Variants

Variants

Many retro games exist in multiple versions — region releases (USA, Japan, Europe), revisions (rev 1, rev 2), hacks, translations, or multi-disc sets. Argosy tracks these as variants of a single logical game, and lets you pick which one to actually launch.

Variants are distinct from modern multi-file systems (DLC, mods via a store). This page is about older platforms where a game may just have multiple ROMs sitting in the same folder.

Regional versions from RomM

When your RomM server has the same game as separate regional releases (RomM matches them as sibling roms), Argosy consolidates them into a single library entry instead of showing duplicates. Every region is accepted and no region is preferred by default; set an order under Settings > RomM > Sync Settings > Metadata Filters to decide which release fronts the entry. The others remain available as versions in the picker, each with its own save channel so progress doesn't cross regions. Libraries that synced the regions as separate games before are merged automatically on the next sync.

How Argosy resolves a variant at launch

When you launch a game, Argosy picks a file using this order:

1. Pinned variant — if you've chosen a default variant for this game, use it.
2. Last played variant — otherwise, use whatever you played last.
3. Primary file — fall back to the canonical ROM (typically the USA release, or the first file Argosy matched).

This means the common "just press A, play the thing I played yesterday" flow keeps working without prompting.

When the picker shows up

The variant picker opens when:

• You launch from Game Details or Library and the game has more than one file available.
• You pick Select Variant from the game's context menu (Select > More Options).

It does not open from the Home screen launch-to-play shortcut — Home always uses the resolved variant (pinned → last played → primary) so you can keep launching fast.

Picker UI

The picker shows every variant Argosy knows about for the game, labeled with region, version, and language where available. For each, it shows whether the file is currently downloaded.

• Already downloaded — tap to launch that variant.
• Not downloaded — tap to queue a download; the game launches automatically when finished.

You can also pin a variant as the default from this screen, which makes it the top choice in the resolution order above.

Local file scan

Argosy scans the platform's ROM folder live when opening the picker so user-added files show up without a library resync. This means you can drop a translation patch ROM or a bugfix revision into your ROM folder and it'll appear in the picker for the game it belongs to.

Multi-disc games

Multi-disc games are handled separately from variants, and not by the same per-file save isolation described above. RomM organizes a multi-disc game one of two ways: as separate sibling roms each tagged "Disc 1", "Disc 2", and so on, or as a single rom whose folder holds every disc together. Argosy consolidates either shape into one library entry with a registered disc list as soon as your library syncs -- no extra step needed, and no picker at launch.

Launching starts on disc 1. On platforms that build a disc playlist (PS1, Saturn, Dreamcast, Amiga), the whole set of discs launches as one playlist, and you switch discs at any point from the in-game menu's Swap Disc option rather than relaunching. Because the game runs from that one playlist, all its discs share a single save file and set of save states -- swapping discs mid-session doesn't touch save data, the same as it wouldn't on original hardware. A disc that hasn't been downloaded yet triggers a prompt to fetch the missing disc(s) before the game will launch.