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Do you merge?
Howard_Casto:
Well, with respect, those aren't clones.... they are unique romsets. What goodmerge is doing then, is making some sort of bastardized mush of all the rom variants (note I didn't say clones because they aren't clones) and putting them in 7zip format, a format that is NOT universal and not all emus support (not to mention no fe that I know of supports) and just making it difficult for everyone to read... emus, fes, rommanagers ect....
Let's assume that this all wasn't issue. You still end up with a bunch of super-compressed files, which take a long time to umcompress and would trash the heck out of your harddrive from constant use.
It's just all-in-all a bad idea.
Also the question arises.... why would you even need the rom variants? Sure there might be one or two you wish to keep (so keep em) but in regards to console roms, most variants are hacked up crap or foreign language translations. Mind you it's ok to keep em, but I don't see why you need them launchable from the fe. Personally I just use gootools to sort by region /hack and only point to the US folder fro my console roms. Any special case roms I wish to run I can just throw in that folder.
sWampy:
--- Quote from: Howard_Casto on May 03, 2006, 02:55:11 pm ---Well, with respect, those aren't clones.... they are unique romsets. What goodmerge is doing then, is making some sort of bastardized mush of all the rom variants (note I didn't say clones because they aren't clones) and putting them in 7zip format, a format that is NOT universal and not all emus support (not to mention no fe that I know of supports) and just making it difficult for everyone to read... emus, fes, rommanagers ect....
Let's assume that this all wasn't issue. You still end up with a bunch of super-compressed files, which take a long time to umcompress and would trash the heck out of your harddrive from constant use.
It's just all-in-all a bad idea.
--- End quote ---
It's not a bastardized super compressed format, it's just a better format that zip. It zips across the entire archive, so you get bigger more efficient hash tables, so better compression as a whole. The format is just fairly new, but is gaining a lot of support from others, clrmamepro has supported it for a long time, and tons of no emulation support. It open source and doesn't have a lot of the problems with copyrights and patents that zip and rar have. It's about like png was a few years back when mame added support for it, it was new and most people were like why would you go to png, jpg is all that will ever be needed, and before that people said the same thing about gif.
Compressing might be a little slower, but decompression is just as fast as zip. A small # of small files causes a lot less fragmentation than a large number of large files. ;-)
--- Quote from: Howard_Casto on May 03, 2006, 02:55:11 pm ---
Also the question arises.... why would you even need the rom variants? Sure there might be one or two you wish to keep (so keep em) but in regards to console roms, most variants are hacked up crap or foreign language translations. Mind you it's ok to keep em, but I don't see why you need them launchable from the fe. Personally I just use gootools to sort by region /hack and only point to the US folder fro my console roms. Any special case roms I wish to run I can just throw in that folder.
--- End quote ---
Most people wouldn't want them all, and shouldn't need them all, no tool exists that does a good job of auditing the roms for most consoles than good tools, that make sure you have one and only one version of everygame made for a system. With goodmerge, you are left with only one file for each game, and all the other versions of the game are stored along with the parent taking up very, very little additional space.
I've done as you say for ages, only point at the us folder, but I then have to keep all the other versions on the drive wasting space if I want to be able to produce a list of missing games.
To me being able to store 880 n64 games that used to take up 25.5gigs in 4.71 gigs of space, or 18 gigs of gba zipped roms in 9 gigs of space.
Howard_Casto:
Huh? The bastardized, mushed up mess the the idea of putting roms that aren't related at all in the same zip. Goodmerge is doing something that doesn't make any sense, namely grouping variants in the same zip rather than keeping them in their own zip. I wasn't referring to the 7zip format. Better read that again.
An arcade example of this would be to zip up all the variants of dragon's lair into a single zip. Why would you do that? They aren't real clones and thus the roms don't depend on each other. Also daphne can't find the roms because they are in the wrong zip so only the parent would ever be playable. Fe's also couldn't find the "clones". If the emu can't see the "clones" and the fe can't see the "clones", then you can't play the "clones". At that point there isn't any point in keeping them.
That pretty much sums up what you are wanting to do.
On the topic of 7zip imho it's a complete waste of time to use a form of compression on roms that the emus can't support. It's fine for archiving stuff you won't be acessing with anything but 7zip but that's about it.
And you are missing the point on decompressing. Most emus support zip... so you don't have to decompress the files ahead of time. To do what you are propsing would require fe authors to go to essentially decompress each zip to check what files are in it. (Even when you use code to retrieve contents of a zip file, that is essentially what happens... a portion of it gets uncompressed in memory to read the contents.) Then when launching a game, the fe would have to have a table stored somewhere of what zip that particular rom is stored in... decompress the whole thing again, and copy the loose rom somewhere.
The thrashing of your harddrive comes from the constant copying and deleting of files.... every single time the fe scans for roms, and every time the fe launches a game.
As opposed to simply launching the zip file with the emu.
For the record.... png never really was needed in mame for snapshots. Png's, in general are of a larger file size than a comparable gif. Now pngs are used for the artwork system, which requires an alpha channel. (Of course everyone uses them wrong and makes a seperate alpha mask when the frikkin png can contain an alpha channel, making things even larger.) I suspect that was the real reason pngs are used.
And my question on your final response is....
Yes your dat manager is going to report missing files if you delete the other revisions. Your point is? You know which ones you don't need. The rom managers show the country revision in the name so you can say... "Oh that is a Japan rom, I don't need to worry about that one".
sWampy:
--- Quote from: Howard_Casto on May 03, 2006, 04:31:50 pm ---Huh? The bastardized, mushed up mess the the idea of putting roms that aren't related at all in the same zip. Goodmerge is doing something that doesn't make any sense, namely grouping variants in the same zip rather than keeping them in their own zip. I wasn't referring to the 7zip format. Better read that again.
--- End quote ---
The are related,
1080 Snowboarding (E) [!]
1080 Snowboarding (E) [f1]
1080 Snowboarding (E) [f2] (NTSC)
1080 Snowboarding (JU) [!]
1080 Snowboarding (JU) [f1] (DS-1)
1080 Snowboarding (JU) [f2] (PAL)
1080 Snowboarding (JU) [f3] (PAL)
1080 Snowboarding (JU) [f4] (PAL-Z64)
1080 Snowboarding (JU) [f5] (SRAM)
1080 Snowboarding (JU) [f5][t1]
1080 Snowboarding (JU) [f6] (Boot-PAL)
are all related for sure, sure you might not really need anything but the 2 that say [!] and I'd really only want the (JU)[!] one really, but why not keep them all if you can keep them all in a smaller space than just keeping the 2 in seperate zips.
Or that
Donkey Kong Country (Competition) (U)
Donkey Kong Country (V1.0) (E) [!]
Donkey Kong Country (V1.0) (U) [!]
Donkey Kong Country (V1.1) (E)
Donkey Kong Country (V1.1) (U)
Super Donkey Kong (V1.0) (J)
Super Donkey Kong (V1.1) (J)
went together even thought they don't have the same name.
I haven't looked, but someone told me that 7zip's library was compatable/drop in replacement for zlib.dll that lots of people use in their emulators/frontends, but supports 7zip, zip, rar, solid archives, etc. So it I would think before long, newier emulators would start supporting the format natively.
My cabinet runs perfect disk nightly, so I highly dought that the 3 or 4 console games that might get played a day would cause a fragmation nightmare, and if they did, the machine has 2 gigs of ram, I could afford to unzip them to a ram drive if I had do. It only has an 80 gig sata drive with windows and the emulators on it, all the roms/disk images are loaded over gig-e.
Howard_Casto:
--- Quote from: sWampy on May 03, 2006, 05:42:03 pm ---
The are related,
1080 Snowboarding (E) [!]
1080 Snowboarding (E) [f1]
1080 Snowboarding (E) [f2] (NTSC)
1080 Snowboarding (JU) [!]
1080 Snowboarding (JU) [f1] (DS-1)
1080 Snowboarding (JU) [f2] (PAL)
1080 Snowboarding (JU) [f3] (PAL)
1080 Snowboarding (JU) [f4] (PAL-Z64)
1080 Snowboarding (JU) [f5] (SRAM)
1080 Snowboarding (JU) [f5][t1]
1080 Snowboarding (JU) [f6] (Boot-PAL)
--- End quote ---
No they aren't. They aren't related at all. They are the same title but totally different versions. 180 ju f1 and 1080 ju fe use totally different roms. It's like zipping pacman and galaga together... it makes no sense.
As I said they are variants, not clones. A clone uses some of the roms from the parent. Console roms only have one rom, so by default, they cannot have clones.
By merging them together you are just making a mess. They are seperate because they are totally seperate games. If you don't like all those zips (why? as you should never have to look at them, that is what a fe is for) then delete the variants you don't like but putting them together with roms that aren't releated is just silly.
7 zip aside.... two zips don't take up more room than one... at least not enough to make any difference. It's been a while but at one point merging the entire mame set, chds and all (and I mean real merged, not split-merged) saved 250-500 megs of space..... that's a maximum of 500 megs out of over 10 GIGS. In other words not enough to worry about. 7 zip is the same way, two zips don't take up much more room than one zip with the same two files in it.
But getting back to 7zip...... You keep saying in the future emulators/fes should start supporting it. Well yes, I assume they will, but what does that have to do with now? As I said, compressing working roms in a format that isn't universally supported doesn't make a whole heck of a lot of sense.
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