[FR] Unified "Games" tab

[DavidOliM]

Checks

• [X] I have checked existing OPL feature requests for duplicates and found none

Describe the FR

Currently games are separated by storage devices, in my opinion that's a bit unneccesary and could be more simple.

Describe the solution you'd like

I think a more efficient and concise way of showing the list of games would be if OPL scanned the connected devices for games(by pressing "refresh"?) and listed them all in a single tab called "Games", similar to what USB Loader GX does on the Wii. This way OPL would be more organised, instead of showing each storage devices on the main screen it could have a tab for games and one for apps. Additionally each game entry in the list could show a little badge pointing out which device it is stored in.

Describe alternatives you've considered

No response

Additional context

No response

[BatRastard]

There's a few reasons why things are the way they are ...

Mainly because people often used more than one storage device - especially if their only option was USB (as OPL used to be called OpenUSBLoader, if I recall correctly) or multiple small HDDs. The PS2 is limited to 2GB, but back in the day, we could only afford 250GB and 500GB drives. Most of us made due with 60GB and 80GB Seagates and Western Digitals that we'd have to split the alphabet with -- i.e. games 0 thru K on one drive; L thru Z on another.

Also, there's gamers who apply undubs and re-translations and like to store both the native ISO and the patched ISO on the same drive in which case the undub has an altered SLUS ID, and that also applies to gamers who collected the demo disks included in many magazines.

Also, OPL has the manual/auto start device option to help speed up its own loading process by not having to scan every connected device and/or network share automatically upon boot up, and this also helps with troubleshooting because if a user has games on HDD, USB, Firewire, and a Network Share at the same time -- all of which is set to "Auto" start -- and a failure somewhere in the device chain causes OPL to freeze upon launch, you gotta figure out which device in the chain is the culprit by editing OPL's config file with a text-editor, changing all those "Auto"s to Manuals, and then starting each device one at a time until OPL freezes again just to narrow down the actual device that failed.

[DavidOliM]

I understand, which is why I suggested the list to be updated only when the user requested so, by pressing the Refresh button. Then OPL would create a cache just like it currently does for HDDs. About the patched and original ISO's, I don't see how that could lead to confusion or errors in OPL itself, do you mean if there are serial code duplicates that could cause problems?

And about the start up errors, I think OPL could maybe create a .txt log and spit a number for the drive that caused the error? 🤔

I understand each of these changes would require medium to major changes to the code, but at least it's something to keep in mind for the future.