Using .7z roms with emulators?

[Turnarcades]

I've google'd and can't seem to find an answer to this one:

Is there a way to get emulators to recognise files in .7z format?

7-zip is excellent for compression and it would be great if I could compress my roms into .7z format and have them take up much less space on my hard-drive. I've seen that certain emulators have a plug-in (Gens I think does) to read .7z but was wondering if others can be made to do it.

It sounds like a reasonable request that I thought emulator authors would have thought of by now, but as I'm not a programmer I don't know the details so maybe it is a bit too much to ask.

Anyone shed on light on this at all?

[SGT]

Doubt we'll see it in Mame for a long time:

http://www.mame.net/mamefaq.html#g17

I know that N64 Roms size difference can be substantial but I never could get Project64 to read them.

[Turnarcades]

Damn it. Oh well, any more emulators/custom builds that allow the use of 7-zip?

Not too fussed about N64 as my machine struggles with those anyway, hence now removed. But I do have limited HD space and if I could get my SNES/Megadrive collections down from 1Gb each it would be helpful!

[Silver]

I've been down this road before, but in the end its more trouble than its worth.

If you PC struggles with N64 games, and you need to trim 1GB collections - its going to struggle with 7zip.

7zip is a very impressive - sizewize - compressor, but its an absolute resource hog, and very slow. You end up staring at a black screen for ages while the rom decompresses.

If 1GB is an issue - get a bigger hard drive. I know that sounds a bit rubbish, but in the long run it will be faster and easier.

If not, by the far the best option is unwanted games - delete them. You can probably delete 75% of most game collections if you are honest about what gets played....

[ahofle]

I wrote a batch file a while back to convert all my 7z files to zip for this very reason.  It basically unzips each 7z file in the directory, then zips it back in zip format.  I can post it if you want, let me know.  It's at home though, so it won't be until I get off work.

EDIT: Nevermind, I misread your post...I thought your roms were already 7z'd and you needed them in zip format.

[Howard_Casto]

I've been down this road before, but in the end its more trouble than its worth.

If you PC struggles with N64 games, and you need to trim 1GB collections - its going to struggle with 7zip.

7zip is a very impressive - sizewize - compressor, but its an absolute resource hog, and very slow. You end up staring at a black screen for ages while the rom decompresses.

If 1GB is an issue - get a bigger hard drive. I know that sounds a bit rubbish, but in the long run it will be faster and easier.

If not, by the far the best option is unwanted games - delete them. You can probably delete 75% of most game collections if you are honest about what gets played....

Yeah, that and the fact that zip support is "built in" to most langauges while 7 zip is not is why it isn't widely adopted.  I wrote a big post explaining it the other day but I must have forgotten to submit it.   

[Hoopz]

I wrote a batch file a while back to convert all my 7z files to zip for this very reason.  It basically unzips each 7z file in the directory, then zips it back in zip format.  I can post it if you want, let me know.  It's at home though, so it won't be until I get off work.

EDIT: Nevermind, I misread your post...I thought your roms were already 7z'd and you needed them in zip format.

Would you go ahead and post it?  It would be handy to have.   

[ahofle]

Here you go:

for %%t in (*.7z) do D:\Progra~1\7-zip\7z e "%%t" -r
del *.7z
for %%t in (*.*) do D:\Progra~1\7-zip\7z a -tzip "%%t.zip" "%%t"

Just a few notes about this...it assumes there is one file per zip (I wrote this for console roms).  Shouldn't be too hard to change it to handle multiple file zips.  Also, one annoying thing is that it leaves the rom extension so you end up with a file name like "mario bros.c64.zip".  That could probably be fixed too, but I didn't bother.  Hope that helps some.

[Turnarcades]

OK then, in the spirit of economising on what I already have (not upgrading HD etc.), is there a program that compresses files into regular .zip files, but does a better job than winrar?

I use winrar because you can just right-click a group of roms and click 'add to archive' to zip them each into seperate zip files.

I need a program that perhaps does this (in batch) but compresses the files more? Anyone know of one?

[Howard_Casto]

OK then, in the spirit of economising on what I already have (not upgrading HD etc.), is there a program that compresses files into regular .zip files, but does a better job than winrar?

I use winrar because you can just right-click a group of roms and click 'add to archive' to zip them each into seperate zip files.

I need a program that perhaps does this (in batch) but compresses the files more? Anyone know of one?

That's impossible, or at least impractical.  See zip files have like 7 levels of compression.  They are stardardized so that any application trying to read the zip can look at it and say "ok it's level 7 so I use function X to unzip it" compressing beyond level 7 afaik would make the zip unreadable to anything other than the app you created it with.

[Turnarcades]

See, get it now!

I wondered why zip programs seemed to use the same number of comprssion options. Oh well, that buggers that theory.