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Do you merge?
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sWampy:
Oh, you are so right, roms that are 90-98% identical, are the same games with only different languages and headers, aren't related at all.  Some might be recompiled, relinked with newer versions of the sdk, etc but they are mostly identical, or you wouldn't be seeing the huge space savings you see when storing them together.   Sticking them together taking up 25% of the space of them zipped separately, makes no since at all.   

Here is the example 1080.


http://www.landoncrews.com/1080.png


Notice that the 1080 Snowboarding.7z contains 25 versions of 1080, and is 11,005,952 bytes.   While the 1080 Snowboarding (E) (M4) [!].zip is 11,313,152 bytes.  If you were to take all 25 versions of 1080 snowboarding out and zip them into zip files, the total disc space would be around 282,828,800.   You are correct, it's not twice the size, I'm wrong, this makes no since at all, what a waste of time.   
liquid8:
oh my... I have to take Howards side on this... damn. This brings on 2 points:

a) if you want to so bad, keep them that way (no use in arguing about it), but you are going to have to either, unzip them each time you want to play them (which will probably be never), or write your own frontend, which I wouldn't recommend, because in your fe you will have to do exactly what Howard said code-wise for it to work...

People like Howard, )p(, Minwah and so on have been working on their frontends for years.. they know what works and what doesn't.

and

b) Did you really own all those versions anyways?? :) Oh... did you even own one of them? If they really are 90-98% identical, why do you need 25 (TWENTY FIVE) versions. A lot of us tend to get fussy with keeping a "complete collection", and I sympathize with what you want to do, but think about it... it's not worth the hassle. Trust me, I tried.

liquid8
Howard_Casto:

--- Quote from: sWampy on May 03, 2006, 09:14:59 pm ---Oh, you are so right, roms that are 90-98% identical, are the same games with only different languages and headers, aren't related at all.  Some might be recompiled, relinked with newer versions of the sdk, etc but they are mostly identical, or you wouldn't be seeing the huge space savings you see when storing them together.   Sticking them together taking up 25% of the space of them zipped separately, makes no since at all.   

Here is the example 1080.


http://www.landoncrews.com/1080.png


Notice that the 1080 Snowboarding.7z contains 25 versions of 1080, and is 11,005,952 bytes.   While the 1080 Snowboarding (E) (M4) [!].zip is 11,313,152 bytes.  If you were to take all 25 versions of 1080 snowboarding out and zip them into zip files, the total disc space would be around 282,828,800.   You are correct, it's not twice the size, I'm wrong, this makes no since at all, what a waste of time.   

--- End quote ---


You just aren't getting it.... This has nothing to do with how similar the games are or play (which is virtually identical) they are DIFFERENT FILES!!  Do you get that?  Is it too far over your head to understand?  The emulator authors will NEVER add support for files merged in the way you are talking about because the 1080 u 1 variant doesn't share ANY FILES with 1080 u 2. 

They are both SINGLE FILES... it is PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE for them to share any files because they both only have one.  It is the same for nearly every console emu.  Each game is a singular file.  It's illogical to expect emu developers to put in a lot of code and a very time-expensive zip search routine for searching for files where they don't belong. 



Maybe you don't understand how true clones work so I'll explain it.

For example let's examine the fictional roms "game.zip" and "gameb.zip"

Open up game and you see:

game-snd.bin
game-vid.bin
game.bin

Open up gameb and you see

game-snd.bin
game-vid.bin
gameb.bin


Now these two games actually have files in common.. namely game-snd and game-vid.  So merging them makes sense..... we throw out the extra copies of "game-snd.bin" and "game-vid.bin"
to make a new gameb.zip that only contains:

gameb.bin.

Now the emu has to be specifically coded to know all the parent-rom relationships or else it would literally take hours to search through thousands of zips for all the files.  The emu has to have an internal database that says "I should look for the first two roms in game.zip cause that's the parent, then I'll look for the third file, first in the parent and then in gameb.zip"  Mame does it because it is a documentation project.... emus that rip-off mame's data also do it (like zinc, raine, ect) because the data is available.  For consoles and I can't stress this enough... it is completely and totally impossible to do so.  Why?  Well for one console emus are designed to run any rom because each and every cart runs on the same hardware... namely the console.  So emu developers don't know, and for the most part don't care what roms are out thier for said system as (with a few exceptions) all games will run on their emu if they are dumped properly.  You are asking them to keep a database of 10's of thousands of roms, which would literally require hundreds of man hours just so you can save some space?  And those guys are good at coding.  On top of that you are essentially asking fe authors (which admittedly aren't as good) to do the same thing, if you want them to detect variant roms inside a zip and extract them for you in a speedy manner with no known record of how roms are related to each other or even which ones exist.




Finally....

Did you just compare multiple REGULAR zip files to a single 7 zip file?  That's comparing apples and oranges.  Compare multiple 7 zip files to a single 7 zip file or multiple zip files to a single zip file. 

And for the thousandth time... the emus simply don't support 7 zip so there's no use in using 7 zip compression for anything other than archiving.  IF and WHEN they do support 7zip THEN it's a valid argument.


And I didn't want to start a flame war but since liquid brought it up....

You shouldn't have a full set of console roms.  I don't.... I only have the roms to carts I actually own.  Why?  Because you can't use that "well these games are no longer available" or "these games are impractical to own" argument for console roms like you do arcade machines.  With the exception of odd-ball systems like the neogeo carts for old consoles are still readily available and cheap. 

While I won't get into a legal argument over it (as either way it's illegal) I do morally object to rom hoarding for the sake of rom hoarding when it comes to consoles.

I'm very sorry for yelling but you seem to be caught in an infinity loop of brining up points that don't matter because your suggestion is still too impractical regardless of the few advantages you bought up. 

Long story short.... can't use 7zip cause the emus can't use 7zip.  Shouldn't merge em cause they aren't related. 
sWampy:
Ok, I tried to be nice,  I'll stop trying to explain it to you, you will never get it!

It's wierd I make well over 6 figures programming, and you have to resort to begging for money to add features to your buggy frontend that almost nobody uses. 

It took around 3 minutes to throw together a perl script, to rename the files, and maybe a minute and a half to make a batch file go get mamewah working with .7z files for n64, and I went from having 140 zipped roms that took up 8 gigs, weren't in a good state at all to 393 .7z files that are well organized, and only take up 5 gigs.   

Telling people they don't understand a concept that is clearly miles and miles over your head is just laughable, you couldn't even understand the question thorus originally asked.
thorus:
Wow this has gotten into a bit of a flame war, sorry guys.  But back to my original topic it looks as if nobody uses the merge as me and sWampy are thinking. 

I'm not implying that I want to make emulators handle the roms I'm looking more so for a front end solution.  sWampy mentioned using batch routines in MameWah but how would MameWah handle which to pull out from the zip file?  I would like the option similar to mame32 where variations of game (ie 1.0, 1.1 EU) would be a sub category of the game and you could choose which you mean when you say play The Legend of Zelda.

As far as drive space goes I'm running out of space on my 300 gig drive which I assumed would be large enough.  And when I take files that fit in 1.4gig and explode into 18gig and do that 10 times over  I can see where all my space is going.  I'm still working on exactly how my directory structure will work out but I didn't like the language split since I still ended up with dupes/hacks that cluttered the directory. 

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