🚀 Breaking the "Impossible": CHD Support for Xbox, Xbox 360, and PS3 is Here!

Today marks a major milestone for the retro gaming community. Support for CHD (Compressed Hunks of Data) files on original Xbox, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 has been a long-awaited and heavily requested feature—Xemu users in particular have been vocal about it—but native support never materialized.

Until now.

With the latest update to Simple Launcher, you can now launch your games directly from CHD files for Xemu, Xenia, RPCS3, and Cxbx-Reloaded.

📋 Prerequisite: Dokan Library Required

To mount CHD files as virtual drives, you must install the Dokan library on your system. Dokan is a user-mode filesystem driver for Windows that enables the virtual drive mounting functionality.

Download and install Dokan from: https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany/releases

Simple Launcher will not mount CHD files without Dokan installed.

🛠️ How It Works

• The virtual drive system is built around Dokan. I wrote the tool that provides a wrapper layer around Dokan that handles mounting the virtual drive and parsing the file tree inside the CHD image, enabling seamless CHD integration with the supported emulators.
• Perhaps the most significant achievement is that I did all of this without touching a single line of the emulators' source code. Simple Launcher acts as the "brain," handling the heavy lifting externally so you can use standard, official emulator builds.

📦 What This Means for You

• Massive Space Savings: Stop wasting hundreds of gigabytes on uncompressed ISOs. CHD offers incredible compression without losing data.
• Instant Play: No more waiting for slow "CHD to ISO" conversions in temporary folders. The mounting is nearly instantaneous.

🎮 Supported Emulators

• Xemu (Original Xbox) - The long-awaited community request!
• Xenia (Xbox 360)
• RPCS3 (PlayStation 3)
• Cxbx-Reloaded (Original Xbox)

This refactor wasn't just a code update; I am thrilled to put this power into your hands.

Download the latest version now and reclaim your hard drive space!

🚀 Major Features & Refactoring

• CHD Virtual Mounting: Refactored the launcher to use CHDMounter for Xemu, Xenia, RPCS3, and Cxbx-Reloaded. Instead of converting large .chd files to .iso (which was slow and consumed disk space), the app now mounts them as virtual drives and automatically locates the necessary boot files (e.g., EBOOT.BIN, default.xex, , default.xbe, image.iso).
• Atomic File Saving: Implemented atomic write operations for settings.xml and system.xml. The app now saves to a temporary file before replacing the original, significantly reducing the risk of configuration corruption during crashes or power loss.
• Enhanced ZIP Security: Added "Zip Slip" (path traversal) validation to all extraction and mounting services to prevent malicious archives from writing files outside of intended directories.
• PBP Support for Mednafen: Added a new strategy to convert .pbp files to .cue/.bin on the fly specifically for the Mednafen emulator.

🎨 UI & UX Enhancements

• Global Tooltip System: Added descriptive tooltips to almost every UI element across the application, including the Main Window, Edit System, and Settings windows.
• Centralized Styling: Refactored XAML resources to centralize styles and brushes in App.xaml, ensuring a more consistent look and feel across all windows.
• Improved Loading States: Replaced direct flag manipulation with atomic lifecycle methods for UI updates, preventing race conditions during system scans and game loading.

🕹️ Emulator Compatibility & Logic

• RetroAchievements Filtering: The RetroAchievements icon and context menu items are now intelligently restricted to supported systems. Systems like PS3, Xbox 360, and Switch are now filtered out of the hashing logic.
• RetroArch Validation: Added early validation for RetroArch parameters. The app now warns users if the -L core parameter is missing before attempting to launch.
• MAME Error Handling: Improved detection for MAME-specific errors (ROM set mismatches, unknown systems, or missing images) with user-friendly dialogs and links to compatibility guides.
• Xenia Configuration: Extended the Xenia config handler to support both portable and standard Documents\Xenia locations.

🔍 Game Scanning & Metadata

• Microsoft Store Improvements:
  • Significantly expanded the app exclusion filter to hide system utilities and non-game apps.
  • Added EFS encryption fallback for copying game logos.
  • Improved icon extraction logic to prioritize high-resolution assets.
• Recursive Search Control: Added a "Disable Recursive Search" option to system configurations, allowing users to limit scans to top-level directories.
• Robust Image Downloading: Added retry logic and a 15-second timeout to the game image API service to handle intermittent network issues.

🛠️ Maintenance & Build

• Dependency Updates: Updated SharpCompress to v0.47.3 and Tomlyn to v1.0.0.
• Library Migration: Replaced SharpZipLib and SevenZipSharp with SharpCompress to simplify the codebase and remove the dependency on external 7z DLLs.
• Long Path Support: Improved path handling across the service layer using the \\?\ prefix to support file paths exceeding 260 characters.