when auditing your artwork with hypersync for example. The wheels will just look the same across all discs.
-I worked this so far using the recommended items in the previous post. This is final for now unless someone wants any new types added.
-I'm still looking into the sub sub thing for tapes. Subbing tapes out is fine as it sits, subbing out sides isn't worked in yet but shouldn't be a problem.
Can someone tell me what the most tapes they've seen for a single game is? Double that number and we could have a lot of menu items, I just need to know this for ensuring the popup menu can handle it.
Cr3tyl
09-30-2011, 04:18 AM
Well... NEC PC-9801 has a couple of games with 17 disks. Sooooo... We need to have at least that much in total :)
Not too sure about tapes, I think I saw a couple of games somewhere with 5 tapes in total...
brolly
09-30-2011, 09:31 AM
Great news BBB, so by removing the numbers from the wheels I assume all multi-disc games will now only show up on the wheel once? I thought you'd have this configurable (show one entry+popup or show them all), personally I only want to see one entry so it's all good to me.
Is there any reason to limit the number of discs to 8? Can't you just build a dynamic list like the games wheel?
About tapes I don't remember seeing any game with more than 4 tapes, but there are so many systems that no one can be sure. But there are games with a lot of disks, Amiga for example has games with over 15 disks luckily most (if not all) of these can be installed on HDD, so one would use that version instead (disk swapping 15 disks would be kind of insane anyway), but I'm not sure about other systems.
In a nutshell would be perfect if you could do this without having a max number of discs limit.
BadBoyBill
09-30-2011, 03:58 PM
We are not removing the numbers from the wheel. I was saying we are removing the disc text on the wheel image logos. The games must have the disc number in the description and yes you do have the option to show all or use a popup.
I chose 8 for performance reasons. The way to figure this is several nested loops per game when loading a wheel. The more games you have, the more discs you have per game, and the more types of disc possibliities creates more work overall before the wheel loads. So by trying only up to 8 discs, keeps the work down. I just chose 8 because I only remember there was a Sega CD game that had 8 dics and that's the most I had ever seen. Thats why I asked if there was more. I'ts not a big deal to add more checking. I wasnt going to make it into a wheel just to view discs, this is going to be more of a up and down text list you can pick from.
brolly
09-30-2011, 04:52 PM
Yeah I got it, I didn't meant removing the numbers from the game name, but the wheel image of course.
I see what you mean, but I believe it shouldn't be such a high performance hit to do a few more cycles unless the user is using a pretty old machine. If you keep a limit there please increase the number to a bit higher than 8, or better yet make that configurable on the settings file so we can play around with it if we want :)
A Sega CD game with 8 discs? Which game was that, the largest Sega CD game I know is Slam City with Scottie Pippen with 4 discs.
Hypnoziz
09-30-2011, 05:46 PM
BBB, use more switch/case (sometimes called select/case) conditional arguments! Eff the nested for loops!
8 dics and that's the most I had ever seen.
Were those your college years?
BadBoyBill
09-30-2011, 07:09 PM
BBB, use more switch/case (sometimes called select/case) conditional arguments! Eff the nested for loops!
switch statements are not a replacement for loops, go back to school dude, lol
A Sega CD game with 8 discs? Which game was that, the largest Sega CD game I know is Slam City with Scottie Pippen with 4 discs.
Ya that was the game I was thinking of. For some reason I thought it was 8.
brolly
09-30-2011, 08:03 PM
Well there's also the 32X CD version that's 4 more cds so both versions together makes 8 that's probably where you got that number from.
BadBoyBill
10-01-2011, 11:26 AM
Here's a video of selecting in action, the entire menu's background is customizable so you can design your own screen. A basic screen will be included.
[YOUTUBE HD]y5SV-mVWHIk[/YOUTUBE HD]
What's awesome BBB, great work.
brolly
10-01-2011, 01:43 PM
That looks pretty cool! 2.0 gets better and better.
rangel
10-02-2011, 12:03 PM
BBB!!!! That's perfect!!!!!
Truly one of the greatest new features!!
On the multi-disc topic, does anyone have any game saves or save states of a multidisc game where it is asking you to insert the next disc? I want to play with this...
BBB, this support is only from the HS menu right, and not within a game?
brolly
10-02-2011, 02:15 PM
Yeah within a game is the next thing we need :D
But this will be emulator dependent, I mean for some emulators like WinUAE this would be pretty simple as you can setup hotkey to do a disk swap. For others I think the best way of doing it would be to call a HL script to deal with the whole disc swap since this will be different from emu to emu.
NoLogic had a wip autoit app for this, but would be great to have this feature integrated on HS.
You have plenty of DexDrive PSX game saves at gamefaqs for example, you'll need PSXMemTool to convert them. Here for FFVIII:
http://www.gamefaqs.com/ps/197343-final-fantasy-viii/saves
There are some saves just before the end of disc 1 and 3.
Hypnoziz
10-02-2011, 02:20 PM
FFVIII isn't going to work. I just recently was playing it and it's not one of the games where you do on-the-fly disc swapping. You just save, close the game out, and launch the emulator with the next disc. From there you can load your save again and continue.
We're going for examples where your game isn't saved before the next disc. Something where it MUST be done on-the-fly.
brolly
10-02-2011, 03:13 PM
I thought it would work since you can simply do a disc swap on the actual PSX unless my memory is playing tricks on me.
If it doesn't work there are plenty more saves for other games there, so just name one it works with a on the fly swap Hypnoziz and maybe we can find a save on gamefaqs.
What's important is if the game allows for the hot swap. It shouldn't matter if you can save progress or not. Really looking for a save state right at or before the disc swap. So really it's any game, and I'm not looking to convert game saves, rather ask if anyone has one already.
brolly
10-02-2011, 04:23 PM
Converting game saves is a 1 click process :p
Celestria
10-03-2011, 03:20 AM
Djvj maybe you can try an amiga game with muliple disks? Usually even before being able to play anything a disk swap is required. Not sure wether uae supports save states though
brolly
10-03-2011, 03:42 AM
If Amiga works for you then you can use Sensible World of Soccer it asks you to do a disk swap when starting the game. WinUAE has a hotkey for disk swapping though so it's easy to swap disks on this one.
And yeah WinUAE supports save states celestria.
I'd rather a ps1 or 2 game as I have those games and am already set up. I don't really have amiga cd setup nor am familiar with the emu at all.
brolly
10-03-2011, 03:58 AM
BBB, sorry I missed one type : Cart
It's pretty uncommon, but it can happen on some systems like the first Odyssey. So if you could add that one too it would be great.
Also I saw on another post:
FYI, the official DB naming for multi disc games needs to be
Game Name (Disc1),
Game Name (Part2),
Game Name (Tape3)
etc...
No spacing between number and type. Hope this doesnt affect any of your scripts.
You removed the space between the type and number?
This will mean editing all the current dbs again (and roms), any reason to remove the space because I can't see one? Also this won't match No-Intro/Redump naming anymore which will be a pain since you'll have to edit all rom names too and on cd based systems with multiple audio tracks it will be quite some work. I do have an app to do this automatically, but only to match no-intro/redump which was what we've been using before.