GDMenu for GDEmu sloooow game menu loading has me confused..

[TooBeaucoup]

So, I've done a ton of reading on this and I'm curious if there's any solid answers yet. The most recent topics I can find on different sites at this point are like, a year old. I'm currently using a 200GB Sandisk SD card with my GDEmu. It's filled with about 160GB of games. All of them play just fine. I was using GDMenu version 0.5.2 and my Menu and games would load instantly after the SEGA screen, like within a second. But, whenever I try to use GDMenu version 0.6, my menu and games take like, 60 seconds to load. I've read that this can happen if your card is too full, if a game filename is too long or has a weird character in it. None of these things apply to my scenario, unless you consider 160GB of a 200GB capacity as too full. Now, I get that having a ton of files on the card could result in it taking a long time to read, but why does menu version 0.5.2 load instantly, but version 0.6 takes forever? Did the developer do something so drastically different to cause this? I've even tried smaller SD cards and version 0.6 still takes forever. I can certainly just use 0.5.2 and it's fine, but I really like 0.6 because it allows much faster game list scrolling with the triggers and also seems to do better at displaying game titles better in the GDMenu, mostly with more unknown Indie and fan-made DC titles.

I guess I'm just mostly wondering if anyone has a solution or if 0.6 was just altered in some dumb way that just makes it take way longer to load large SD cards... Just makes zero sense to me how the older menu version loads in the blink of an eye. I'm kind of shocked that 0.6 is the newest version and hasn't been tweaked or updated in like, 4 years. That's just bonkers. I have a MODE for my Saturn and I know that's definitely a more versatile piece of hardware, but I just can't justify spending another $200 on a second one, just for a better menu system over the GDEmu. Speaking of the MODE, I have like, 500GB worth of stuff on that and it shows your games right away.

[Syntax]

Its because of corrupt/incorrect characters in your game titles list.

[korpse413]

Do we have a list of the weird characters to not use? Also, the sweet spot for title length? I have been changing my extracted .gdi game titles .bin with IP.BIN 4 Win.exe program. You might ask why but I kind of get OCD when it comes to sorting games and what not. Some of you might already notice but some games out there are named some bizarre things like BUZZ2000 which drives me nuts

I recently changed from a 128GB to a 400GB indended to get full US library and noticed a huge delay in menu loading. The 400GB isn't even halfway done yet and the loading is a good 15+ seconds slower. Both cards are formatted to FAT32 and both are using Mad Sheeps SD Card Maker tool

[TooBeaucoup]

Its because of corrupt/incorrect characters in your game titles list.

Which I've read is a possible cause, but I still don't get why version 0.5.2 loads immediately, but not 0.6

[Syntax]

Try drive sorter to rearrange your fat32 file table in alphabetical order.

[darcagn]

The Windows software builds a file list and puts it in a text file within the CDI disc image it builds and puts in slot 01 (for the GDMenu software).
This pre-loads the menu.
If this file list text file does not exist, the GDMenu must read and generate the list at boot-time.

The problem with corrupt/incorrect characters is related to GDMenu crashing or not loading at all. Long boot times are because you didn't do a pre-load list with the Windows software.

[TooBeaucoup]

The Windows software builds a file list and puts it in a text file within the CDI disc image it builds and puts in slot 01 (for the GDMenu software).
This pre-loads the menu.
If this file list text file does not exist, the GDMenu must read and generate the list at boot-time.

The problem with corrupt/incorrect characters is related to GDMenu crashing or not loading at all. Long boot times are because you didn't do a pre-load list with the Windows software.

So, even though I knew this was how it worked, reading your post had me double check my stuff and what was happening is, somehow, my computer was loading an older version of SD Card Maker, so what was happening is, SD Card Maker was compiling the GDMenu image using 0.5.2 so that would load instantly. I couldn't figure out why it kept using 0.5.2 cause I just wasn't paying attention, so I'd just drag and drop the 0.6 menu in there, which obviously hadn't had it's image compiled with the SD Card Maker. Face palm.