Could Emulators Support Roms In Single Zip?


DaveC

Internal Development
Joined
Mar 4, 2004
Messages
9,208
I was wondering if it is possible to have emulators etc. support multiple roms in a single zip file?

What would be the point you ask?

Well for emulators especially the Atari800, C64, SMS, Coleco etc. the files are small in size but there are alot of them. What this means is because SMC cards use blocks or clusters you waste alot of space with alot of small files. For example if the smallest smc block size is 128k (I really don't know what it actually is) and your C64 .PRG file is only 32k in size it still uses up 128k on the card. When you have hundreds of files this wastes a huge amount of space.

If every file was in a 3MB or so zip file, not only would you save because of zip compression but you would also avoid the block size problem. The emu would look in the zip file like it was a directory and decompress in the GP32 RAM the file you load.

Does anyone that codes here think that it is possible to do?
 
Its just a matter of support, if the coder want to support that, its possible. Otherwise the emulator (considering it can load zipped roms) will probably see only the first rom.
 
It would also be nice if emulators could run 7zip files. I converted all my rar and ace archives to this format and it has saved me much space on my harddrive. If programs on the gp32 could read archives with multiple files in this format, it could save a noticeable amount of space.

There is an opensource sdk on their website

www.7-zip.org
 
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