Genesis Plus GX lists ROMS twice??

I have a question that I haven't been able to find an answer to. When I load up Genesis Plus and go to the ROM list.... I see, at the top of the list, "._.DS_Store" and then it lists my ROMS each with a "._" before the name (so "Altered Beast.bin" is listed as "._Altered Beast.bin"). When you click on these, they do nothing. But its basically listing all of my ROMS twice -- first, at the top of the list, with a "._" before it. Then you have to scroll through all of these to get to the actual ROMS.

I am loading from an SD card, formatted DOS Fat-32. My ROMS are in the proper ROM folder (genplus/roms) on the card. I'm wondering, since I am on a Mac and copied the ROMS onto the card with my Mac, if maybe that's the problem, since .DS_Store is a Mac thing?

The thing is, since Gen Plus only lets you view 1,000 ROMS, and I have 930 ROMS, I only get to see about 1/2 of my actual ROMS, since the rest of the list is taken up by these 'invisible' files. When I go to look inside the ROM folder on the card, those files aren't in there -- that's why I say they are 'invisible'. You can't actually see them except in the Gen Plus list.

Hope this makes sense to someone! I'd love some help with this as its an annoying problem. This doesn't happen with the NES, SNES or GB emulators that Tantric built. It DOES also happen with the N64 emulator, but it only shows a small handful of the invisible files, and so isn't nearly as annoying since all of my N64 ROMS can still be viewed.

- reformat your SD Card properly and make sure to get ride of any hidden file while you are copying on your Mac. Genesis Plus (and Wii 64 also as it seems) will list ALL files found in the directory, including those hidden by your OS, so yes, if you have put unwanted files on it or if the directory somehow get corrupted, they will be listed as well.

- the ROM limit per directory is there to limit RAM usage, make sub-folders and arrange your ROM files, the emulator can browse ANY directories on the SD Card.

Thanks for the advice. I downloaded Houdini (let's you see invisible files on your comp) and used it, but it only showed .DS_Store as a hidden file in my ROM folder. So that must mean that the 'duplicate' ROMS aren't invisible files at all. They're not actually there. I don't know why GenPlus is showing them. Perhaps a glitch?

But I did take your advice and divided my ROM collection into 2 folders (roms_1 and roms_2) so that I can have all 930 on there. The annoying part is having to scroll through all of those fake files first to get to the actual ROMS. But oh well. Small price to pay, I guess.

But again, the Nintendo emulators (by Tantric) don't have this problem. I wish the ROM list for GenPlus could be coded similarly.

It's not a "glitch": if the emulator were creating those files, it would happen for every other users, and I garantee you it doesn't happen. No, the files are there, the fact your OS cannot see them is another issue.
Afaik, other emulators only list supported files so they would hide those .bin files, change the extension to .zip and I'm sure you would see them in those emulators too.

So what I am supposed to do ? I cannot hide them since they are supposed to be valid files with a valid extension, I could eventually ignore files with starts with ._ but then it would just add complicated and specific code when all you have to do on your side is to delete the files you don't want and make sure your card is not corrupted. Sorry but I can't just add code to filter all existing (or not yet existing) hidden files format.

Now, I guess those files were temporary files created during the copy and something wrong happened, those are just now "zombie" files but they are still listed in the FAT entry list. As I told you, reformat your card properly and recopy your ROM files carefully.

I looked for your problem in Google and in 5 seconds I found these links:

[www.litfuel.net]
[reviews.cnet.com]


See, the problem is on the MAC side.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/29/2010 09:31AM by ekeeke.

The reason they don't show on my emus is that I hide any file that starts with ".". This is pretty easy to do and a good idea, since in all operating systems these files are always meant to be hidden. Perhaps ekeeke will add this.

Ekeke, I have reformatted my brand new sd card 'properly' and copied the files 'properly'. My card isn't corrupted. It has nothing to do with that. Like i said, and like you just confirmed with your links (thanks for those) this is a Mac thing. I'm going to follow the advice in those articles and we'll see if I can fix it on my end. But perhaps in a future update, you'd be willing to do what Tantric did in his. That would be great. I'm sure I'm not the only Mac guy out there using GenPlus. And according to Tantric, its not as hard or complicated to do as you think.

UPDATE: for all of those Mac users out there having the same problem -- I used Blue Harvest and it worked perfectly -- it cleaned out all of those invisible files. You can get it free for 30 days: [www.zeroonetwenty.com]

Actually, I didn't want to simply hide all files beginning by "." because it would include the ".." folder which is used to go up to previous directory. But yeah, since controller can also be used to go up, I guess I could get ride of this kind of files.

That's said, I still think that cleaning unnecessary files from your SD is a better solution than just modify the program to make "as if" they weren't there ;-)

I agree! Thank you for the link that lead me to Blue Harvest. Whether you ultimately decide to add the code or not to hide these files, I'm glad I discovered how to clean up my SD card regardless. I hated knowing there were invisible, unnecessary files on there! ;)

It was interesting to learn that when you copy files from a Mac to a non-Mac formatted drive or SD card, it always adds these hidden files. Annoying. But glad I found a way around it. Thanks again and thanks for all of your amazing work making an awesome Genesis emulator! You rock!