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Improvements: compressed roms and mergedroms

Open Otakufanatic opened this issue 5 years ago • 1 comments

If I may, I would like to suggest some improvements to your wonderful frontend:

Zip support for emulators that dont natively support it and are better than retroarch libretto. (Example: Snes9x or Kega Fusion) and then goodmerge 7-Zip support to choose rom inside like others frontends (EmulatorsOrganizer, Emucenter2...) or emulator BizHawk, because old consoles or computers collections are romerged (Example: GoodSnes or GoodGen) with all versions of the game (Usa-Europe-Japan) plus Hack versions and (this is the most important) translated versions, and is important to choose what file you want to send to emulator to run. (attached video https://streamable.com/kaaxt)

Best regarts,

JMPM.

Otakufanatic avatar Feb 18 '20 09:02 Otakufanatic

I have a related proposition (in fact, extending one by @JMPMX and depending on it, so until 7-Zipped ROMs support is included, it will be useless anyway).

Since in Raspberry Pi 4 8 GB the RAM is plentiful - it'd be great to be able to leverage both support for 7-Zip compressed ROMs and images and support tmpfs (ramdisk) extraction.

Rationale is:

  1. (Obvious point) Compression will let you store much more ROMs on same SD card. Sometimes (for single compressed ROMs) you could save 2+ times the space, and for goodmerged ROMs you could save gigabytes versus uncompressed.
  2. RAM is blazing fast, so extracting a ROM to RAM should be pretty fast (7z is known for great compression rates and very fast decompression), and running it from there is free I/O.
  3. RAM (unlike microSD) is not suffering from wear, so extracting compressed ROMs to RAM seems to be logical.
  4. On Raspberry Pi 4 with 4 GB RAM (and even more so on 8 GB version) RAM is plentiful, so it's easily possible to uncompress even Playstation or PSP images into ramdisk.

ostrosablin avatar Sep 11 '21 20:09 ostrosablin