how do you get .chds to work?

[Sephroth57]

i have the complete .chd collection for KI 1 and 2 and i dont know how to play them, they came in rar files which when unzipped have the same name, so firstly how should i label the unzipped .chd? second where do i place them, how do i make them work?

[DeathMonk]

This should have been posted in the software forum.

Don't rename the chd's.  Put the chd's in your roms directory in directories with the same name as the chd (minus the extension).

[Sephroth57]

well you have to rename the .chds, at least the ones i DLed. cause when in rar form theyre named kinst1.rar kinst2.rar, etc but when unzip they are not numbered they overwrite each other.

but i figured it out by looking at mame.net faq, although it hardly explains anything its like 2 sentances i figured it out after a while

[SirPeale]

Does it now work?  The RAR files are a spanned archive.  When you use a program like WinRAR, it will look at all those files and unRAR them to one file.  KINST is ~89M and KINST2 is ~120M.

You then put the CHDs in the ROMs folder in this fashion:

C:\MAME\ROMS\kinst.zip
C:\MAME\ROMS\KINST\kinst.chd

Don't get too comfy with them if you plan on staying cutting edge with MAME.  As of version .78 the CHD format will change to a new standard.  It's no big deal, MAME will come with the conversion tool, called CHDMAN.

[Sephroth57]

yeah i got it to work, what i had to do was rename the chds except the first one. so i have kinst.chd , then kinst2.chd, etc. it only looks for the first one and then i guess they just link or something?

and holy ---steaming pile of meadow muffin--- i didnt think you could compress like that, i DLed beatmania 4th mix, which compared to DDR doesnt have that many songs, and its 5.9 GB!! i was like omg each 20MB rar unzips to 390MB chd. thats some badass compression too bad we cant keep them in rars though. im afraid more will come out like this and ill need more HD space so ill probably buy a 120GB or something with my MAME PC instead of 60GB i was planning on