Classic Home v5 beta — physical CDs

Superseded by v5 beta 2. That release fixes two credential-handling bugs and repaints far less of the screen. Please use it instead.

Classic Home v5 beta — physical CDs

This is a beta, for testing. It has had more hardware testing than any previous
release in one area and almost none in another, and the notes below say which is which.
If you want a quiet life, stay on v4.

Everything is one file, as before: copy MiSTer to the root of the SD card. There is
one optional second file this time — see Disc titles below.

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Physical CDs

This is built on Anime0t4ku's work. Reading a real CD
on a MiSTer at all comes from
Anime0t4ku/Main_MiSTer_Physical_Disc
— the streaming sector reader, the read-ahead worker, the drive-speed cap, the recovery
when a USB drive drops out, the disc swapping. That code is used here whole rather than
rewritten, GPLv3 as this tree is, because every part of it is subtle: the one time it was
paraphrased smaller during this work it cost two frozen consoles. What follows is a
front-end built on top of it, and none of it would exist without that author. Credit and
the full division of labour are in support/physical_disc/CREDITS.md.

Put a game CD in a USB optical drive and the shelf notices it. The disc gets its own
screen — press up from the shelf — with the game's name, its artwork, and two buttons:
Play, and Options to send it to a different core.

Four cores read a disc directly: PlayStation, Mega CD, PC Engine CD, Neo Geo CD.
Only PlayStation has been tested on real hardware. Set classicui_disc=1 to enable any
of it; it is off by default.

A disc is a game like any other now. It has its own save states, its own memory
card, and its own per-game core settings, all filed under the disc's identity rather
than shared between every disc you own. Save a state in Metal Gear Solid, come back to
the shelf, and the disc's suspend points are there with your screenshot in slot 1.

The name and the artwork. A pressed disc has no filename, so the front-end reads its
serial off the disc — SLES-01506 — and looks that up. The name comes from a table on
the card; the artwork is fetched from ScreenScraper, sized once, and cached. Both arrive
while the disc spins, before you open the screen, so it is ready when you get there. If
the picture lands late it appears by itself.

Artwork from ScreenScraper

Off by default. To switch it on you need your own free ScreenScraper account — the
application is registered already, but the per-user request quota is tied to the person
using it, so an account of your own is what gets you a usable allowance instead of
sharing the guest pool. In MiSTer.ini, under [MiSTer]:

classicui_screenscraper=1
classicui_ss_user=yourname
classicui_ss_pass=yourpassword
classicui_artfetch=1

Two things to know. The password sits in MiSTer.ini in clear text, as MiSTer options
do. And one request at a time is the rule — the front-end never fetches in parallel, so
art fills in gradually rather than all at once, and it never blocks the menu.

Swapping discs mid-game works on Mega CD and Neo Geo CD.

Disc titles

Copy disctitles.txt from this release to /media/fat/classicui/disctitles.txt and
discs show their real names instead of a serial. Without it everything still works — you
just see SLES-01506 where a name would be.

It covers 12,761 releases across the four systems, built from Redump's own DAT files. To
build a fresher one yourself: support/classicui/tools/disctitles.py --fetch. Note the
/serial suffix on Redump's URLs is mandatory — without it the DAT contains no serials
at all and the table silently matches nothing.

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Everything else

A core setting for the whole system, from inside a game. In the core options screen,
changing a value still applies to that game only. Y now promotes the setting under
the cursor to every game on that core. It writes only that one option — the other
overrides the running game happens to have stay its own, which is what made this
impossible before.

Bigger save-state pictures. The suspend strip was using about 60% of its width and
leaving a third of its height empty. The tiles are now roughly two and a half times the
area, and long game names are no longer cut short.

The disc icon is drawn at the screen's resolution rather than as a 32-cell sprite, so
at 720p it is a smooth 480-pixel disc instead of chunky blocks — and it breathes when it
has focus. When real disc artwork is available it replaces the drawn disc at the same
size, with the same edges, so the two do not clash.

Analog / CRT output. Two real bugs fixed: a scandoubler setting meant for a VGA
monitor was forcing a 31 kHz signal at 15 kHz televisions (no lock at all, which looks
like a scrambled mess), and the layout was computed for the wrong canvas shape on
640×240 outputs, overlapping the button bar. That second fix also covers direct_video,
where nobody had looked. Options ▸ Best Settings now tells you what is wrong with an
analog setup instead of leaving you guessing — see the Known limitations.

Setup help. Best Settings now also checks that the front-end is switched on in the
right section of MiSTer.ini — a classicui=0 left in a core or video section silently
turns it off for that one game while the shelf looks perfectly normal. The guide covers
analog output, the disc options and the title table.

A frozen console, fixed. The disc detection helper was polling the drive underneath a
running game, which is the documented cause of two frozen consoles during development.
It now stays out of the way once a core owns the drive.

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Known limitations — please do not report these

• On S-Video and composite the menu is black and white. Games keep their colour. The
  colour encoder in the shared FPGA framework sits only on the core's video path, not the
  one this menu goes out through, so it cannot be fixed in firmware — it needs a change to
  sys/sys_top.v and every core rebuilt. RGB SCART and YPbPr are in full colour.
• With an HDMI display attached, the front-end deliberately leaves the analog output
  alone, so a CRT shows the game rather than the menu. Unplug HDMI to see the menu on a
  CRT. This is by design, not a fault.
• No still picture behind the in-game menu over a disc game — you get black instead of
  the paused game. Cosmetic; diagnosed, not yet fixed. File-launched games are fine.
• Mega CD, PC Engine CD and Neo Geo CD disc playback is untested on hardware — no
  media here to test with. It may not work at all.

What we need tested

Most valuable first.

1. Analog output on a CRT. This is the big one — the fixes above are reasoned from the
   source and nobody has seen them on a television. With HDMI unplugged: does the menu
   appear, and does it hold sync? Try forced_scandoubler=1 (should now still be a 15 kHz
   picture) and menu_pal=0 versus 1 (which holds on your set?). If you use
   vga_scaler=1 or direct_video=1, are the cards roughly square with nothing
   overlapping the bottom bar?
2. Mega CD, PC Engine CD or Neo Geo CD discs, if you own any. Does a disc identify,
   launch, and play? Does swapping discs mid-game work?
3. Core settings promoted with Y — set an option for one game, promote it, switch to
   another game on that core, and confirm it took. Then confirm the first game's other
   overrides did not follow it.
4. Save states on a disc game, including starting a disc at a suspend point from the
   shelf.

Reporting a bug

Please include:

• Your MiSTer.ini — most of what goes wrong is configuration, and this is the single
  most useful thing you can send.
• How your display is connected — HDMI, RGB SCART, S-Video, composite, YPbPr, VGA — and
  whether the set is PAL or NTSC.
• What you saw, in the words you would use to describe it. "Scrambled black and white
  with a rolling image" is a better bug report than "video is broken".
• /tmp/debug.txt, after setting debug=2 in MiSTer.ini and reproducing the problem.
  That file names what the front-end was doing and is often decisive.
• Whether it also happens with classicui=0. If it does, it is not this front-end.

If it goes wrong

Keep your previous MiSTer binary and copy it back — the firmware is one file, so
rolling back is one copy. Or set classicui=0 in MiSTer.ini to get the stock menu back
while keeping this firmware.