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wizzomafizzo / mrext

Collection of extensions and utilities for the MiSTer system.
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Game Migration from MiSTer to Pocket (or vice versa) #91

Open mikeyvids opened 5 months ago

mikeyvids commented 5 months ago

Syncing game saves would be amazing and for me my top feature request, as I am sure many others.

Second on my list would be to migrate, or sync, games library between MiSTer and OpenFPGA supported pocket cores. Sometimes I may put a new romhack on my pocket or on mister so sync would be more desired than migrate, but I imagine more complex. A migrate feature is just as useful with the end user being mindful to place new games in the source library to migrate to the destination library (eg source: mister destination: pocket, or vice versa).

I appreciate all your feature-rich contributions.

best

wizzomafizzo commented 4 months ago

I would have liked to add this too but I'm not sure it's possible right no over the USB cable connection, because it is so crazy slow. You would need to use a SD card reader in the mister. Is this still useful that way?

mikeyvids commented 4 months ago

EDIT: Whoops, did not intend to close this.

Yes, having to eject MicroSD from the Pocket is needed to perform basic core updates in a timely manner with Pupdate and Pocket Sync. It is a perfectly reasonable expectation to do the same for this use case.

Regarding library sync, having recently updated both mister and pocket libraries a significant issue may be that all mister libraries would have to be unzipped, since Pocket does not read zip libraries.

Giving it some thought most of the games that I want to be synced would be ones I recently played or those I drop in recently with intent to play. Rather than updating the entire library a quicker solution may be having a dedicated Sync folder in each games library, where it ONLY syncs the contents of this folder in each core library e.g. a handful of new romhacks you are playing or want to take on the go / vice versa. This would cutdown on the sync transfer time and file size for transfer. The Sync folder could be something managed by an end user.

Another method I thought has a prerequisite - Does MiSTer track recently played titles? If so copying a file path from a recently played title to that sync folder could be a neat feature (say a limited lookup of the past 5-10 games, copy the file path from the source to the destination; maybe bypass the need for sync folder.) Drawback to this is you go MiSTer to Pocket, unless Pocket has a similar way to track recently played titles for developers.