Why is game X not recognized, or why are some of my disks images not recognized?

Game variants available on your computer are recognized by checking if you have exactly the specific file(s) by comparing checksums. This means that if a game expects you to have the disks A, B and C, but instead you have A, B and C2 (where C2 is a slighly modified version of C), then the game will not be found.

The reason that such strict checks are performed, is that in order to apply the correct settings for the game, the system needs to know what version of the game you have, and disk file names are not reliable enough for that purpose.

So in many cases this means that you need to have common unmodified disk images. If you have altered a disk image by for example saving games (*) to one of the game disk, this disk image will have changed, and the game will no longer be recognized because you don’t have the expected disk images.

(*) Saving games to disk when launched from FS-UAE is not a problem, because FS-UAE does not modify the original disk images, but instead saves the disk changes to a separate file in the save state directory.

Why are older WHDLoad slave versions recognized along with newer releases?

There isn’t a great point in itself to add older WHDLoad save versions to the database. But it is not a good idea to just remove old version when a newer version is added either. Many people will still have the old version installed – and have not got the files for the new version yet – so removing the older variant will cause games to suddenly disappear from people’s game libraries.

At one point, older WHDLoad slaves will still be removed somehow, to avoid the database from growing and growing. But it makes sense to recognize the older versions for some time. More advanced functionality here is also possible, such as removing the old version for users which has the new WHDLoad slave installed, or keep the older version around for users which has save data associated with that version.

Why do many games recognize so many different disk sets?

There are a couple of reasons for this:

• In order to jump-start the database, the database has been populated by TOSEC sets (and similar), trying to build sensible disk sets by analyzing disk file names.
• In some cases, different people will have different opinions on what version is the best. Different languages, different cracks, different game versions or different trainers.

In an ideal world, only known good disk sets would exist in the database. Currently, some disk sets will be less than ideal due to the following reasons:

• Bad cracks, or bad combinations of disks (due to insufficient or outdated information in the disk names).
• Shortcomings in the algorithm to combine disk sets may in some cases yield invalid combinations.

The idea is that the rating buttons (star, thumbs up, thumbs down) are used by users when they play good/bad versions, or comments are added to the game pages where for example a known good disk set is missing. Over time, the best ones will hopefully rise to the top, and older, unused ones can be hidden by default and deleted from the database.

It is planned to add functionality to allow users to supplement the database with missing good/useful disk sets.

Why are the newest WHDLoad slave releases not recognized?

Currently, there’s a bit of bottleneck when it comes to adding game variants, since this can be done by very few people, and this can cause new variants to not be added in a timely manner.

It is planned to add functionality to allow users to add new WHDLoad releases to the database, though the exact mechanism isn’t decided.