The runtime mounts a .chd natively and the launcher lists it in the disc
picker, so a player could select one and see a valid disc identity, then have
first-run setup fail: verify-disc, prepare_disc.py and probe_disc.py hash and
parse raw 2352-byte track data, which a CHD stores compressed. Nothing on the
Python side could read it, and telling players to install MAME for chdman is
not an answer.
libchdr is already vendored and compiled for the runtime and the native media
CLI. Build it once more as a shared library in recompiler/ (CMake target chdr,
output next to the emitters, static CRT on Windows so a plain python.exe can
load it) and read the CHD from Python through ctypes. tools/psx_chd.py mirrors
the layout the runtime's iso_reader.cpp uses -- 2448-byte frames, 4-frame
track padding, stored versus virtual pregaps, big-endian audio -- and
reproduces the .bin files a Redump dump of the same disc contains, in either
of Redump's two layouts (one bin per track, or one bin for the disc).
verify-disc hashes those reconstructed track bytes against [prepare_disc]
instead of the container. prepare_disc.py writes the tracks into out_dir in
whichever layout the recorded digests match and then continues down its
normal cue path, so the data track is written once, SBI companions are looked
up next to the CHD, and the receipt names the CHD the player chose.
probe_disc.py extracts to a scratch directory and probes the cue. The CLI
builds target chdr on demand for a kit whose emitters predate it, and falls
back to the extract-it-first message when it cannot.
Verified against two discs from a Redump library converted with chdman: a
single-track MODE2 disc and a four-track disc with stored audio pregaps both
reproduce their catalogued track-1 size, MD5 and SHA-1 exactly; verify-disc
and prepare_disc.py accept the four-track one end to end. Tests build a
synthetic uncompressed v5 CHD around a cooked ISO image, so no retail data is
needed; the decode tests skip with a reason when no libchdr is built.
The launcher and studio ship as Retro Launcher and Retro Studio now,
from the RetroPortingToolKit org, so the old product name is gone from
display text, documentation and release asset filenames.
The split is by case, and it is not cosmetic. CamelCase RetComM was
always the product; lowercase retcomm and RETCOMM_ are identifiers --
the C++ namespace, the binaries, the data directories, the CMake and
environment variables, the Cloudflare service names, the readme markers.
Renaming those would orphan existing installs for no benefit, so they
are untouched: 1101 lowercase retcomm and 205 RETCOMM_ still stand in
the launcher alone.
Four things are deliberately still spelled RetComM, and three of them
would have been real breakage:
- RetComM-Data is CamelCase but it is a directory on disk --
<exe_dir>\RetComM-Data\{runtime,config,data} for a portable install.
Renaming it strands every portable user's config, toolchains and
catalog cache.
- TechnicallyComputers/RetComM-Launcher in readme_has_launcher() is the
historical half of a both-slugs test. Renaming it makes it a duplicate
of the line above and sends every port built before the transfer back
to reporting its launcher section missing.
- _LEGACY_LAUNCHER_RE matched "^## RetComM Launcher". A sweep renamed it,
which would have silently stopped it matching every README already out
there; it now accepts both headings.
- The portable-stub lookup gained the pre-rename filenames back as
fallbacks, because old zips stay on the releases page and a rollback
downloads one.
Release assets become Retro-Launcher-* / Retro-Studio-*. That is safe
for installed clients: pick_launcher_asset() gates on *linux*/*windows*/
*macos* plus extension and arch, not on the product name, and the
Windows portable stub is identified by its RCM1 trailer rather than its
filename.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_013DpaQqVguHFpBuCmdoFYWY
Path.write_text(newline=) is Python 3.10+. RHEL/Rocky 9, Debian 11 and
Ubuntu 20.04 all ship 3.9 as the system python3, where staging died with
'TypeError: write_text() got an unexpected keyword argument newline'
after writing the .bin but before the .cue.
open(..., newline=) is behaviour-identical and available everywhere. No
other tool in the repo needs 3.10: the rest already rely on
'from __future__ import annotations'. Verified by running the real
prepare_disc under 3.9 end to end (digest check, PSX.EXE fallback,
staging, RESULT_CUE).
Mirrors the probe_disc.py fallback from 5ab7a053 into the staging step.
probe_disc.py accepts SYSTEM.CNF-less discs (King's Field, Dec 1994), but
prepare_disc.py still required the file, so 'generate' failed on any clean
worktree where disc/ was not already staged. Windows never hit this because
the staged boot EXE made psxrecomp_cli skip prepare_disc entirely.
Tools-only: runtime and recompiler sources are identical to 54fe30bf.
Alexandros Mandravillis