Question Unzipping .rar files, full rom sets

[lovespicyfood]

Hey Everyone,

I have the series of 13 full MAME rom sets and I'm trying to unzip them all into one folder.  I have 8,650 files but it seems every time I unzip a set, all of the names are the same...  I get a prompt to replace existing files which I say "no" to but then it doesn't unzip anything.

What am I doing wrong?  I'm using 7-zip.

Thanks in advance for your help!

[lovespicyfood]

Do I need to unzip into unique folders and then make sure I point my Mame to each folder?  I'm thinking that is the case..

[JDFan]

Most likely the 13 zips are actually 1 very large file --- So when you start to unzip it then it all gets unzipped to a single file ( ie. the 13 files are each a piece of the larger file thus the reason you are always getting the one file name no matter which one you unzip -- ZIP archives like this are saved as pieces of the whole and you need to have all parts to unzip the whole --- If you try to unzip just one of the parts and do not have the other parts it will not create a whole file - If you try to unzip one part and do have all the other parts it will extract all of the pieces to create the single package from the parts.

Ie . a fullset of roms named roms would be split into 13 pieces roms01.zip, roms02.zip, roms03.zip, ... roms13.zip for uploading and then downloaded as 13 pieces - then when you run unzip it puts those 13 pieces back together as roms when you extract one of them it knows it is just a piece of a whole file and will extract all of the pieces to create the one file roms no matter where you start the process. ( So when you are unzipping several of the pieces you are actually unzipping the same large file multiple times ! )

[lovespicyfood]

Okay, so if I selected one of the 13 files it should have worked...yay!   

Thanks for the reply and info!

[Titchgamer]

The best thing to do is copy all the zips into 1 folder first.
Then as JD says start unzipping and go make a coffee!
They should auto unzip themselves once started.

[lovespicyfood]

Thank you all!  Got them unzipped and used the "all killer no filler" to filter them down.  So stoked I got my machine going through Launchbox right now...