GSDx hacks not applying to games after compressing to CHD

[goody_fyre11]

I was excited when I heard that CHD support was added, so I went ahead and compressed all my games to CHD, saving me over 20 GB of space!  Unfortunately, I ran into a major issue - none of the games' compatibility hacks were loading.  For example, if Sly 2 doesn't have any compatibility hacks, the game will slow to around 10 FPS at most camera angles and will have weird colors.  If the game is in its original ISO format, it'll load these hacks, but if it's in CHD it won't.

Remember when I opened a thread asking if the compatibility hacks could be loaded by game title instead of by game CRC?  Add this to the list of reasons why I wanted that.  Will this eventually get a fix?  All games suffer from this when compressed to CHD, such as Treasure Planet which becomes broken again, causing the camera to fly off once more, even though the only thing that's changing is the compression.

This goes beyond "Sly 2 experiences bugs out" and a global workaround needs to be found.  Am I really the first person to bring this up?

[refraction]

Remember when I opened a thread asking if the compatibility hacks could be loaded by game title instead of by game CRC?  Add this to the list of reasons why I wanted that. 

CRC doesn't change with file format. So no that's not a reason to change.

As for your issue, I'm not sure why that's happening, it shouldn't

[goody_fyre11]

If any game ISO is modified by even a single byte, this happens. It's more apparent on games like the Sly games where the hacks obviously don't load. This is weird though, I went back and checked, sure enough they are the same.

But what I said about modifying them holds true for me and for everyone I've talked to that's tried it. They all have different hardware in their computers and it's happening to them too. This is true even without CHD compression, and every game acts this way. It's acted like this since the 1.5.0 builds across multiple gaming computers.

[TellowKrinkle]

If the game is in its original ISO format, it'll load these hacks, but if it's in CHD it won't.

What's the exact command you used to create the chds?

[goody_fyre11]

Okay, this is extremely strange - now PCSX2 isn't loading hacks for any game at all, even unmodified. Looks like there's a completely different issue going on here. The log is saying "Searching for patch with CRC '07652dd9' No CRC-specific patch or default patch found" despite Sly 2 using several. This all started since I last updated PCSX2, maybe 5 builds ago? I don't remember the exact version.

Edit: tried loading Sly 2 (unmodified) on 1.6.0 and this isn't happening. Perhaps something broke since then?

Edit 2: this was taken using 1.7.0, this also happens in 1.6.0 when CRC hacks don't load:
https://imgur.com/a/gVVINcE

[goody_fyre11]

Okay, I found the problem, but the solution is out of my hands. This user claims that the Sly games no longer have CRC hacks:
https://imgur.com/a/pTf5god

But they're still needed, otherwise the games run at 5-10 FPS and have major graphical issues. Why were they removed? Aside from fixing the major slowdowns, they also fixed this weird pink/green discoloration of everything in the game:

https://imgur.com/a/gCqeMqO

There's also this weird effect on edges that's hard to explain, it also gets fixed with the CRC hacks. They shouldn't have been removed.

[Kojin]

I told you we removed them. twice. In the very thread you're tooting your own horn about.

[goody_fyre11]

But... why? Why remove them when there's clear issues with these games that no combinations of settings can solve? As soon as I replaced the GSDx plugins with the ones from the 1.6.0 release, the game's issues all went away and became playable again. Why not remove other games' hacks? They're useful just like these.

[Kojin]

Is this like a joke?
Go read the thread you clearly didn't read. I mentioned other games and one specifically by name, SMT Nocturne.

[goody_fyre11]

"But you're patching the game anyway so just patch out the effect that you don't like" is the only thing I could see from that thread that could potentially explain why they were removed.

No one in the Sly Cooper modding scene has figured out how to remove specific effects. Plus, even if we did, there's still the major performance issues, and we don't know what causes that. SMT/Persona modding is quite advanced, I'm in that community myself, and assuming the Sly community can patch away effects just as easily as they can is like assuming a giraffe can climb Mount Everest in a single night. Only recently has anyone gotten into the actual files, and we still don't know what 99% of them do, they were made hard to read on purpose, heck most of them aren't visible on non-dev equipment. If PCSX2 wasn't the only PS2 emulator, I wouldn't be so upset right now, especially since people cared about CRC hacks for a long while before tossing them out.

Could someone at least tell us how to re-implement those hacks ourselves on our own time so we don't waste yours?