"Copy Global Settings" does not copy the settings you can see. It runs the whole
configuration through a wrapper that writes every key unconditionally, so the file
it leaves behind holds roughly seven hundred of them — network adapters, the
debugger, trace logging, memory cards, sections no settings page ever shows.
That was untidy and no worse, until a key present in a per-game file started
meaning the player claimed it. Now one press of a button whose dialog promises only
that "the configuration for this game will be replaced by the current global
settings" turns off every automatic fix that game had, permanently and silently.
A value is worth writing down only if it decides something, and there are two ways
it can fail to. It can be the stock default, in which case the file carries it as
noise. Or it can be what the game database is going to set anyway, in which case
writing it can only become a claim that suppresses the fix it agrees with. So the
copy now excludes both, and what lands is what the player actually chose.
The comparison goes through the string form rather than the typed value, so a float
or an enum name compares the way it will be stored rather than the way it happens to
sit in memory. That is why the references are built with the same interface class:
same formatting on both sides, exact comparison, one path for every type.
The database reference is a default configuration with the entry applied, not this
one with the entry applied. The question is what the database wants, not where it
would leave the source. It matters for the handful of fixes that clamp rather than
assign, and it errs towards writing the player's value — never towards dropping a
fix, since a value is only skipped when it already equals what the fix would set.
Working the reference out means running the apply functions for an outcome nobody is
going to run with, so they take an apply mode. A hypothetical apply says nothing to
the log, raises none of the recommendation messages, and does not allocate the four
megabyte lookup table that the Goemon TLB fix asks for.
The tests cover the precedence rule and the filter, but the ones that matter are the
drift guards: they assert every gamefix, speedhack and clamp mode has a settings key,
and that the only graphics fixes without one are the six that genuinely have no
setting behind them — three renderer routine selectors and three that only raise a
recommendation. A knob nobody maps is a setting that goes quietly back to being
overridden, with no warning and no failure, and that is what these are here to catch.
Brian Degenhardt
SternXD
TheTechnician27
GovanifY
Stenzek