Network storage

[stoniemahonie]

Is ist possible to pick network storage when scanning for files or adding a new rom ? I can only pick local storage inside the pc.

I managed to edit the dat file and mass-replaced the paths.

When i add a new file i have to fakeadd another file and then afterwards i can edit this entry and change the path with \\networkstorage\example\file.zip

i know this Synctool is there but that is for another purpose i think.

[butter100fly]

Are the files you want to access zipped? Do you need quickplay to unzip them for you before playing? It sounds quite like you have a good case for synctool here if so, since you may wish to cache the files locally in order to unzip them not on the network storage. Have a look at the synctool docs on the wiki. I use Synctool by mapping the network path to a drive letter in windows (pretty sure it can be a direct url though) - but if synctool isn't appropriate for you for some reason, could this be an option? And what is it that prevents you from scanning network locations anyway in the scanning dialog (can you post a screenshot?).

I'd def say that Synctool has really changed the way I think about storing my game collection and playing retro games in a frontend generally, I'd seriously recommend it - just setting up a remote url for your games can have a fair few gotchas - not knowing your use case at all, but generally I'd say: store them externally but copy them locally before you try to do anything with them!

[stoniemahonie]

Sorry for the late reply. I found the problem. It was because i launched quickplay with admin rights. With admin rights, there need to be some steps to see the network storage in picking a folder through quickplay. Without it, no problem. The unzipping is no problem, most emulators handle zip well.

I generally use quickplay on my pc and also on the tv. I also played around with "playnite", pretty fun too but in the end i alwaysgo back (i mean, i never was anywhere else) to quickplay bc it is so fast and snappy.

[butter100fly]

that's interesting about admin rights, thanks for that tidbit! I still generally find I need to unzip many disc isos in order to play them in emulators (but the newer the system the more impractical this becomes due to the iso size, its a pity that compressed iso are best for use yet zipping them is still often best/used for storage). Also isn't it sometimes a problem if your game is streaming from the iso and its on a network location? If your game is a single file then synctool is very useful - I've got various laptops with various storage limitations as well as an HTPC setup, so its nice to cache games i'm playing on-demand, but I guess my use case must be an outlier: synctool changed my world but doesn't seem a good-enough use case for others Glad you found a way that works for you!

[stoniemahonie]

The streaming works flawless. No lag or strange hiccups. It's really good and that counts for PC and on raspberry pi. I thought this too, when i first set a nas storage up for this reason but everything works good. What systems are you having trouble with compression ? Many emulators support .chd compression, so i wonder. The systems where it is a problem, that i know of, is xbox/xbox360/ps3. In the past i tried .isz compression from daemon-tools, but mounting images to play a game wasn't that elegant. But the integration of .chd in many emulators made it for me obsolete worrying too much about size. You can still achieve better results with a normal file compression like zip/7z/rar but the tradeoff for chd is great, especially for psx/ps2/dreamcast/saturn etc. But maybe u like maximum compression to have more space ?

In theory, synctool sounds interesting as a feature, but i don't see any practical use for me. Everything just works from the network, but this is also the only thing that network storage is there for and i'm the only user.

[butter100fly]

good to know streaming works well for you! That's really interesting. So you don't even need to ensure your emulator pre-caches the whole image instead of streaming eg: audio (its a setting in some cores in RetroArch for instance)? I still store isos as zips for most systems where the native emulator-supported disc format isn't compressed (eg: Gamecube's native format used in Dolphin is compressed, so I don't zip that). I too tried streaming compressed disc data using stuff like .isz compression with Winmount, and daemon-tools native zip mounting, and all had various severe problems for our use case here, making me realise that some tool achieving that could take some years yet! I'm interested that you use CHD, I take it you attack ISOs with CHDMan - do you have any tooling or process that helps you with that? Yes in an ideal world everything would be 7zipped single file iso's that emulators or some 3rd party tool can directly stream, but I'm not sure we'll ever get there, and yes my current problems is that as soon as you get modern DVD-size archived isos eg: PS3, it takes so long for 7zip to uncompress them that you've forgotten which game you wanted to play by the time its ready

[stoniemahonie]

Now thats funny, i also expiremented with winmount and zip files and it didn't work out well. Compressing the image and mounting it with winmount and then pointing the emulator to the file or even then mount the mounted image file with daemon tools, that was interesting.

For chd i recommend this easy batch script, i put it in the attachement. It is foolproof and gets the job easily done (on windows). You only have to put it in the folder with iso/cue/img/gdi and let it work, it automatically detects multiple images, so if you only want to compress one image to test or in general, you should put it in another folder with the script. As for playing from nas, only big files are your concern here, and those run just fine as chd or rvz/gcz (dolphin) and if you use PSP, cso works also just fine. I'm on cable, but it also works on a retropie setup over wifi without problems, there's psx/dreamcast/neogeocd/segacd for instance working on it (i guess the other emulators who support chd work as good) without a hitch as chd. And chd can also extract back to iso without any loss, so the crc matches as far as i know. The only emulators who i would like to have chd support but it doesn't is phoenix for 3do and someday ps3/xbox. For xbox theres xiso (https://xemu.app/docs/disc-images/)in case you didn't know but that only gets rid of the junk data, but thats already quite something instead of the almost 8 gb dvd. And for xbox360 theres a tool called iso2god who can do merely the same as for xbox360.

CHD support for emulators that i know:

segacd
neogeocd
psx
ps2
dreamcast
pcengine/turbografx
saturn

https://github.com/unknownbrackets/maxcso for PSP. You can drag an image, or multiple ones, and it starts. CSO works also for psx and multiple images can be combined into a single file (but for that i don't know if maxcso can also do that), but chd still compresses a little better. So for multidisc games, i created an extra folder for them, and then use a .m3u file to start the game, so the list is clean of "disc 1, disc 2" etc. On pcsx2 there's no .m3u support for now though. Dolphin has it though.

[butter100fly]

Thanks for all that info, very much appreciated. There's some work to do here! I'm wondering what the easiest way to make those CHDman batch commands cross platform would be - these look interesting: https://nastytester.com/posts/script-th ... linux.html and the similar https://stackoverflow.com/questions/299 ... bat-and-sh) (The other way would be to wrap them in a programming language that could check the OS type of course, but that's more maintainance-heavy!)

streaming zip files containing isos is one of those areas where, when emulation was young, it seemed like a problem that would be quickly solved, yet as we saw never was, so its become one of those great unsolved things in emulation, which of course makes the field really interesting let us know whenever you find any new techniques!