Load zips on the fly

RetroArch General
#1

not sure if this is supported, but when i try to load a zip file in it extracts the game rom which you then need to select that extracted file to play the game, but is it possible to load a zip on the fly without it decompressing it to a seperate file? and if not might it be considered - especially for games that have relatively smaller roms like megadrive, pc-engine and snes

thanks

#2

Most emulator cores require a concrete file name to be known, i.e., they cannot load ROMs from RAM directly.

#3

zips load automatically on real mednafen, without extracting it, and also the same goes for every other xbox emulator i’ve used personally speaking

#4
  1. You can have very big HDDs in Xbox 1. Why is this such a priority?
  2. Why are people still using ZIP files for very minuscule files in 2012? This isn’t the late '90s/early '00s anymore - you can buy a 2TB 3.5 inch harddrive and put it in your Xbox1 and have as much stuff on there as you want. How much ‘compression’/saved file space does that ZIP actually buy you?
  3. The ZIP code actually offers you MORE options than any other emulator/frontend out there -

you can extract all contents of a ZIP file in the current directory/cache partition and select what you want (most of these emulators only support loading 1 file from a ZIP using some heuristics and they won’t be able to extract something generically at all), or -

you can extract all contents of a ZIP file in the current directory AND load the first supported ROM in that ZIP.

Why do I have to resort to a temporary buffer in memory to extract the contents of a ZIP to when we already have everything that we need? Right now we have a scalable ‘one size fits all’ solution for the problem at hand that works across all emulator cores/consoles - your proposal here would not work for emulator cores such as FBA which don’t support loading ROMs from RAM anyway.

#5
  1. You can have very big HDDs in Xbox 1. Why is this such a priority?
  • 1000 roms in uncompressed format takes up double the space as zips, and that space is quite precious when you have a lot of emulators on your hard drive
  1. Why are people still using ZIP files for very minuscule files in 2012? This isn’t the late '90s/early '00s anymore - you can buy a 2TB 3.5 inch harddrive and put it in your Xbox1 and have as much stuff on there as you want. How much ‘compression’/saved file space does that ZIP actually buy you?
  • don’t want to spend £150 on a 2tb hard drive for an 11 year old console
  1. The ZIP code actually offers you MORE options than any other emulator/frontend out there your proposal here would not work for emulator cores such as FBA which don’t support loading ROMs from RAM anyway.
  • as i said in my original post “especially for games that have relatively smaller roms like megadrive, pc-engine and snes” (didn’t mention FBA)