Just curious how ROMs are zipped

[MPTech]

When I look in my ROM folder, I have 3217 zipped files (I removed the CHDs), but in MAME it says I have over 6,000.
How does that work and is there a way to change the name in the display list (I'm running MAMEWah).

[ahofle]

You probably have 'merged' sets, which means that parent and clone ROMs are all in the same zip file.  I'm sure you can setup MAMEWah to ignore clones.

[stan2323]

Is it possible to unzip ROM and use them like that or should they stay zipped to be used.  Would they run faster being unzipped?

[Fozzy The Bear]

Is it possible to unzip ROM and use them like that or should they stay zipped to be used.  Would they run faster being unzipped?

No.... Mame requires the roms to be zipped in order to work. Other emulators mostly use zipped files as well.  They unzip them and read the code into the emulators working space... They won't run that code any faster zipped or unzipped.

Best Regards,
Julian (Fozzy The Bear)

[MPTech]

Thanks!  That explains the size.

Now, can I change the names? some of them have a name 50+ letters with all kinds of code on the end I don't need. (I know most of the country codes and eliminated a bunch of dupe stuff a long time ago).

[Turnarcades]

This might be the wrong place to go into the details of rom structures, especially with the billions of MAME-based pages available out there.

To put it bluntly, don't mess with roms too much unless you know what you are doing in MAME. The roms are designed by the dev team to show a certain way for a reason - to correctly catalogue the dumps MAME emulates. Other emulators are nice and easy, you just change the filenames, but trying to get the same uniform list with MAME is more ball-ache than it's worth.

Try the MAME website for answers first - they're bound to have more answers anyway as they wrote it.

[MPTech]

Good enuf, I'll leave it as-is!  It works, I shouldn't mess with it!

[u_rebelscum]

How does that work and is there a way to change the name in the display list (I'm running MAMEWah).

Since this is a MameWah question and not a mame question, and I've never used MameWah, there might be better ways of doing this, but...

I think you can go into the mamewah\files\mame-0.lst file and edit the line underneath the rom zip name.  Make sure you do not change the zip name.  (I'm assuming you had MameWah generate the list?  With list_generation_method set to rom_folder_vs_listxml?  Then MameWah is getting the list from mame -listxml, which means the name in the list is the game description.)

Example:

1941
1941 - Counter Attack (World)
1990
Capcom


Raster
Vert
joy8way
Status Good (Good)
Color Good (Good)
Sound Good

1942
1942 (set 1)
1984
Capcom


Raster
Vert
joy8way
Status Good (Good)
Color Good (Good)
Sound Good

1943
1943: The Battle of Midway (US)
1987
Capcom

You can edit the bold lines.

[RayB]

I could have sworn MAME works with them unzipped. It's just a big waste of space though.

[taz-nz]

I could have sworn MAME works with them unzipped. It's just a big waste of space though.

M.A.M.E. does work with unzipped ROMs, but the ROMs must still be place in folders within the ROMS directory that are labeled the same as ROM set zip would be.
So instread of having .\Mame\Roms\1942.zip you have a .\Mame\Roms\1942\

Extracting all the zips may infact slow your system down, because instead of the file system on your hard drive having to store index infromation for just under 7,000 files, it would have to store information for almost 100,000 files and 7,000 directories.

ROM sets containing large ROM load quicker if they are not Zipped, the difference in load time is too small to notice for most ROM sets.

I store all ROM sets with CHD, unzipped in folders containing both the ROMs and CHDs, all other ROM sets are stored as Zips.

 

[stan2323]

Does it have to be .zip?  I have a bunch that are .rar, .7z, and .gz.  They are compressed files but I am not familiar with them so I do not know whether to use them as is or unzip them and zip to a .zip.  When I look at them some have .zip files in them and some have other such as .a26, a78, .dsk.gz, and .jag.  Does it have something to do with the kind ROM it is?  Atari 2600 is.a26 and Atari 7800 is a78 Atari Jaguar is .jag.  dsk would be disk?