theshaneobrien/mister-disc-drive-support

MiSTer USB CDROM Loader lets you play retail CD games directly from a physical disc on a MiSTer, a small hardware system that recreates classic game consoles. You put a real CD or DVD in a USB drive plugged into the MiSTer and it boots and plays the game with no need to rip or copy the disc onto an SD card first. Music CDs work too, and depending on which build you use, you can even earn RetroAchievements straight from the physical disc while you play. This project is a fork of the main MiSTer software, meaning it takes the original project and modifies it, and all the changes happen in the software layer without touching the FPGA chip that emulates the consoles. The system reads the disc automatically, figures out which console it belongs to, and loads the right emulated hardware, called a core, to run it. Supported consoles include Sega CD, PlayStation, Saturn, NeoGeo CD, and 3DO. Multi disc games work as well: when a PlayStation game asks you to swap discs partway through, you just put the next one in and the game keeps going, the same way it would on real hardware. There are two versions to choose from on the releases page. One adds only the physical disc support to standard MiSTer cores. The other merges that same disc support into a separate community build that also supports RetroAchievements, so you would pick that version if you want achievements to unlock from your physical discs. Setting it up means downloading one of the two builds, backing up your existing MiSTer software, and replacing it with the new version. You also need a USB CD or DVD drive, and a proper powered USB hub matters a lot, since a spinning disc drive draws more power than a cheap hub can reliably supply and running short on power can cause games to freeze briefly. Region settings for each console core generally just need to be set to Auto so the software can read the correct region straight off the disc. The README is candid that most of the code was written with help from an AI coding assistant, with the author steering, reviewing every change, and testing on real hardware. The project is still early, and the author is looking for more testing from other users, particularly with different MiSTer hardware and drive models.