Rom set size?

[Dogface]

How much hard drive space would a complete rom set use?

[APFelon]

With or without hard drive images?

APf

[Dogface]

I gues I'm still a newbie.  What do you mean by hard drive images?  A friend let me borrow a dvd (one) full of ROMS but I get the impression that a full rom set wouldn't fit on a single disk.

[Howard_Casto]

This is just a rough guess but I would say a complete collection is 8-10 gigs or more.  I don't keep track of the size of the chds like I should.  

[Paul Olson]

A full Non Merged set  with CHDs is 26.6GB.  Split or merged sets would be somewhat less.
The CHDs are 12.7GB

Paul

[Dogface]

Thanks....but one more question...

What's the difference between merged sets, non-merged sets, split sets, etc?

[Howard_Casto]

Well, a full non merged set, is a format that NOBODY should be using... thus the hugely bloated estimate the other poster gave.  It means all clone zip files contain both the clone and parent roms and there are a ton of duplicate files.  


You need to be using split/merged sets in which clones and parents each get their own zip file, but files they both share aren't duplicated.  This is how mame roms are distributed thoughout the net.  This is why a parent rom might be 20 megs but the clone is only 2... mame gets the other 18 megs of data by reading the parent zip.

In other words, don't worry about it as people who distribute roms keep them in the proper format for you.

[abrannan]

There are many, many, many FAQs on this subject available.  You'll probably have more luck finding and reading one of these than waiting for us to answer your questions here.  Rom nomenclature (especially goodTools naming conventions) is a surprisingly deep topic.  

And the full set size changes rapidly, as new MAME releases add new emulated systems.  Especially now that MAME is getting to the point where the CD and hard-drive based games as being emulated.  CHDs have only been integrated into MAME for last 10 or so versions, but the addition of those 25-30 games that have CHDs in MAME account for about half the total space required.  I would expect each new release of MAME to add about 2 gigs worth of new CHDs.  

[Paul Olson]

A full split set is 21.2GB

Paul