SCI: Hangs on Load of GK2 with subtitles patch on 3DS

[MarioKartFan]

The excellent 3DS port runs GK2 fine (meaningful delay on first boot but works fine afterwards). Recently ScummVM added support for subtitles using a 3rd party patch for GK2. Works great on my PC and Mac. But when I try to load GK2 w/ patch on my 3DS, it just hangs indefinitely (and eventually soft-locks the system).

[bgK]

Accessing files stored on the SD card is slow on the 3DS. The issue here is the SCI engine opens each one of the 1500+ patch files on startup..
There are some optimizations that could be done in the filesystem code to improve the situation, but I don't believe it would reduce the time the 3DS takes to load GK2 with the subtitles patch below 10 minutes.. For this to be fully fixed something needs to change with the SCI engine or with the subtitles patch.

[sluicebox]

Thanks for looking at this, bgK. I don't have a 3DS but I'm sure that 1,000+ patch files is the cause.

I looked into patch load time a while ago because SCI32 Mac games store each message's audio as a patch file instead of together in volume files. PQ4 has 10,000 files! Each gets parsed at startup to determine audio type (and validate that even is audio) and it's a huge delay even on a desktop system. I didn't come away optimistic.