This core needs a better way to handle floppy change.

[i30817]

The main readme says to create a file with

px68k "Disk 1.dim" "Disk 2.dim"

and this works well enough. Trouble is, some games have 3 or 4 disks. When more disks are appended to that line, the core doesn't boot (Street Fighter II Champion Edition (1993)(SPS) notably).

What i'm proposing is a way to append the disks to a 'game set' like you can do with psx disks, that always loads the first two if any more than two are given, but that you can change in the menu when the game asks you to.

IF you want to get really fancy you could try to emulate a expansion slot to the fdd disk drive, which apparently existed on the hardware, but i don't know how much games support that.

[ghost]

there is only 2 fdd for the system, there is no way to insert more than 2 disks at a time there. and there are actually games that have multiple disks but you only need to insert disk 1(or the system disk), and put in other disks as prompted or else it would not boot when disk(even some 2-floppy disk games wont boot with both inserted)

On Mon, Jul 3, 2017 at 11:13 AM, i30817 notifications@github.com wrote:

The main readme says to create a file with

px68k "Disk 1.dim" "Disk 2.dim"

and this works well enough. Trouble is, some games have 3 or 4 disks. When more disks are appended to that line, the core doesn't boot.

What i'm proposing is a way to append the disks to a 'game set' like you can do with psx disks, that always loads the first two if any more than two are given.

IF you want to get really fancy you could try to emulate a expansion slot to the fdd disk drive, which apparently existed on the hardware, but i don't know how much games support that.

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[cmcginty]

I'm trying to load Aquales, and putting the disk1 and disk2 in gives an error. If I put disk 2 in FDD0 it plays the intro, but can't seem to get past that point, it just repeats continuously.

I think the core should at least support putting the correct 2 disks in the drive, in the correct order when starting the game. I understand that if the disk has to be changed mid-game it would be hard for the core to know when to do that.

[ghost]

Aqualis is played by inserting Disk1 only in fdd0, boot up machine. it should prompt that drive 1 is not ready, insert disk 3 (savedata disk) into fdd1 and go back to game(do not reset, just use the F12 or L2).. at least this is how i load this... a few other multi-disk games behaves the same, should only place disk1 and reset

On Wed, Jan 3, 2018 at 3:20 PM, Casey McGinty notifications@github.com wrote:

I'm trying to load Aquales, and putting the disk1 and disk2 in gives an error. If I put disk 2 in FDD0 it plays the intro, but can't seem to get past that point, it just repeats continuously.

I think the core should at least support putting the correct 2 disks in the drive, in the correct order when starting the game. I understand that if the disk has to be changed mid-game it would be hard for the core to know when to do that.

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[cmcginty]

Thanks. somehow I managed to accidentally do that combo right after I posted this! Again would be a nice feature to automate this some way. Since it's not clear the disk order always, nor do you always know what disk is system vs data disk.

[ghost]

i dont know how you can automate manually inserting the correct disk from example a 3-4 disk set into a 2-driver device/emulator/.

On Wed, Jan 3, 2018 at 4:18 PM, Casey McGinty notifications@github.com wrote:

Thanks. somehow I managed to accidentally do that combo right after I posted this! Again would be a nice feature to automate this some way. Since it's not clear the disk order always, nor do you always know what disk is system vs data disk.

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[cmcginty]

You could probably use the same method that core's like Mame use. A game consists of multiple files and the core loads all the files correctly when the game starts. It doesn't ask you to specify every file for the game. It also doesn't just randomly use every file that you put in an archive.

[ghost]

it not currently coded to load that way.. are you offering?

On Thu, Jan 4, 2018 at 4:21 AM, Casey McGinty notifications@github.com wrote:

You could probably use the same method that core's like Mame use. A game consists of multiple files and the core loads all the files correctly when the game starts. It doesn't ask you to specify every file for the game.

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[gingerbeardman]

In TOSEC the Aquales disks are out of order. There are three disks: intro, game, saves.

• either intro or game in FD0
• saves always in FD1

[i30817]

Is it even possible to make multi-disk games behave 'like mame' if they couldn't install to a hd? Well, i know it's 'possible' because projects like WHDLoad exist but those are major hacks of the executables (and often screw up with copy protection or errors).

I think the only reason many MAME sets can get away with extracting files from the filesystem is that the game was originally on a single medium.

I do have a suggestion that may work. If you can hook the game 'succeeding' on opening for reading a single file after a disk change you could 'assume' it's the right disk and otherwise (after a failure) change disks and try again - this would happen for every drive opened for reading. This could be a shortcut key, or if there is a way to recognize the game expects disk change even automatic (with a setting).

Another hack i can think is if the check uses a system api (ie pass a volume identfier to a standard function you can 'hook'). Then the 'right' disk could be sneaked into the volume the game expects to read it from by picking out the right floppy from the identifier yourself without player intervention. I've never actually seen a older platform where this works, apparently nearly all of them just read the volume directly into their code before doing the check or just read the files directly, not pass a string to a library (I first asked this hack for multi-cd psx games).

Thinking about it, it's possible the first hack actually can work for a majority of ps1 games.

[negativeExponent]

hi. want to add to this discussion, and possibly further improve usuability.

from my understand, using m3u shoud at least remedy the issue. it also has a core option to tell core from which FDD you will be swapping from. Its quite annoying, but it works.

Im trying a new approach though, that is to change the active floppy disk drive by pressing a buttons (instead of going through the menu) and remapping hotkeys for disk swap/change, similar to how disk swapping hotkeys work in FDS. but we dont have enough buttons now.