How do CD-ROM based system emulators handle .zip files?

What I want to know is for emulators such as PSX, Dreamcast etc. how does Retroarch load and run CD ROM games that are in zip files? Does it unzip first to the HDD then run or does it load the zip files to computer RAM?

I want to know this as I don’t want to be having games constantly unzipping to disk to play.

It will only extract the first file in the archive, so it doesn’t work with zipped bin/cue dumps. You want to extract them, then use chdman to convert to chd format. It’s a lossless compression format that can be read directly by most CD supporting cores. You can extract chdman and the .bat from this .zip into the folder with your unzipped games. Then run the .bat to start converting every game that has a .cue or .gdi into a .chd file. It even finds the .cue or .gdis that are in subfolders.

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