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Do you merge?
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sWampy:
I'm not sure what all front ends could use these, but I bet mamewah, gameex, and dk could.   In mamewah, you could make a batch file that extracted the rom you needed from the .7z file, load the emulator, then delete the unzipped rom on exit.  In gameex, you could just give it a pre launch command that extracted the rom, and a return command to delete the rom.   In both cases you could only play one version of each rom, but I don't think that would really make a difference often.
Minwah:
I might be missing something...but I really don't see the point if emulators don't support them...

And HDD space is cheap as chips now so space isn't really an issue.
sWampy:

--- Quote from: Minwah on May 03, 2006, 05:11:04 am ---I might be missing something...but I really don't see the point if emulators don't support them...

And HDD space is cheap as chips now so space isn't really an issue.

--- End quote ---
I personally think it's cool, because you end up with say 300 zips listed in a directory instead of 900+.   I think it would be nice to have just the 300 games listed, ie just castlevania, not castlevania (e), Castlevania(U), Dracula (J), etc, but still have all the other versions available in the same directory, without having to keep 2 copies, or worry about keeping track of a bunch of different filters.  While direct frontend support isn't necessary to use them.  You can always make a batch file to just unzip the primary rom, and then launch the emulator pointing at the extracted rom, then delete on exit.   If the frontends knew about the merged sets directly, they could generate a list filtered list, and also allow you to hit a key while sitting on a parent to show a list of other versions contained in that archive.   So if there was some cool intro/ending/extra feature of the Japan/French/Whatever version you read about, you could play it without much trouble.
Howard_Casto:
You seem to be talking about console roms, which incidentally don't have clones (each version is unique). 

Also you do not want fes that are aware of merged sets, mainly because that requires crc checks and rom verification during the scanning process which can take a LOOOONG time.  Think of how long it takes romcenter/clrmamepro to verfiy a complete mame set. 
sWampy:
Well there are a ton of hacked console roms, that are close to being like clones in arcade sets.   But there are also misdumps, overdumps, this kind of header, that kind of header, that nobody really seems to be able to identify as the correct dump.  What goodmerge does is use 7zip's ability to make solid archives that compress the crap out of these small changes to make an archive say named game.7z that contains game.rom, game(j).rom, game(E).rom, game(e)overdump.rom. or whatever.   All the frontend support would entail would be looking for all .7z files in a directory, and being able to extract the primary rom from that file and call the emulator.  It would be nice if it had the option to list all files in the .7z so you could run any game.   http://goodmerge.sourceforge.net/Statistics.php  shows the savings that can be obtained.   For those of us with multiple cabinets sharing files over a network, having small easily to maintain console collections would be awesome.   

http://lusspace.free.fr/html/modules/news/ supports goodmerge sets now btw.
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