Multiloader Guide

How can I play CD/DVD Games with QuickPlay?

Well, if you have a game on a physical CD/DVD, a DVD Player in your PC that can play it, and you want to play that disc with some emulator, just setup QuickPlay to launch the emulator with just one parameter - the one that says "load from the physical CD/DVD drive letter" for instance ../epsxe.exe --cd, and set the emulator up to load from your DVD's drive letter.

But often you've got your disc game as an image file in some format (.iso, .cue/.bin and many many more...). Lets say you just have a .bin/.cue file locally, the image file is unzipped, and you want to just pass the runnable file i.e.: .cue, .iso, .gcz to your emulator (check outside of QuickPlay that this works in the emulator to your satisfaction). In this case, you can choose the .cue file as the game when you scan for roms in QuickPlay, and you can just choose the standard emulator for that system in QuickPlay (i.e.: you don't need to choose the 'MultiLoader' version of that Emulator, though it will work if you do, the Multiloader handles all cases....)

But it often gets more complicated: although many emulators will directly play many image formats for disc systems, some still don't, some image types don't work with some emulators, and some games don't work right (in subtle ways like losing game audio). In addition, most emulators don't let you load images directly from a zip file. And if your disk image is not physically on the pc you're on (often the case with larger DVD images) even if you do get the emulator loading the game, something is going to have to cache the disk image on your local pc: reading the disc over the network is not going to make a fun gaming experience. Some emulators have a function for loading the whole image at once, most don't.

So even though you can easily set up QuickPlay to pass a .iso to an emulator using just the normal commands for adding roms, the QuickPlay MultiLoader was made to be a single thing to point disc files to in order to get them played with any emulator, given any combination of these problem situations. You don't need to 'set' anything against any individual game or emulator to cope with these situations, as you do with other frontends, you just select the 'Multiloader' emulator for that system.

QuickPlay's multiloader does these:

Accesses almost all types of CD/DVD image formats, whether or not the image has been compressed as .7z, .zip, .rar, or proprietary formats such as those used by dolphin or psp emulators
Determines whether you want to process the file from its current location, or whether you're trying to use a remote image
Unzips if necessary, checking the file unzips ok where it can
Works out the runnable file in the image
passes the image to Daemon Tools and passes your daemon tools' virtual DVD-drive's letter to the emu (eg: drive letter K:\)
Passes the runnable file to your emulator
Checks your local copies of archives with 7zip and recopy if they got interrupted/corrupted (Useful for if you didn't quite get time to finish the download before you had to leave)

QuickPlay will automatically configure the MultiLoader for many emulators when you run an Efind. When you use the EFind that comes with QuickPlay it will setup emulators load from CD/DVD (the emulators say "MultiLoader" at the end). For instance, if QuickPlay sees you have RetroArch installed, it will setup a MultiLoader for RetroArch's Saturn emulator (as well as many others). Or, If you have a CD/DVD-based emulator that isn't found via QuickPlay's existing EFinds, you can also set it up as an emulator from within QuickPlay yourself, and save it as an EFind so you can search for it again in future

How to setup your PC so the MultiLoader works

If you want to decompress images you need 7zip installed

If you want to mount images or zips to pass to an emulator, you need the latest Daemon Tools Lite installed (10.6 when I was writing this). Daemon Tools change their command line often, so make sure you have the latest

both are free just download and make sure they're installed

What's all the fuss about Daemon Tools Lite with QuickPlay Frontend?

For every emulator of a CD/DVD-based system, there's yet another implementation of disc-reading algorithms, solving the same old problems again and again in slightly different ways. Sometimes it works with your filetype, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes the audio all works, sometimes not. So, where we have the option, why not have a single thing that's really good at dealing with disc images, that presents itself to your emulator, rather than rely on a load of emulators all writing their own image reading algorithms? You can use QuickPlay without Dameon Tools Lite, sure (You can even use QuickPlay without 7-zip installed). But please install: Windows has never been great at mounting image files, and DT has ALWAYS been great at doing so. They do have ad-ware options in their install, which you NEED to say no to by ticking or not ticking the right box. And you do get annoyed with windows alerts that Demon Tools uses to try and make you pay for it, they don't happen very often but there's sure to be a way to turn them off. Just live with it: its worth it to know your image is as likely as possible to load, and as likely as possible to work correctly.

How to setup Daemon Tools Lite

You will need to setup a default drive in Daemon Tools (see screenshot) for QuickPlay to use when loading games. If K:/ isn’t a suitable drive letter for this drive for you, then you’ll have to change to a more suitable drive in: qp/tools/Multiloader/Multiloader.ini.

Its important for many emulators that you keep the same drive letter for the daemon tools virtual drive, and important for many games to work that it is a SCSI drive. So we need to create a SCSI drive (installing the driver as necessary) and tick all options to persistently mount the drive as the same drive letter. So, in order to use DT’s drive in QuickPlay, please setup a drive in DT just like this screenshot.

Whenever you load Daemon Tools with an emu, you need daemon tools and the emu you're using to agree which drive to load from - so now you need to look in the emu's config for where to set which drive the emu looks to, and set it to K:

Tell me more about how the Multiloader works?

See the MultiLoader's readme in Tools/Multiloader if you want to know how to setup the multiloader for some emulator that hasn't already been setup in an EFind (do tell us about it though at the forums so we can update the Efind)

Where does the MultiLoader extract Zips to?

By default the cache directory is C:/QPGame, you can change this if you edit the multiloader ini file (tools/multiloader/multiloader.ini)

How can I run discs from my NAS box?

By default QuickPlay caches archived disc images locally in a temp directory - this is designed for if you run a NAS box or similar, so cd/dvd images that you've downloaded to your laptop will stay on your laptop in the cache. The reason for this is twofold: firstly you can be without network and still keep on playing your games, and secondly if you hold your games as zips somewhere on a network its not a good idea to mount the zip remotely, or to unzip the iso to a remote location, or to try to unzip a remote zip to a local location. Instead, the thing to do is to copy the zip to a local cache and to then process it locally.

The cache is on by default. This is recommended if you want to cache remote archives locally. The downside of the cache is you then have to maintain it yourself (i mean delete your isos and zips manually when you don't want them locally any more) but there is a flag in the ini you can set to wipe the cache every time you exit a game.

Bear in mind also that you can delete the iso after playing a game, but if you delete the zip, then QuickPlay will download it again and re-extract the iso next time you run i.e: even if the iso is still in the temp dir (the reason for this is that we need to read what's in the archive to know what the iso is called). So you have to keep the zip hanging around...

To know what needs to be cached, the multiloader uses Window's builtin robocopy, and looks for symlinks. The core way the cache works is by this simple rule: if the rom you're trying to load with the multiloader is a symlink, the multiloader will assume that the file is not on the local machine and will copy the zip to the cache directory before processing it. But if the file isn't a symlink, it will assume the file is somewhere on your local filesystem and will process it directly from there (for instance, if you're mounting the actual iso rather than the zip, it will then use 7zip to unzip the iso to the cache directory, so be aware there will still be files in the cache that need manually deleting if you don't turn caching off.

In order to have fine-grained control of what is and is not a symlink I really recommend LinkShellExtension[1] its a really great tool that windows users should be proud to have! In particular you can make multiple symlinks at the same time in windows explorer by right clicking in the source and destination directories.

Now that QuickPlay implements a cache for CD/DVD, new things become possible - for instance here's just one idea: if you can make your games available to you when you're out of the house (for instance over webDav or FTP or similar) you can use Netdrive[2] to mount the store as if it were a local drive, and then point QuickPlay to some symlinks that link to that drive. Then if you're away from home, selecting a CD/DVD game in QuickPlay will download your game and keep it locally for as long as you need it.

Why is there a multiloader for emulators that don't need a file extracted or mounted? Like with Dolphin I can just pass a .gcz and it loads...

In case your game is on your NAS box: Because we can now cache those systems' games too, so you can store games you are playing on your laptop, if you pass them through the multiloader

How can I make SFF work with the multiloader, you always need the right bios loaded for a particular region's game

There exists a region free bios out there somewhere, which means, if you have this BIOS, you should be able to now use SFF with the multiloader even if you have games from more than one region

Some notes for advanced use

remember that 7zip and Deamon tools need to be at the default install locations ie: C:\Program Files\7zip\7zip.exe - the functions that use the progs won't work unless they are
some of the more "exotic" game names you might want to select "use short name (8:3) for exe's" in QP and/or call "shortrom" - this just makes the command line shorter as over a certain character limit it will refuse to work or error. This only applies to a very few systems' games
YOU CAN CHANGE THE BATCH CODE YOURSELF (mostly useful because daemon tools love changing their command line every minor revision) - alter multiolader_imp.bat
Any problems? In task manager close QUICKPLAY MULTILOADER.exe,cmd.exe to get quickplay responsive again
There is a list in the script of filetypes for it to search in order for the appropriate thing to use - i've added .gcm and .gdi to this list for gamecube and dreamcast - bear in mind daemon tools can't mount these they need to go directly to the emulator. If you come up with any more image filetypes for the script please let me know
If you blank the location of the extract directory in the MultiLoader config file, the zip will always extract to a shortname folder in the ROM directory
When you have to change disc in a game, for the moment you'll just have to do this manually. If you're caching your game you can tell quickplay to load the second disc with the emulator first, then the file will be available in the cache
If the disc image is uncompressed, not available locally, and consists of more than one file - your mileage may vary. How do we know what files make up your image set from the source location? We could follow the links in a .cue i guess, or look for matching filenames with different extensions that follow some pattern. But its a non-trivial problem. Its advised that you zip up your images if running from a remote location