Post subject: ROM Management (specifically GoodMerged sets)
Emulator Coder, Former player
Joined: 10/2/2005
Posts: 563
Location: Toronto, Ontario
Just out of curiosity, does anyone know if there is a good utility out there for working with GoodMerged sets? I've recently upgraded my collections to these sets, but was hoping to avoid having to extract everything (GoodMerged sets tend to house a whole bunch of hacks and crap you'll likely never play that just eats up disk space). I haven't seen anything useful out there and was thinking of writing my own, but before I do, figured I'd do some research first. What ROM management tools do you guys use, if any? Would anyone find something like this helpful? I was thinking of something that could work for compressed sets, compressed single files and uncompressed ROMs for all supported platforms.
Experienced player (829)
Joined: 11/18/2006
Posts: 2426
Location: Back where I belong
I just use the Goodsets as they come, hacks, crap, and all. Since they're 7z'ed, they take up next to no space, and it's helpful to not have to go search for a patch file and IPS every time I want to watch a movie of a hack. So I basically don't use anything, but if you were to write one, I'd definitely give it a try.
Living Well Is The Best Revenge My Personal Page
Joined: 10/15/2007
Posts: 685
I have two terabytes of disk space on my desktop, so uncompressed Goodsets don't exactly set me back a great deal. The only management I've ever used was to 7zip them properly for my laptop, which has considerably less than 2TB to work with. It's not terribly painful to just nab the ROM out of the appropriate 7z archive when I need it. The more popular games I just leave uncompressed to save some time. I'm almost positive that I once came across a tool that would extract only the single most relevant ROM from each archive, but I do not appear to have it.
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mz
Emulator Coder, Player (79)
Joined: 10/26/2007
Posts: 693
I use this frontend when I want to play something in my GoodMerged sets: QuickPlay. Here's a screenshot with my setup, but you can configure it in almost any way you want: [URL=http://img516.imageshack.us/my.php?image=qpxj4.png][/URL] Then, you also have UnGoodMerge, which does this:
This program allows you to select a folder that contains either GoodMerged archives (multiple ROM variants per archive) in 7-Zip or Zip format, or non-GoodMerged archives/ROMs. It then goes through each game, performs customisable filters to skip unwanted variants such as bad dumps, allows the user to choose which variants to use, and generates a batch file. This batch file extracts the chosen files, and optionally re-archives each one using either ZIP or JMA. This program makes it very convenient to convert a large amount of GoodSets into formats that emulators can read, while also removing the clutter of many unwanted variants per game.
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Emulator Coder, Former player
Joined: 10/2/2005
Posts: 563
Location: Toronto, Ontario
mz wrote:
I use this frontend when I want to play something in my GoodMerged sets: QuickPlay. Here's a screenshot with my setup, but you can configure it in almost any way you want:
That looks like exactly what i'm looking for. The only thing is that it's windows-only (I was hoping for something cross-platform), but I guess that's what Wine is for ;) Thanks mz.
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