Open PS2 Loader Project Feature Requests

[doctorxyz]

From this wazup640's initial idea...:

During the last weekend I found some time to finally setup my NAS and copy all my game file on it. Around 570 games available at once. W00t! This is so nice to have, even if it take ages to browse.

Some key to jump to the first game with the next character in alphabeth would be nice, too

... OPL could show all the alphabet whenever we hold the R1 button at game list.
Then we could use our left analog or digital pad to choose the letter.
After that, we could just simply release the R1 button and voilá... OPL would jump to the first game of that letter chosen.
(FYI: RockBand 3 has a similar feature for quickly jump to a song / artist name. It has been proven very useful for me, since I have almost 100 songs).

[EvilGamer]

Even better... wouldn't it be nice to have a Genre sort option ? like: RPG, Shooter, Simulation, Strategy etc etc ?

Choose an Genre, and all games that were sorted out in that genre will show ?

[RandQalan]

I think that has been suggested before for genre and got turned down all games must have description of genre and OPL has to read every one to do it
I think it would slow down loading considerable.

[mgh]

About the genres,this may be not the best approach but how about a special cfg file that is loaded depending on the genre(cfg for every genre)you choose and in that cfg file,to contain the GameIDs(S***_***.**),so once you load a certain genre,to display only game games listed in it.

This way OPL wouldn't have to load every single game cfg to display only the genres you want.

Or maybe a single cfg file like this

Action=SLUS_111.11
Action=SLUS_222.22
RPG=SLUS_333.33
RPG=SLUS_444.44
Adventure=SLUS_555.55

So if you choose from some OPL menu RPG,then OPL will look in that file and display only the games that are in the "RPG=" category

[RandQalan]

Now that may work less time loading but only the coders may know how hard it is to implement that on top of all the other cfg files

[EvilGamer]

About the genres,this may be not the best approach but how about a special cfg file that is loaded depending on the genre(cfg for every genre)you choose and in that cfg file,to contain the GameIDs(S***_***.**),so once you load a certain genre,to display only game games listed in it.

This way OPL wouldn't have to load every single game cfg to display only the genres you want.

Or maybe a single cfg file like this

Action=SLUS_111.11
Action=SLUS_222.22
RPG=SLUS_333.33
RPG=SLUS_444.44
Adventure=SLUS_555.55

So if you choose from some OPL menu RPG,then OPL will look in that file and display only the games that are in the "RPG=" category

Indeed, I had something like that in mind.

If you choose to load the games list from Genre, it will open OPL on the Genre screen, when you click on the Genre you want... example Racing. It will start to load the Racing config file and will list all games that have been sorted out for that Genre.

Of course there will be loading times, but if you have a big amount of games this loading time will be less then searching for your game in a very big games list.

[xnamkcor]

What if the use just put the genres in the Name and just manually looked for that Genre?

[wazup640]

Of course there will be loading times, but if you have a big amount of games this loading time will be less then searching for your game in a very big games list.

Genre is not not very handy. Often it is not clear where to sort files.

My 610 games (yes, got even more on the flea market) have all a proper config file with a genre and I know how hard it is to group them.

A good compromise with around zero programming needed would be a simple option in config, which allows to switch L2/R2 from "ShowFirst/ShowLast" into char hopping.

These keys are somewhat defined as "#/Z", so enhancing without option wouldn´t hurt, too

Wazup

[No.47]

Genre is not not very handy. Often it is not clear where to sort files.

My 610 games (yes, got even more on the flea market) have all a proper config file with a genre and I know how hard it is to group them.

I disagree. Of course there are games that don't perfectly fit into the main genres, but that's no reason for OPL to not offer a such feature.

Anyway, why should we only allow sorting by game genre? An universal feature that can be defined by each user individually would be the best.
Not only the game genre but each attribute written in the game configs (such as developer, year of release, number of players, etc.) can be useful as a sorting criterion. Imagine the following implementation:

• Each user decides individually which game attributes are important to him. He then needs to write these attributes (such as game genre, year of release, number of players, etc.) in the game configs. This feature is already implemented in OPL as it's used for the game information page.
• The user chooses one of these game attribute that should be used as a sorting criterion (e.g. game genre).
  How to make this choice? One could simply add an option to the OPL option menu or even better add the possibility to make the choice on-the-fly while watching the game list by holding R1 or another button (as doctorxyz described).
• Alternatively, instead of simply sorting the full game list, the chosen game attribute could be used to display sub-lists as written above by others. So if you choose "year of release", you would see a list of all years you have games from (instead of the game list) and then, by picking for example the year 2004, all your games released in 2004 are displayed.

But as RandQalan said, this stuff has been suggested before. Here's what izdubar posted some time ago:

The genre sorting stuff is kinda complicated to implements, I have thought about this feature a lot lately ... as this feature is sort of related to the latest changes I've done.

One big task is to modify the GUI, to provide a way to browse the list of various category, and then drill down to a particular genre.

[Udosatiz]

In Monster rancher, it generates monsters by CD/DVD swapping. Possible to emulate disc id, such as buttons sequence combos, some data in usb drive or at least random number generator in this game?