Cheats May Not Work in Multi-Disk Games?

[Malor]

Just spotted a possible buglet: I'm playing through FF9, and was lost exploring the new continent in Disk 2. I was going to use a cheat to disable random encounters so I could gorram look in multiple directions without getting jumped, but realized that the Cheats menu was ghosted out and nonfunctional.

After a little experimenting, I found that the cheats only work with Disk 1 loaded. I presume that the system is using either a name or hash value to determine which cheats (if any) should be enabled. I'd be happy to generate and post checksums for the CHDs I have, if that's how it's done. My Disc 1 obviously works, so presumably disks 2, 3, and 4 should also be correct, and just aren't in the database.

Alternately, if there's some other method to turn cheats on with multi-disk games, I'd appreciate enlightenment. I poked around in the menu, but didn't see anything that seemed relevant.

I looked in the Cheats directory to see if I could figure out how cheats are linked to games, and I have no freaking idea what's going on in there. There are oodles (thousands?) of numbered files, but I don't understand how they would link to the correct CHDs. I was figuring I might do a quick edit and then post my changes, but I don't even know where to start.

My expectation was maybe an ini, txt, or even a database file linking hash values to cheat compilation names, but if that's how it works, I don't know which file it is.

If it helps, these are the filenames I'm using for FF9:

Code: Select all

Final Fantasy IX (USA) (Disc 1) (Rev 1).chd
Final Fantasy IX (USA) (Disc 2) (Rev 1).chd
Final Fantasy IX (USA) (Disc 3) (Rev 1).chd
Final Fantasy IX (USA) (Disc 4) (Rev 1).chd

They're together in a directory called "FF9". Would the containing directory name have any relevance?

edit: somewhat belatedly, I figured out that you can spin the world view in FF9 with the shoulder buttons. Doh.

[PistolsAtDawn]

You'll want to make a copy of the cheats file and rename it:

The filename of the zip must match the ROM name exactly.

So you just need a copy for each disc image because of the different file names.

https://mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_M ... es/cheats/

[zakk4223]

PSX cheats use the product ID embedded in the disc image to determine which file to load cheats from. That's all the "numbered" files you saw, it's PSX product ids.

I didn't check them all, but there's no cheats for disc 2 at least. I wonder if that's just an oversight in the cheats db mister pulls from

[Malor]

Okay, so, as a bandaid fix, is there an easy way to extract the product ID from a CHD? I did a couple of searches, but I may not be using the correct terms.

Thanks for the help, btw.

edit: I messed around for awhile with chdman.exe from MAME, and didn't see anything obvious there.

[PistolsAtDawn]

zakk4223 is correct about the product ID, but I'm pretty sure that if it doesn't find a match there, it will then default to file name. I had to copy the cheats file and rename it for the second disc of Xenogears for it to work (I was also seeking to turn off the random battles. They are IMHO excessive in Xenogears).

I should say that this was several months ago already and the core has seen a ton of changes since, so I could be wrong now. Often times the cheat codes were different for different regions too, so that may possibly be why the product ID is not working with the cheats files.

[Malor]

zakk4223 is correct about the product ID, but I'm pretty sure that if it doesn't find a match there, it will then default to file name. I had to copy the cheats file and rename it for the second disc of Xenogears for it to work (I was also seeking to turn off the random battles. They are IMHO excessive in Xenogears).

I should say that this was several months ago already and the core has seen a ton of changes since, so I could be wrong now. Often times the cheat codes were different for different regions too, so that may possibly be why the product ID is not working with the cheats files.

Well, the cheats do work with Disc 1, so I suspect the additional disks should as well. I don't see any reason to think they come from different sources. If they did, I imagine there would have been some spectacular crashes by now. Likewise, I suspect they're probably not bad dumps, as I got them directly from a believed-good collection on archive.org straight to a ZFS filesystem. If they weren't still bitperfect, ZFS would be throwing a hissy fit.

I'd be willing to copy the cheat file to that directory and play with the filename, but since I don't know how to extract the volume ID, I don't know which of the thousands of numbered files to copy. There's definitely nothing matching Final Fantasy 9 by name.

I just need a little bit more knowledge to unstick myself.

[PistolsAtDawn]

I run a ZFS NAS too. Solid stuff. Resilvering is smooth and easy when a disk needs replacement. I'm very satisfied with it.

I wasn't clear earlier, and that didn't make a lot of sense. I've re-read my own message several times trying to figure out what I was remembering.

You have it correct that a mislabeled region can be a source of trouble, and that was what happened to me when I was trying some old GameShark codes with Xenogears. I somehow had the wrong region for the codes that I setup manually before the core was officially released. I pulled those codes from some ancient Angelfire site that had them mislabeled.

But that didn't have anything to do with the automatic matching of the disc ID code. I got those things conflated. I think I was trying to say that you possibly have a bad / mislabeled dump, but you already know you don't.

According to the file date of the Xenogears cheats zip file, I created it in April of this year. IIRC cheats didn't automatch on the core yet back then, so I had to name the zip the same file name of the disc image.

Here's a database with the names of the games and the disc ID codes: https://psxdatacenter.com/ntsc-u_list.html

[Malor]

So what I ended up doing was this (for the three extra disks in Final Fantasy 9):

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cd /media/fat/Cheats/PSX
ln -s SLUS-01251.zip SLUS-01295.zip
ln -s SLUS-01251.zip SLUS-01296.zip
ln -s SLUS-01251.zip SLUS-01297.zip

Update_all doesn't seem to remove the symlinks, fortunately. I was a little worried about that.

[Malor]

Well, the latest update removed my symlinks... but replaced them with actual files. Someone was on the ball and saw this post, I think.

Doing multi-disk games with symlinks might save some space. I now have four 1.5 megabyte files instead of one and three symlinks. Doesn't matter to me, I've got oodles of space, but switching to symlinks in general for multi-disk games might save some bandwidth and storage.

Not a big deal, for me at least. My problem is fixed, and I would never have noticed the extra space in the first place.

[valerino]

uhm ..... i wonder if it works with all titles...
i'm trying to finish Parasite Eve US (SLUS-00662 for disc1 and SLUS-00668 for disc2, according to https://psxdatacenter.com/games/U/P/SLUS-00662.html).

i verified the disc2 CHD and indeed its SLUS-00668, so i manually copied SLUS-00662.zip to SLUS-00668.zip in the cheats directory.
still, for disc2 the cheats menu is greyed.

can this thing be made "manually bypassable" maybe ? i.e. making the user able to select the cheats zip ?

[valerino]

ok, i managed to get it working by copying the cheats zip from disc 1 to Parasite Eve (USA) Disc 2.zip (same name as chd, but with zip extension) in the cheats directory.

beware, according to [url=https://mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_M ... rom-images] the cheats file should be copied in the same directory as the chd. but according to the source code of the mister in cheats.cpp, this is indeed read from the cheats directory. problem solved, maybe the doc should be fixed.

anyway, i can't understand why the psx_get_game_info() fail to detect the correct id for disc 2 SLUS-00668 .... extracting the chd the id corresponds (SLUS_006.68) but that code somehow fails to normalize it to the xxxx-yyyyy format ....