Back when only a limited amount of data could
be held on a single CD, gamers playing on certain platforms would eventually come across
titles that couldn't fit on just one disc. It wasn't uncommon to see games in a multiple
floppy or multi-CD format for home computers, , but this was eventually also adopted by
consoles like the Sega Saturn and Sony Playstation, among others. In fact, some of the greatest and most classic
console games were on multiple discs, such as: Panzer Dragoon Saga, Final Fantasy VII,
Final Fantasy VIII, Final Fantasy IX, Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil 2, and many, many
more. Nowadays when attempting to play these beautiful
multi-disc games through emulation, you will likely run into a bit of a headache when trying
to organize them in your playlists. This can become an even bigger annoyance when
your saves don't properly transfer between discs. Luckily for us, most cores within RetroArch
support a file type called .m3u which does a magical job of consolidating all of the
disc files for a game into a single file format. Let's take a quick look at how to create this
file type for your multi-disc games for use within RetroArch and other emulation software. Hello, Watsonator here with another RetroArch
tutorial. I have recently been organizing and beefing
up my ROM collection and in the process of doing so I've probably ran into about 40 or
50 different games that came on multiple discs. I created .m3u files for every single one
of them and tried them on a bunch of different RetroArch cores and they all seem to work
flawlessly. So with that fresh in mind let's just hop
right in here. The first step is getting all of the .bin
and .cue files together for your individual game. So if you look at this Final Fantasy VII example,
and I know it's kinda tough to see, I'm gonna make this bigger in a second and read it for
you. I had to go through each disc individually
here and extract it, and if you look here this is Disc 1, .bin and a .cue file, Disc
2, .bin file, .cue file. So just pull all of those out and put it into
one spot. So I just made a Final Fantasy VII folder
and put them all in there next to one another. So before we continue go up to view and make
sure you have this file name extensions check-marked right here, that is very important. So once you have all of the .bin and .cue
files in one spot, you're gonna right click, go to "new text document" and I like to just
call this the same name as the .cue files but without the "disc" part at the end, so
just the title of your game. This is gonna be "Final Fantasy VII (USA)"
it's also what RetroArch is going to read as the title of your game now. So there that is, and at the end here instead
of it being a ".txt", you're going to take that off and change it to ".m3u". That's why this is called an m3u file, change
it to a .m3u at the end, hit enter, it's going to say "are you sure?" just say "yes." Now here's our .m3u file, it's empty right
now, what we need to do is add the .cue names individually to each line. And that's it, that's an .m3u file. I'll make this a little bit bigger so you
can see it as I do it real quick, let's just get a little bit bigger here. So this is the first .cue file, Disc 1, it
needs to be in order, so disc 1, copy the whole thing, paste it right there. Disc 2, copy the whole thing, make sure you
get the ".cue" at the end because when you first grab it, it doesn't include that, so
make sure you highlight the whole thing and copy and paste it. If you're not copying and pasting and you're
typing it out, make sure it is exact, because it needs to be word for word, or, character
for character perfect. So go to "file," "save" and I'm just going
to make my font smaller again just to be sure, I don't think it matters but just in case,
go back down to 11. So "file," "save" and you can just exit out
of that. Keep this .m3u file right next to all of the
.bin and .cue files for that game, keep it all together. So I made a copy of this Final Fantasy VII
folder and I put some other games in a folder right here. This is Final Fantasy VIII, I did the same
thing for VIII, here is an .m3u file that I made, and these other 2 games are single
disc games. So as you see just one .bin and one .cue. So I will show you how to import all of this
together. I created a brand new, I installed a brand
new RetroArch, i have never used this for anything, all I have done is change the background. So the way I like to add games is by going
to a "Manual Scan." For whatever reason, the other scan doesn't
seem to always work. So just for my example, I am using the desktop,
so that's under my name, desktop, and video example, example roms. Now there are the four right there I just
mentioned. Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and the other two
that are single disc games. So scan this directory. "System name," we are for the Sony Playstation
right now, and then "File Extensions" is the only other thing we have to worry about. Separate them with a space. So "cue" and "m3u" are the two we are looking
for. Now the system is smart enough to separate
without adding copies, extra copies. So watch this. You don't need to worry about any of that,
start the scan, back out, now we have a Playstation right here, and there are the four games. Like I said, these two are multi disc games
and these two are single disc games and it knows to separate them. So if for whatever reason that didn't work
for you, if you didn't get these perfectly like this and it shows like "Disc 1," "Disc
2," you can just go in and delete them individually, just click and go to remove. All you need is the m3u file for your multi-disc
games as the title now. Now let's take a look at how the disc change
part works within an actual game for an .m3u file. This here is Metal Gear Solid and I have a
state save right before you must swap to disc 2. So I'm going to go ahead and trigger that
part, and once this loads here, we are going to bring up the in-game menu which is default
"F1" key on the keyboard. I'm going to hit that now. You're going to go down to where it says "Disc
Control," hit "Eject Disc," and then find the disc that you need, in this case we are
going to Disc 2, and then hit "Insert Disc" to put the disc tray back in. So imagine that you pop the tray out, swap
to the disc you need, and then push it back in. Push the start button after swapping. And there we go, it's pretty much just that
simple. Make sure that it loads.. yep, there we go,
no problem. Now that's easy, but I'm going to show you
a way to make this even easier. So, let me go ahead and go back to where we
were here. So I need to actually change the disc back
to disc 1. And reload that state. Now I have hotkeys setup. So, if you go to your Main Menu and go down
to "Controls" and then "Hotkeys," you can actually setup hotkeys for "disc eject toggle"
and to swap between discs. So I have mine bound to the arrow keys, on
the keyboard. So if I hit my down arrow key, I eject the
tray, I hit the right arrow key, to swap to disc 2, and then the down arrow key again
to push the tray back in. And it does the same thing we just did through
the menus without even having to go to the menu. Just let this load just to show that it does
indeed work. And there we go, no problems at all. Super, super, super simple, and just another
reason why .m3u is great. So that about covers it for this video, there
is one more thing I do want to mention. If you are thinking "ya this is great, I love
the .m3u file types" but you've already begun a game, and you have your save file for like
"CD 1" or "CD 2" or whatever for the game you're on, go ahead and make a backup of your
save file and rename it as the new game name that you have within RetroArch and that should
basically transfer your save over so that you can still use that old save if you were
using, you know some old format before you were introduced to .m3u. But other than that that's all I have for
you today. If this helped you out, please consider Liking
and Subscribing, it helps me out a ton. But, other than that I hope you have a wonderful
rest of your day. Bye-bye.
