Managing Roms

[joa]

One of the most exciting developments for the pandora is the Amiga emulator...

EvilDragon, How did you get on Compressing the TOSEC collection back in 2004? I once read a help request where you were having problems with Error: ~ not set (or similar).

I tried to do the same yesterday and ran into this problem too.

Compressed i think we could get the pack to around 4 gig, uncompressed it's about 18 gig...

What are people planning to do here? just have their favourite roms on SD, or a whole pack and hope for compressed archive support in the emulator?

UngoodMerge is very good at filtering out working, official playable roms amongst these packs containing overdumps, bad drumps, intro's etc and all that stuff we really can live without...

 

[stupot]

I was planning on a 32GB sd CARD FOR MY rOMS.?

 

[joa]

As am i!

but just to give you an idea, If we had every NES,SNES,Gensis,Master system roms including all versions available Merged with goodmerge to 7z format; assuming the emulators will be able read these archives (i'll have to use ungoodmerge if they don't) and we also had every amiga ADF not compressed at all, we would be looking at around 23.6gig.

For those of you lost right now what you have is a compressed archive exc, a Zip file which contains all the roms for that game, example: Hell Fire (U)[!], Hell FIre(JUE)(Beta) ... now because the difference in the actual data is going to be so small, when you put these in these in the same archive it'll only be slightly bigger than if one rom was on it's own uncompressed. - Hope that makes sense.

 

[amnesiasoft]

I'm of the opinion I don't need a ROM of every single awful game out there and can stick to the ones that are worth playing. I'm only getting a 16GB card and expect that to be more than sufficient for all my needs.

 

[joa]

But wouldn't it be cool to have every game for said consoles in your pocket.

 

[amnesiasoft]

Cool, but very, very pointless.

 

[joa]

erm, why? surely you're just giving yourself a wider selection to choose from.

What is pointless is having all the bad, overdumped and broken roms included even though they have to be included in the full packs.

Going to give this some thought and hopefully have it all ready to go by the time the pandora is out

 

[stupot]

For me the cost of storage is low enough to have that wow factor of 'every' game in my pocket, Say im using my pandora and my mate goes oh does it have "insert obscure game from 1984" I want to be able to say yes and have him playing it 1 minute later.

Or say someone mentions something obscure and I want to play it Bam there it is.

Well worth the £40 it will cost for that size memory.

 

[amnesiasoft]

Just because they're there, doesn't mean they need to be played. Like Shaq-Fu, for example. Or maybe Michael Jackson's Moonwalker? Ever played The Blues Brothers game? I'm sure there are plenty of others I can come up with given the time...There are too many games out there that really should never have been made...ever.

 

[joa]

well i'm sure there are people out there that can't wait to play michael jackson's: moonwalker

More to the point, what's up for debate is do we filter one complete fully working rom and don't bother with any compression. (would still have every game)

Or do we have a complete romset, with every roms out there with one compressed archive per game. Both ways you get to play every game.

I think i'm going to go with the latter, a bit of extra work but once i have them sorted it'll be cool. and i'll always have have the complete sets backed up on pc.

I guess i'm looking for some input from someone whose been into emulation for years and has asked the same questions as me, someone who is very familier with goodmerge, goodsets, the Tosec project etc and using the most logical way of sort their roms, without repetition.

anyone? :lol:

 

[Lamb]

LOL, shutup moonwalker was alright, at least it seemed to be when I was 6 or 7 years old.

 

[stupot]

Moonwalker is a classic! its not great but was a game I loved as a kid and musically and sample wise probably one of the best games of its era.

 

[Pleng]

One of the most exciting developments for the pandora is the Amiga emulator...

EvilDragon, How did you get on Compressing the TOSEC collection back in 2004? I once read a help request where you were having problems with Error: ~ not set (or similar).

I tried to do the same yesterday and ran into this problem too.

Compressed i think we could get the pack to around 4 gig, uncompressed it's about 18 gig...

I downloaded a TOSEC collection which was 3GiB Compressed, 18GiB uncompressed. It was irritating, to say the least, that it had loads of different rips of the same disks. The worst part was that you couldn't decompress the whole collection in one go, on my machine at least, as it resulted in a directory with too many files in it!

I moved the adfs into alphabetical directories and then painstakingly went through deleting duplicates until I only had one of each disk for each game. Uncompressed it now occupies just under 5 GiB. My entire Emulators directory, including the (Windows) emulators and ROMS (Megadrive, Amiga, C64 complete, partially full SNES and Mastersystem, plus DosBox and a variety of shareware games) comes to 11.5GiB. I have some CD32 games which I'd like to Rip, assuming P_UAE will support booting from ISOs (WinUAE only boots from real or virtual CDs) so that'll probably bring me up to around 16GiB. I will purchase another 16GiB card for my music collection, and another 16GiB for homebrew, apps, and video files.

 

[Mithrildor]

I got 10 GB for ROMs and ISOs (2 8GB cards , 6 GB is for movies). 10 GB should be enough for my favorites and still enough space to test my non favorites. I'll remove a game when I completed it or I don't play that game anymore. And I'm not going to play 30 games at the same time , I don't like that all, I just want to be dedicated to 1 game for some time.

 

[joa]

Theres a few program that will do that automatically Pleng, UngoodMerge for one, and it supports Tosec sets aswel as Goodmerge ones...

Just this second tested it and it works, you need to set it up in the options though...

It's set by default to remove overdumps, hacked, bad dumps, etc... you can run it on pretty much any romset, though its best compability is with the goodsets.

 

[Eisner]

I agree with the posts re: less is more. I do not feel that having every game on earth is as important as having the best games, your favorate games. I would rather have a select game pack that is custom than all the games out there.

I have question that I hope someone can answer. Which would be faster to pull roms from ? HCSD Card or USB Flash Stick ?
I was looking at a 16 GB flash stick that was a better price then a HCSD card of the same size.

D)

 

[3n19m4]

So Joa you are telling me there is a collection of every rom for all the consoles in one pack?!
That sounds great! =)
Where do I get it from and how do I use it because on looking at the TOSEC website its unclear?

 

[stupot]

So Joa you are telling me there is a collection of every rom for all the consoles in one pack?!
That sounds great! =)
Where do I get it from and how do I use it because on looking at the TOSEC website its unclear?

I dont think people can direct you to the actual file in these forums? however if someone could direct you to a site that COULD maybe that would be useful? anyone?

 

[SEGA Sage]

Just because they're there, doesn't mean they need to be played. Like Shaq-Fu, for example. Or maybe Michael Jackson's Moonwalker?

Oi! Leave Moonwalker out of this... it's a top game!

 

[jaycee900]

I can see both sides of the argument here, I think when i was younger with the Gp32 or on the PC i was dl every rom for every system for the sake of it, but obviously not having time to play all those games and only really playing the best games or the ones i remember, so all i do now is for each system, go on a site e.g for Amiga, Lemon Amiga and go through the A-Z (yes it takes a while, say 2-3 weeks on a hours lunch at work) and list my favs, classics and some i wanted but never got, then dl them when i get home) so instead of 5000 odd Amiga games, I've got around 400 which i can trim down a bit by playing them when my Pandora arrives.....same for other consoles, we have 8 weeks to it arrives, get sorted now i say, by the time it arrives, all the best and classic games will be waiting for you to enjoy on that lush screen!