I figured out using CDs, Disks, and Cartridges

RetroArch General
#1

A little while ago we were having a discussion on RetroArch playing physical media. While it’s not possible to play your Playstation’s CD-ROM copy of Tomb Raider 3 using RA, I thought I could come up with different sort of solution.

So here I have put together an up-to-date video of Gam3B0x. If you’re not familiar with my project there’s a brief introduction near the beginning of the video. I discuss a few of the things I’m working on and working towards, but you will see I was able to find a physical media solution through RetroArch.

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#2

I kinda realize the video doesn’t make it clear how this works through RetroArch… lol

So here’s how it works:

You take a floppy or a CD or an SD card or w/e you have… and you figure out what drive that’s mapped to on your computer.

i.e. Floppy Drive = A, CD Drive = D

First, throw your game onto that drive with the physical media, and then create a .bat file that instructs the computer to load up RetroArch via the commandline, and apply whatever paramaters you need to play the game. (This is where I customized it with loading text)

Then, instead of the command line telling the game to load from your HDD, it loads off the disk you have inserted. i.e. “A:\Super Mario Bros. 2.fds”

**Alternatively, you can use a .bat file on the external media, that in turns tells RA to load the game from your harddrive. This method negates essentially any size limit restrictions for any media, regardless of size. Meaning you could create a floppy disk for something as large as GTA V, because it’s not actually on the disk. However, using the disc would still pull up the game, and the end result is the exact same.

You could even create labels for CDs that match retail and keep them in the same cases. Then it looks like you are loading real media as well lol.